Entries by matt

Open Office Hours: 2023 Diversity Report

For the last several years, I have been making myself available for free, first-come-first-served meetings in the style of academic office hours. They’re 30 minutes, 1:1, virtual, and guided by the participant on topics ranging from career advice to applied behavioral science.  And they’re specifically designed to address the inequities inherent in gatekeeping culture. I’m […]

Open Office Hours: 2022 Diversity Report

For the last several years, I have been making myself available for free, first-come-first-served meetings that I call office hours. They’re 30 minute 1:1 virtual meetings, guided by the participant, on topics ranging from career advice to applied behavioral science.  And they’re motivated by the belief that when we require introductions or other forms of […]

Open Office Hours: 2021 Diversity Report

Humans are habituation machines.  Once something becomes true for us, our brain starts incorporating it into our reality through selective attention and a variety of other cognitive biases, such that it is hard to remember a time when it wasn’t true. Take the internet. If you’re old enough, you might be able to dredge out […]

Applied Behavioral Science: the SIDE model

I believe that behavioral science, correctly applied, can change the world. But, as with any emerging discipline, there is a period of self-definition in which people fight (with varying amounts of actual animosity) about who can claim what title and where the borders of the field are.  Personally, I’ve largely been uninterested in the debate […]

How not to deal with the world and work

Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp, has been making some changes at the org and decided that they “deserve an announcement”. While worth reading in their entirety, the changes are geared around taking the challenges of leading a company and addressing them by promoting monoculture (in the veil of individualism; Jason would call it “being […]

How not to grow from 2 to 120+ people in < 18 months

Over the weekend, Fast’s CEO Domm Holland posted a short Twitter thread about growing from 2 to 120+ people in 18 months while maintaining “an exceptionally high talent bar” and offered some tips based on Fast’s hiring process.  But as I was reading the thread, I was struck by how many of the practices seemed […]