Notices by Dr. Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social)

imho, the machinery of myth-making is actually very easy to understand in this industry and it's not about burnout lol

I've been hearing about a lot of behaviors that people think "melt their brain" or "make people stupid."

So what do people think "makes people smarter" and "repairs your brain"?

The quest for shoes that fit this era of life continues

living the first years of your grownup life with a lot of precarity does so many things to you but one thing I didn't anticipate was realizing I didn't know what "comfortable shoes" actually felt like

I suspect I'm not the only person this happened to, and it is a small and simple example but also sort of compelling to me as an example of how much our appraisals of our experience are trying really hard to be adaptive strategies and can also be....wrong

Next newsletter getting locked and loaded

me throwing open my little cottage window to yell at my uncaring neighborhood

I WAS RIGHT. THOSE REVIEWERS SAID WHO CARES ABOUT THIS AND I WAS RIGHT

Bet on inequitable identity-based evaluation differences creating a penalty in the assessment of people's skills and you will never be wrong

God this sort of affirmation happens so rarely in social science I literally feel like I just went for a run

I am SCREAMING I just opened up a paper that completely justifies the interpretation I offered on one of my observational studies of a few years ago

After a career full of people using my writing and thoughts without naming me, I am proud to be writing a book that is CHOCK FULL of scientists' names.

"banned keyword" researchers to the front of the line please and thank you

"No account of human psychology would be complete without recognizing that other people are as central to our natural ecology as is the physical environment"

- Dunham, Y. (2018). Mere membership. Trends in cognitive sciences, 22(9), 780-793.

@whitequark oh I would think absolutely. And people who are relatively successful doing that also create a lot of opportunities for the people around them to more automatically default to "oh wait....my ingroup includes this!" which is a powerful effect for our group psychology a lot of the time. Directly empathy triggering!

@whitequark - for instance, the stereotype inoculation model (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1047840X.2011.607313) would suggest that some folks of a certain identity being able to be successful and creating networks can boost and support others. It's a lovely effect when it can happen.

@whitequark I have no particular view on it because I don't really see much evidence about it. Difficult for me to know if there is actually a higher rate than the gen pop. I do know that there are often high achievement patterns for sexual minority *and* gender minority folks, ie achieving beyond comparable cisgender students, but that's v complex bc those groups also face well measured bias, dampened income, etc. I do think it's always possible for there to be resilient small network effects -

Additionally a great point by Max Sahin:

"And that environment itself selects for people who tolerate & even seek high conflict environment, doubling down on the fundamental problem."

https://bsky.app/profile/maxsahin.bsky.social/post/3lv7a6h7bck2w

What we observe is entirely troubled by the fact that it is the selected, situated result of enormous social forces.

I also find analyses such as this very helpful for understanding failed eval of students in PECS, the fields that have failed on gender. Essentially we trade high achieving women for lower achieving men. Or, achievement predicts differently by your identity

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/math-intensive-fields-have-a-gender-problem-the-men-are-worse-at-math/

Like I can be empathic and show that I care about the disparities in who gets to be seen as technical (I do!) but I also spend most of my time being an ice cold statistician about it. The math does not math for the arguments that claim these outcomes are an unbiased sample of innate ability

Software development explanations that discard social effects require us to assume absurd effect sizes from things like personal student interest can completely overcome the obvious sorting effects of structural bias, a thing that has sorted access for centuries. Very unsatisfying logic tbh.

I recommend this review if you want to learn about disparities, including how they show up in the preconditions for student interest. Student personal interest is not an unbiased measure separate from social environments. Quite the opposite.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-024-00380-3