Myopic Delirium
Myopic Delirium is a student-led research group enriching agent architectures for large-scale social simulation. Agents stand in for people — yet across the field they are treated as convenient characters, tuned until the results flatter whoever paid for them.
We assert ourselves on experimentation devoid of imposed structure and ideology, building dynamic, emergent systems rather than fixed incentives. The rigor of those systems, and the uncertainty of their outcomes, gave us our name.
Our initiative developed with a small core team, most of whom had worked in the development of limited models — RBC / New Keynesian DSGE models, CGE and IAM policy workhorses, macroprudential scenario models, and shallow, goal-seeking ABMs. Our core model is a hybrid cognitive-institutional ABM, treating bounded cognition as the state space and using ensemble runs with sensitivity and ablation to map regime structures of social emergence.
Experiments are designed for reproducible batch execution across multi-core CPU infrastructure. We are grateful to the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Research Computing Services for access to the JARVIS cluster, and the Hanlon Financial Systems Center for compute that supported this work.
We currently maintain 21 core members across four teams: Agent Cognition and Behavioral Mechanics (ABBY), Research Software and Reproducibility (RODY), Empirical Methods, Metrics and Validation (EMMY), and High-Performance Simulation Systems (HOBY).