Matthew Hirschey

Building

Flipping Lab Meetings

100% of research labs have LAB MEETINGS. 0% are set up to enable everyone to have a voice. This is how we flipped them to increase engagement, hear from everyone, and save time...

Enhancing Creativity With AI

In the future, creativity will thrive As we learn to think outside the hive We'll imagine and create Innovative things we'll make And our minds will be full of life In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the development of conversational AI technologies, from simple chatbots to

Thinking

Synthesizing

Over the past year, I wrote an article every week and sent it to a growing list of curious readers. The topics were eclectic, sometimes meandering, but always related to a simple question: how do you come up with a good idea?

Wait

One of the big ideas in having a minimum viable mindset is to get your ideas out in to the world early. However, if your idea is not yet ready, then have the confidence and foresight to wait. So we wait.

Thinking

Minimum Viable Mindset

“Publish houses of brick, not mansions of straw”, says Bill Kaelin, Nobel laureate and professor of medicine. Scientists need to write papers that include fewer grand claims and more proof to make the scientific literature more reliable. Scientists need minimum viable discoveries.

Building

How to draw listeners into your story

Imagine you’ve been invited for a presentation, a talk, or a pitch. You’ve been allotted 15- maybe 30-minutes to share your story. Turns out, you only have a few seconds to grab someone’s interest. You need a hook.

Art

But is it art?

The conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp is often seen as a key founder of conceptual art. His 1917 piece 'Fountain' is often cited as the first conceptual artwork. But..."It's a urinal." "I don't get it." "Is it art?" Soon, you will see, this is the wrong question.

Thinking

Naming things

One of the key functions of science is to organize knowledge. Scientists take new information and classify and categorize it — connect it with the known. Name it. But knowing the name of the thing is not the same as knowing the thing.

Thinking

Mental models

The DIKW triangle is a way to organize the relationship between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. When I first came across this model, it resonated with me. But I wanted to understand: how do you move up the hierarchy?

Thinking

Another newsletter

I had an in-person conference last week, the first in years for most of us. There, I ran into a colleague on the street. After the customary, "how have you been?", she asked me, "are you still writing that newsletter? I think it's really important." Why did she say this?

Thinking

Dynamic range

In a common parable, a group of blind men heard that a strange animal called an elephant had been brought to the town. The moral of this story is that humans have a tendency to view the world through their experiences. But this is not the whole story.

Thinking

Counting cycles

We published a paper last week. 🎉 We worked on this project for several years, plus one additional year for the editorial process (broken, I know). A conservative measurement estimates at least 5 years from start to finish. If a cycle takes 5 years to complete, how many cycles are left?

Thinking

Consistency

It’s 9 o’clock on Sunday morning. I’ve written an article and sent it out every previous Sunday for almost a year, but I haven’t written this Sunday’s article yet. There goes the streak. I should probably throw in the towel.

Science

Scientific judgment under uncertainty

How is it that we are quick to be skeptical of science but less skeptical of news? Why this difference?

Thinking

Why skeptical sounds smart

I'm skeptical. It's the phrase that strikes fear into the hearts of innovators and creatives everywhere. A new idea is fragile and must be nurtured tenderly before it is ready for the slings and arrows of the skeptical world. But how do we protect our ideas from the skeptical skeptic?

Thinking

Composable ideas

Programming language wars arise when software developers disagree over which language is the best tool for a given task. Which language is best?

Science

A publishing problem

If I needed to send every article to a ghostly editor of this site's publishing platform to read and decide whether it's interesting enough, you'd never read an article here and I would be stuck in publishing limbo. This absurd universe describes the academic publishing system.

An approach problem

I want to start by telling a story about a young scientist. This young scientist had everything that you would hope for in someone just starting out their career: ambitious, hardworking, plenty of ideas. And this young scientist had a great hypothesis to start out a project. The only problem

Science

A funding problem

In 1999, the NIH set a modular budget of $250,000/year. In the past 20+ years, the modular budget has not moved. Ask any academic scientist about the hardest part of the job, and they will undoubtedly say funding.

Thinking

Alternative mechanisms

Scientists consider alternative mechanisms for diseases or genes all the time. This is what the path to discovery looks like. But rarely do we consider alternative mechanisms for how something is done. Why this discrepancy in thinking?

Thinking

Stop copying me

In a world hyper-focused on creativity and novelty, credit and attribution, the last thing anyone wants is to be copied. But then how do we ever learn anything?

Thinking

What's in a name?

In college, I signed up for an online account for a messaging service called Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Signing up meant you needed a name, and you could find me on IRC under the handle 'RedSuit007'. So what's in a name?

Thinking

10K PFP

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a virtual membership club. Images of these apes have become ubiquitous profile pictures (PFPs), with celebrities ranging from Jimmy Fallon to Stephen Curry, from Mark Cuban to Madonna showing off their Apes. What is behind this current 10K PFP craze?

Thinking

Entertaining

A pair of couples, each in their late 40s, were lamenting to each other in the freezer aisle how they don’t understand their children. Perhaps these parents just want for their kids something they had. But like most things, just because you don’t understand it doesn’t make it any less legitimate.

Thinking

Zero marginal effort

The internet enabled a new digital economy where the cost of increasing the production of digital goods is essentially zero. However, the notion of 'zero marginal cost' extends far beyond selling. Zero marginal effort means scaling activities that would otherwise cost time.