Navigating Emotional Attachment in Scientific Decision-Making

In this episode, Stanford professor Michael Fischbach discusses insights from his course on how to choose meaningful research problems. Highlights include:

- Invest time in problem selection: Spend more time upfront selecting the right research problem.
- Date ideas: Before settling on an idea, explore multiple alternatives without emotional attachment.
- Fixed vs. floating parameters: Early on, clearly define what aspects of your research idea are fixed and which can be flexible.
- Manage risks: Embrace risk but systematically de-risk projects.
- Killer experiments: Identify early “go/no-go” experiments.
- Turn crises into opportunities: Use a project's crisis to find out what it's really about.

This episode was supported by Research Theory (researchtheory.org). For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .