Thanks to Readers

I want to express some thanks to the readers of this blog for their help. In August, I was struggling to find a way to make my research interests from ideas in my head to something I could work on systematically and publish. And I was willing to work very hard to get all of it out and in a form that I could use as a template for the work to be done. Writing notes on my computer hadn’t helped, and neither did banging my head against the wall doing experiments that never really got at problems that I was interested in or approaches I found useful.

I can now say that this process has been completed. Over the last few days, I coalesced all of the collected notes from this blog into a giant template for generating research, which — as precisely as I can right now — specifies the research topic, research background, related literature, research questions, methodologies and sketches of experimental designs, workflow sketches, and other important templates. As a result, I have two papers (each about 8–10K words long) in a draft queue, one single-authored and another co-authored. Both papers exhibit far more clarity and precision than any of my prior attempts. And that is just the beginning.

I plan to try to focus my efforts now on simply generating papers and technical projects. I could put up my internal guide here, but I think it would just tempt me to endlessly revise it instead of working on my papers and projects. I will continue to use this blog and others as a scratchpad for reflecting on some things of interest to me related to my research but on the whole I am done with using it to generate formalized research ideas about my synthesis of strategy and computation. I will occasionally also publish pieces that don’t fit elsewhere here.

I could not have done it without the people who read, commented, and generally made me feel like what I am doing is important and not solely just an academic’s abstraction. You provided a source of external motivation to keep pushing and not be frustrated by the difficulties I have had expressing myself, my ideas, and linking them together. You have my sincere gratitude and appreciation. Good ideas aren’t always produced not by solitary thinkers that have flashes of inspiration. They come from communities like you, who gave a damn and helped this idea grow into what it is now.