Notices by Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)

I love that Flow won and I love that he thanked Blender 😭

The fact that federal funding for biomedical work is a huge part of the economy of and in many cases saved cities in deep red states that lost e.g. former manufacturing industries, feels like a story we gotta tell more

It is possible to scaffold more thoughtfulness and it is possible to scaffold less thoughtfulness. I mean our entire education system (pls do not complain to me about the education system; I am comparing it AT LARGE to "not having an education system at all", it is a relatively recent human intervention) is essentially the former

The answer is obviously much more complicated than "make things hard slash always visible" lol, we all live in a world of very helpful abstraction a lot of the time, but still

Designing tools that work for and with us will require, unfortunately, a cultural context that is far more interested in and curious about human potential and human ability. I am baffled all the time by the number of tech places that don't invest in this. The bar is so low that if you invest in it a tiny bit you are just ridiculously ahead of others sometimes. Like my work is really great, but I do find it wild just how much I can regularly AMAZE tech leadership re: logic about human behavior.

I had a thought with my morning coffee and I'm not sure I'm totally bought into it but here it is: I've always had a real problem with the way that myopic tech "UX product thinking" (the overly simplistic sort) chose "things need to be very easy slash invisible" as its only possible marker of success and AI really shows some of the stupid decision-making scaffolded by making some things very easy slash invisible

or in other words

"The cognitive load construct is similar to the workload construct in that it takes into consideration the demands that a certain task imposes on an individual. However, it does not take into consideration the psychological effects that individuals' beliefs, expectations, and goals have on their load perceptions. This has been argued to be one of the limitations of CLT" - Plass, J. L., Moreno, R., & Brünken, R. (Eds.). (2010). Cognitive load theory.

if you're asking people to rate how "overwhelmed they are" on a scale that's not cognitive load

IF YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT WORKPLACE STRESS. YOU ARE NOT. TALKING. ABOUT. COGNITIVE. LOAD. I would accept "mental load" (even though that is really just casual speak) but it's not cognitive load

I'm going to get a dig about how people use "cognitive load" when they mean "allostatic load" into this manuscript if it kills me

I need to do my own actual work which is advancing good theory, but there is a second, meaner book inside of me about bad theory.

from that same source: "CLT was never claimed to be a learning theory [...] [no developments in the theory] have challenged the basic assumptions drawn from the computational models of the mind that inspired the theory" 🤷♀️

also reducing "load" doesn't always "increase cognitive resources" because of unexpected penalties to cognition and problem-solving in ways that we frequently are wrong about; the evidence is really very mixed

If the only thing we had to do was optimize for some small improvements in working memory on discrete task performance, things would be a LOT. EASIER.

in that book will be a chapter about how pure "cognition" approaches to education, human learning and human achievement have ALL PRETTY MUCH FAILED TO BE PREDICTIVELY AND INTERVENTION TARGET VALUABLE for the OUTCOMES WE CARE ABOUT and SHOULDN'T SET THE STANDARD FOR WORKPLACES even when we have a population of people who will only accept "human stuff" being said about them if you make it COMPUTATIONAL SOUNDING

Less sure about the writing part but very sure about the reading part

Do y'all ever think about how reading is feminized as a skill and writing is masculinized and the difference between what we value re: demonstration of software ability or is this just me

When you feminize skills that are essential you basically get them on sale. It's very effective weaponization of our social biases against us

I also find this a FASCINATING missing piece of how we talk about generative AI like huge amounts of interacting with most incarnations clearly relies on reading skills but do you hear about that as much as you hear people talk about "prompt engineering"? Lol no.