#Poem
Come as you are,
Go when you please.
Should I wonder how & when you might leave?
Or focus on how you differ from me?
Or try to change you, meticulously?
Forget all of that, & thank you, for now
The laughs. & quarrels. The jokes you allow
Change is the only constant, we know
One day soon, we won’t exchange “hello’s”
No matter for this! This moment? I’ll savour!
For the contrast in life, is where we find flavour.
Investment Thesis
Can individual investors expect high yield on short term equity portfolios?
Problem Specification
Suppose you want to build a sound investment portfolio. Suppose, further, that you’ve settled on a long-term strategy. A problem arises:
How should short term funds be handled?
Short-term investment requirements are often disjoint from their long-term counterparts. Short term investment often acts to:
- Save for a particular event.
- As a safety buffer.
- Have higher liquidity & stability requirements.
Here I consider the viability of adopting a long term passive diversified portfolio approach to short term asset allocation. Backed by a statistical enquiry to assess performance in the expectation.
…
∞ A stochastic process that parameterize an uncountably infinite set of random variables - to solve for happiness.
Sometimes existence feels deplorable, other times, bliss. We cannot improve what we do not measure — so why not reverse engineer human emotion?
Is it possible to define happiness as a set of non-linear basis functions that capture societal interaction effects?
Formalizing Happiness
Before we can capture any natural phenomena — which is infinitely complex — by some statistical framework we need to formalize the search space (imposing simplifying constraints). …
Make Science Fun.
A comical guide to Reinforcement Learning; Bayesian Statistical Updating & the Exploration vs Exploitation Paradigm.
So you’re the kid who got 100 for every math & physics test, you’ve read Hagel, you compose like Bach, you think in machine code, life is easy, thinking is fast (& slow), tasks are simple.
But there’s a problem… Girls don’t seem to care?!
So, if you’re growing tired of winning the olympiads but not having anyone to celebrate with :( ... At last! I have the answer for you my present-day progressive Picasso.
So ponder no longer my postmodern Pascal. Here’s how we…
A message to a dear friend — JH, embarking on a new journey.
#Poetry
Run in the forest.
Run fast.
Alone.
Faster & further than you thought you could.
Sprint until your legs give way, you slip and fall & your knees bleed. Look around & realize where you are — in the forest, alone. And the forest doesn’t care about your bloody knees — so you’ll get up & run again.
Without your knowing, nor your consent, the world of things will recede around you & you’ll be left with nothing but the metaphysics of being.
Your mind & heart race as fast as blood pumps through your veins. Now you feel…
Religion & God are so deeply entwined with — & in fact, inseparable from — the human condition. The origins of which possess an ambiguity & opacity that escape logic. Here we examine a plausible premise on which Religion & God may have arisen: perhaps nothing more than a function of evolution.
Does the Prosperity of Tribals Societies Necessitate Religion & God?
Evolutionary Primer
Evolutionary thinking is a fundamental tool for logic & reason. From biology to culture to everything in between — things are only truly understood in the context under which they originate & the pressures that drive them. Here I detail evolution, not for biologists & geneticists — but rather as an abstract framework for problem-solving.
To this aid, I wrote an evolutionary primer: explaining the basic mechanism, advanced & shortcomings in evolutionary theory. It’s available here:
Evolution of Religion
Now that we have our evolutionary primer, we can apply…
Evolutionary thinking is a fundamental tool for logic & reason. From biology to culture to everything in between — things are only truly understood in the context under which they originate & the pressures that drive them. Here we detail evolution, not for biologists & geneticists — but rather as an abstract framework for problem solving.
Here we detail the natural elements of evolution, not for the sake of biology but rather as an intellectual framework to apply to other phenomena (ideas, culture, trends, technology, whatever you like).
It’s foolish to analyze anything statically, systems are dynamic. Let's give a succinct example:
Suppose you wish to analyze something arbitrary: like work culture:
why do we work 9 am-5 pm 5 days a week?
Where does this come from? A naive, static investigation would explain how it fits into contemporary society well, or that it’s a natural structure inherited for its optimality. An Evolutionary explanation would, instead…
Thinking about the brain as an emergent computational engine.
This article, heavily inspired by Robert Sapolsky, details one way of thinking about the brain as a dynamic, computational engine — from which arbitrary complexity can arise. Thinking about cognition as a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), or decentralized networks, can yield insight into some of what makes us human.
Here’s a basic neuroscience/neuroanatomy primer to set the framework for this type of thinking.
The goal of this article is to think about the brain as a computational system, from the perspective of science & engineering.
1. Neuroanatomy
Here we outline some core ideas in the neurological literature that will provide a necessary…
Zach Wolpe
Statistician, scientist, technologist — writing about stats, data science, math, philosophy, poetry & any other flavours that occupy my mind. Get in touch
