Apart

I recently completed a research project - my first, really - and today I was pleased to received this review:

This was my favorite read of the sprint! congrats! The asymmetry you find is super interesting: giving agents a legal warning beforehand stops a cartel from forming, but dropping the warning in after they've started coordinating basically just makes them clean up their chat logs while keeping prices high. Also, good catch on fixing the baseline pricing bug in the underlying benchmark so high prices actually reflect collusion rather than a setup artifact.

If you expand this into a full paper, I'd love to see what happens when the cartel forms organically rather than being pre-seeded. It's also worth digging into why the post-warning prices stay so sticky: IE, is it genuinely tacit coordination, or are the models just lazily anchoring on the numbers already sitting in the order book history?

Well, beyond pleased. I'm so deeply moved that I think I'll print this out and hang it on my wall and look at it when I feel down.

I don't deserve it, really - I relied on Claude a lot for this project. But I will deserve it. I am going to do my damnest to be the best scientist and engineer I can be, and I'm going to succeed because I will engineer my own development.

They invited me to fill out a form - a grant application, really - for grantmaking.io and the Apart Studio, which is a possible path to the Apart Fellowship. I don't know if I will be accepted into the Studio, much less the Fellowship. I don't know if I'll be picked up for the Generator Residency or the Pivotal Fellowship. But I'll make my way, and I will get in eventually. I will earn my place.

I have a plan.

Today, I realized that I've been taking the wrong approach. I've been hiding parts of myself from science. I've been withholding myself. And it's a cliché, I think, but I wasn't really going in all of the way - because I was afraid of what would happen if I failed. I was half-assing it, signaling, hoping that someone would see what I was doing and swoop down and rescue me and pay me a lot of money to do some kind of sinecure job. Because I didn't have sufficient faith in myself, still, to really give it my all.

No more. That ended today. I'm going to dance in math and science and engineering for as long as I can. Decades if possible.