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   Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:17:48 JST Cat Hicks

   I said for the last three years (thinking about the waves of discourse in tech on this) but really, the story of this paper starts far, far further back, to the beginning of my interest in psychology and in the measurement of human ability, which I confronted when I had to take a standardized test for the first time, as I shared about in a talk at Monktoberfest (link below)

   https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/113521762777915059

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:44:26 JST Cat Hicks

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     Le Guin writes, in the essay that we pulled a quote from to begin our preprint: "Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that's what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all."

     Chills every time I read this.
     I will tell you what. This is how we should read the "evidence" about human ability -- it has been applied *backward*, to justify exclusion, not to learn.

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:44:27 JST Cat Hicks

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     I would have to claw my way into education and then navigate years of schooling to gain access to the tools of psychology that explained my experience, but now I have words for so many of the things I had seen for myself and for the adversity-surviving kids around me, the kids I tutored as we all tried to stay in school together: psychology had words like identity threat, and psychology had evidence about "noncognitive factors" and "domain specific cognition."

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:44:27 JST Cat Hicks

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     All fields are imperfect and all science is a human endeavor, and so psychology is an imperfect human endeavor (that is why in our preprint, I explicitly acknowledge that while we are critiquing a general individualistic model of developer ability that is pervasive in tech, you can trace the ORIGINS of that model TO PSYCHOLOGY and our own constructs applied too broadly -- shared heritage! Shared failures!). Yet it is so much bigger than a single effect, or a single finding, cherrypicked

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:44:27 JST Cat Hicks

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     Having a language and a toolkit to describe what matters to us and what we have lived through is vital. I think that software engineering, as a global endeavor, as a transforming field, deserves better than our cold, chilly stereotypes about "programming brains" and destructive contest cultures. I think it matters not just because it is "nice" (although it is!!) but because this is the ONLY way we get to a healthy ecosystem of innovation. And I think a lot of people in software want this too.

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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:44:27 JST Cat Hicks

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     I want you to know it's not inevitable that work like this happens and stories like this get told. It's writing and reading endless papers on nights and weekends (I read papers for weeks and weeks for this one!), it's uncomfortable or even hostile encounters in this industry sometimes with people who want to diminish social science, it is persistence on and on and on.

     I hope you'll share our ideas out loud and name us when you do, because I think that matters. ❤️

     https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/tfjyw

     Robert Link repeated this.
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     Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 00:44:28 JST Cat Hicks

     in reply to

     Here's that talk: https://www.drcathicks.com/post/the-most-personal-talk-i-ve-ever-given-in-tech

     I shared a little bit in this talk about why having a perspective from outside of the education system gave me a sense of mission and clarity of survival: how we think about human ability matters, and the human ability we DON'T SEE is one of the great challenges for society