It’s a widely accepted notion that money influences happiness, a concept famously associated with Noble laureate Daniel Kahneman, who purportedly demonstrated that emotional wellbeing increases with income but plateaus beyond an annual threshold of about $75,000. This idea has permeated both academic circles and popular media, reinforcing the belief that ...

In the realm of business and leadership, one statistical phenomenon often goes unrecognized yet significantly influences our understanding of performance and success. This is the concept of reversion to the mean. This seemingly simple statistical occurrence can profoundly impact how we perceive management strategies, leadership effectiveness, and even the fate ...

The geopolitics of the Middle East has always been complex, with its share of conflicts and political unrest. Numerous theories have been proposed to dissect the underpinnings of the region’s political instability. One such theory, known as the Youth Bulge Theory, asserts that a high proportion of young people ...

Election polls play a crucial role in predicting the outcome of elections and shaping public opinion. However, it’s important to understand that the results of any single poll should be taken with a grain of salt. Many polls only ask about 1,000 people about their political preferences, which is quite ...

Weather and climate are words often used interchangeably in casual conversations. But when a chilly summer breeze sweeps through in July, or when unexpected rains dampen our winter holidays, the age-old debate resurfaces: “Is climate change even real?” If you want to dive deep into the fascinating realm of chaotic ...

The stock market is one of the most complex systems we know about. Millions of intelligent, highly competitive people (and increasingly AIs) try to outwit each other to earn as much money as possible. In this post we build a simulation where little agents employ different trading strategies on an ...

In this post, let us rise into the air to have a good view of the stock market. From this perspective, seemingly unrelated things all of a sudden become connected and patterns hidden by all the buzz and noise start to appear! If you want to understand the big picture ...

R is a powerful programming language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. In this post, we will provide a quick introduction to R using the famous iris dataset. We will cover loading data, exploring the dataset, basic data manipulation, and plotting. By the end, you should have a good ...

This post presents a real highlight: We will build and backtest a quantitative trading strategy in R with the help of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4! If you want to get a glimpse into the future of trading system development, read on! On this blog, I already provided a template to build ...

  The topic of consciousness doesn’t cease to fascinate me. I have already written about it here: Will AI become conscious any time soon?. This essay could be seen as a continuation of my ongoing journey towards an integrated (holistic) worldview of mind and matter, that could be characterized as ...

The 21st century has been marked by a series of global crises – from environmental degradation and pandemics to economic instability and political unrest. As we hurtle forward towards the future, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the challenges we face as a species are numerous and interlinked, the word “polycrisis” ...

Word embedding, self-attention, and next-word prediction lie at the core of LLMs like ChatGPT. If you are curious about how these techniques work and want to see a simple example in R, read on! Last time we talked about LLMs like ChatGPT we gave some intuition about how they worked (...

Everybody and their dog are talking about ChatGPT from OpenAI. If you want to get an intuition about what lies at the core of such Language Models, read on! I also created a video for this post (in German): I will share a secret with you: at the core of ...