Notices by Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social), page 3

@mayintoronto I'd also just like to see the drafted regulation because like.....what are you regulating, math? Ridiculous

To be clear: you can have grief about the mess!! Grieving the mess is also a human response. But you'll feel a lot more alone if your default is "I'm the only one who Truly Understands The Mess" and a lot less alone if your default is "my fellow humans must also be in versions of The Mess" and guess what

The default is a learned skill.

Look, it's a mess out there and you can react to that mess by deciding everyone else is a moron or you could react to it by deciding most people are trying to get by with a different context than yours and start working the problem. Those are your choices pretty much, can't choose "no mess"

This came up a bit over the past week in conversations online, but the way that fixating on short-term productivity in technical work SEEMS good but can actually harm us, is something I've been working on for years.

The fourth chapter of my book is on this paradox! *waits impatiently for release*

Nevertheless as I note in my chapter, this wouldn't be a sticky thing for us if there *weren't truth* in the short-term optimization strategy. We pursue short-term performance in deeply critical times, including as survival goals, in order to break through a gatekeeping barrier. There is SENSE here.

2) the tech culture, of which we find many traces in our specific workplaces & technical communities as they respond to overarching stories: who is technical? What are the signals for brilliance? What makes a developer "good"? What makes an org "technically brilliant"? What is good management?

As with all complex psychological things, there are many possible effects here & so many entrypoints to it. I like to think about it from two entrypoints:

1) the individual. What individual beliefs make you susceptible to the mental traps of this, leading to burnout & motivational crashes?

As ever but ICYMI, little book details and all the launch stuff will be coming through my newsletter so if you don't want to miss this is the key stop for Psychology of Software Team news:

https://www.fightforthehuman.com/

Just a small slice of the hundreds of papers I read for this book that are relevant to this chapter in particular 🥰

Along with the book launch I plan to share my entire research library with supplemental sources once I am recovered from WRITING A BOOK WITH HUNDREDS OF STUDIES UNDERNEATH IT

So to build a more adaptive strategy we need to synthesize and respect the multiple things we are trying to get: short-term pushes and ambitious goals, but also a sustainable intrinsic motivation. We need to hone a better sense of which "hard pushes" actually do pay off and which don't

Kick me in the face if you must for this, I'm at peace with it. I took a risk and started talking on TikTok about harm reduction approaches in helping people who are using AI for their health use it better and with more evidence literacy. And the responses I've gotten from patients is amazing and really moving. You should see the private messages. People need help and I'm going to try to help in my areas of expertise.

I love that simply because it gave me joy I kept my chaotic blogging style with its long sentences for long enough until now it's finally an advantage because it's obviously human while all the bland marketing-style writing in tech reads like terrible AI writing regardless of whether it is or isn't

"Even early in childhood, individuals appear receptive to local norms that govern cooperation and use them to guide downstream behaviors. This work points to early development as a key window for norm acquisition and adoption"

How does cooperative behavior "get off the ground" and how can we study it with ecological validity and rich data across cultures? An ambitious study from lead author Dorsa Amir (https://www.dorsaamir.com/) and collaborators on this

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adw9995

I've been in SF for four days and on each day I've had multiple conversations where people (self included) express deep feelings, fear, wonder and worry about their skills being replaced or (this is less named explicitly but an assumed driver I think) no longer valued by others. Big threats to feel

I think it's really funny when people are like "education is broken" and then you ask "so how and what do you think we should teach" and they're like, "I don't know, how dare you" 💀

@benpate and do you think teachers currently don't teach them?

@benpate how would you teach critical thinking skills?

So corner coffee and donuts on the sidewalk inviting all the neighbors (and anyone else passing by) was so successful now we're talking about making it a regular thing

Neighbor family across the street all waved at us the other day 🥹

The gay agenda (organize, support community, feed people) in motion

I had two PhD social scientists and a dream and was running projects with chewing gum and duct tape and we got more than 5000 people to talk to us about the threat and fear they felt with AI and what helped them value learning despite it

You all *sneeze* and spend what that study cost