A price, therefore, plays both a “prediction” role and an “evidence” role.
The first role seems more like affordance than prediction.
The buyer sees that the price is p, which means that they can buy a share for p (affordance). Taking that affordance is what amounts to prediction, or at least that seems like a more true formulation to me. But this also feels rather finicky, because the “rational” reason to buy a share (in this toy example at least) is that one “predicts” the future price to be higher, so … “it makes sense to predict if one predicts”?
Price being p can be viewed as a prediction, if the subject doing the predicting is the market (aggregate of traders), predicting the future price to be p.
You don’t talk about this explicitly, but it seems to me that the obvious way to apply this frame to, say, humans would be to say that various living hypotheses are mostly investor-like, whereas something like a forceful bottom-up sensory stream is collector-like? I.e., you’re guessing the identity of the silhouette in the shadow, keeping track of, say, 4 possible options, but once you come closer, you become nearly certain about the person’s identity, and the right hypothesis (if one of them was right), gets rewarded, learning happens etc. The evidence-like judgment is some abstraction over the sensory stream that one hypothesis matches much better than the others.
Finally, prediction seems very instrumental value-flavored (buying cheap to sell pricey and gain the diff), whereas evidence seems very terminal value-flavored (buying something for its own sake). Maybe there’s some deeper structure there to explore.
The first role seems more like affordance than prediction.
The buyer sees that the price is p, which means that they can buy a share for p (affordance). Taking that affordance is what amounts to prediction, or at least that seems like a more true formulation to me. But this also feels rather finicky, because the “rational” reason to buy a share (in this toy example at least) is that one “predicts” the future price to be higher, so … “it makes sense to predict if one predicts”?
Price being p can be viewed as a prediction, if the subject doing the predicting is the market (aggregate of traders), predicting the future price to be p.
You don’t talk about this explicitly, but it seems to me that the obvious way to apply this frame to, say, humans would be to say that various living hypotheses are mostly investor-like, whereas something like a forceful bottom-up sensory stream is collector-like? I.e., you’re guessing the identity of the silhouette in the shadow, keeping track of, say, 4 possible options, but once you come closer, you become nearly certain about the person’s identity, and the right hypothesis (if one of them was right), gets rewarded, learning happens etc. The evidence-like judgment is some abstraction over the sensory stream that one hypothesis matches much better than the others.
Finally, prediction seems very instrumental value-flavored (buying cheap to sell pricey and gain the diff), whereas evidence seems very terminal value-flavored (buying something for its own sake). Maybe there’s some deeper structure there to explore.