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

My whole world is people who have so many different and compounding targets on their backs. My whole heart. My whole world.

I will need your help. All this posting about help and community? I am asking for it right now. They are going to try to stifle the work of every single person who works on social topics and even breathes in the direction of power. It has already been happening in tech and I know how much worse it will get. God, I am in text chain after text chain with every other scientist I'm in community with who has published on inequities and taught and written out loud and dared to be visible and different

@hazelweakly code as thinking, just like writing as thinking ❤️ ! So many versions of it possible!

@mekkaokereke @Alon I am sorry for my clumsy words, which I put badly, I meant that about the overall Democratic base and other Dems lack of campaigning over time/NOT the Harris campaign (one million percent agree this is the most incredible campaign!). I meant to express not so much that this ad worked but my frustration at how Dems might consider still reaching & organizing e.g. those young people mentioned above. Obviously did not express it well. Appreciate your insights and patience deeply!

@mekkaokereke @Alon I don't disagree with any of this? I'm not totally sure of the connection between your replies and mine. My thought was just a general reflection that this campaign has made a lot of shared fate narratives pretty successfully and that sometimes persuasion operates in the context of foregrounding that. Of course I totally agree with you that white women are responsible for their actions & are a source of racism. I wasn't aiming to claim this ad was great or something.

@Alon @mekkaokereke this argument isn't at all persuasive to me because the effect of a voter narrative like this isn't just for the specific character in the ad! It's about foregrounding a shared fate narrative that might motivate people (including those unmarried women) to feel that their actions will align with their values and are possible. It's strategy *not* because someone is imagining a large effect only from this subgroup but because the shared fate message could matter to many

@Alon @mekkaokereke whether or not it's executed well, people's beliefs about why they're voting matter and it would be really silly for this political party to not make a play on this when there's a gender split that's observable within groups here

@Alon @mekkaokereke it's very clear gender is a predictor *within groups* for this election, and that's very striking. Everyone votes like their household, that doesn't mean every household is motivated to vote while they imagine *other* households. This ad is for sure an identity play but I don't think it's making the play you seem to think it is.

Take it or leave it. I am long past believing that anybody would care to try to learn from people like me: kids who grew up without any access at all to all your information, not even your schools, and *still changed.* Have your nihilism, that's fine. I was a child and got several of my siblings *and* my mom and multiple close friends out of those communities and no one ever cares how we do it, or asks. But if you asked I'd say yeah, think about how many of these people have kids.

All that and I never voted Republican, not one single time. What did I do in my first election?

I didn't vote at all. Because I was terrified, and for good reason. I don't blame that brave, kind, terrified girl, not one bit for that. But it would've been cool to see another option.

The thing is voting narratives aren't just about the characters in ads. They're about imagined futures. Reaching the children of these people matter, but ads can't show persuading children against their families.

I'm a queer woman who was raised in a hard right community like most people here couldn't imagine and was threatened with physical violence about how I voted -- the people around me literally bought out the ammunition from gun stores around elections, I want you to take a moment to truly imagine being a teenager in the closet and seeing guns in the hands of people who regularly threaten you -- and I'm reading that ad about Republican women voting very differently than 99% of the posts on here

I'm tired of single point observational surveys (not easy at all, but so much easier on balance to fund and run) and I just want to do intervention studies (far longer time course, WAY harder to fund and run) god DAMMIT god damn why is understanding the world and being rigorous so insanely difficult, do you know how many fake-ass "personas" I could've made a career making, do you know how good I could've been at really stupid cherry-picked research

Do you know how easy it is to get a thousand white men (and not care at all about representation of anyone else), throw two hundred different survey items at them, and run multiple different cluster analyses of some kind over it, and force 3-4 different groupings to emerge, and then make up some big story? It's SO EASY. It's like being a robot. People churn this stuff out, plaster the veneer of math over it, throw a big tarp over the methods, put it out with famous logos

Sociology and psychology of discrimination talks about the "dual consciousness" and other bifurcations that happen because of how we treat others. Being successful, kick-ass, and having more impact with my research than I ever imagined does not fix the experience of disability in any way. I had my research findings go in front of boards and to wide public audiences the *exact same day* I'm called in to justify my need to breathe.

There's really nothing like having thought you'd already done all the complex and horrible work of advocating for yourself and your health needs and then having people just straight up forget or fail to document it and having to do it all over again.

Feels like being put on trial about some of the worst experiences you've ever had to go through.

"Political polarization and health"

This is gonna become a paper people cite a lot, I bet

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03307-w

Also if the two of you are sitting around for a whole day being like, "I know there's a paper on this.... There MUST be a paper on this....surely someone wrote this out.... Why are we so certain of the entire argument and riffing if we didn't read it somewhere" sometimes that's a sign there's a paper in your heads that needs to be written lmfao

I think one of the single best scientific skills I have & one that was STEEPLY undervalued when I was in single-discipline trad R1 academia (damn that was never gonna be my world 😂 the older I get the more I'm at peace!) is that I can really facilitate and synthesize collaborations that shore up the weaknesses of the complementary fields. "I know this, but *you* have X missing piece" is a completely different kind of collaborative science than the end-to-end disciplinary dominance approach

The next line of research for me is starting to take shape and it's exciting....trading voice notes with one of my empirical researcher friends like we're planning an album 🥹😭

MAKE the science you want to exist in the world out of the COMMUNITY you want to have in the world

Seriously tho it is so cool to get to have this in my life so much, to see from the point of view of someone who thinks through the logic of physics so constantly, what laser could reveal this, what interiority of cells was mapped, in what way could we have heard cells talking to each other, or was that silence to us? The biophysics solutioning of people who do work in bio & neuroscience is just magical to me. The interdisciplinary brilliance of having had to invent your own tools so recently