Notices by Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social), page 4

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

The historical context of these comments is alarmingly recent, I'll tell you what

Someone in a historical show has cancer

My wife: "I mean they're GUESSING that's what it is, think about how they'd measure that at this time"

It's so funny watching anything set in the past with Ashley, like we were watching the Crown, and anytime someone got sick or something about illness was even mentioned she was like, under her breath, "They knew NOTHING, they didn't even have MRI..."

In my personal, lived, situated, non-universal experience, conversations on my mastodon-mediated sample of the fediverse seem absolutely entirely, and IMPLICITLY, dominated by Kohlbergian style justice ethics, not care ethics; that's my philosophical analysis and I'm sticking to it.

Those of us who ascribe much more to care ethics keep having a ludicrously difficult time finding footing in these conversations because *we are not engaging in the same shared framework,* full-stop.

@inthehands so much time and emotional as well as intellectual labor.

People talk a lot about group/team work that better represents the workplace as a thing education should do. One issue for STEM fields struggling to diversify? Such groups can discriminate.

For instance, these field studies in long-running undergrad groups finds male-majority teams differentially act to cede less influence to female members, and are less likely to elect female members to represent the group. Female leaders, not just members, change things.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4646347

I don't disagree with the potentially powerful impact of more collaborative work in education, I just think actually making that work requires facing issues like this head-on. I have many friends who've gone through a CS PhD and had to weave a very complicated dance around discriminatory people, this is treated as so common it is rote, and I ask myself, "do we have a situation that justifies the type of intervention that in the abstract sounds good?" A lot about stuff like this.

one time when I was a startup cofounder I was the only woman at a founder happy hour and someone mentioned my wife and a guy exclaimed, not with any intended unkindness I think but still as a somewhat sad expression of their unconscious beliefs -- "oh my god, THAT'S a surprise" and I said, "Yeah, well, I'm not usually gay HERE"

or, you know, your PERFORMANCE of the identity that other people will perceive better than what you might actually hold as the identity

It's amazing what people assume you aren't just because they know one of your identities. Intersectional thinking can save lives kids

(saying this sitting next to my switch because it's about the top tier sibling gaslighting opportunity 🥰)

My bro: she started asking me about games and I suggested she get a Switch and she SCOFFED

Me: I mean some of us like graphics, you know, those of us who are ACTUAL gamers

My bro: is mom.......a........gamer........????

Me, knowing FULL well mom was repeating word for word something I said to her: I mean sounds like it

She's putting the controller on my hand every time it vibrates to show me it's doing it 😂 "what does it MEAN" the things you never realize you don't have a verbal answer for...I looked at her and was just like "emotion??"

She just asked me how much a PlayStation is 🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹 we're winning fam

One interaction is now named "The O" for the button you need to press to invoke it. "Was I supposed to use The O??"

Questioning my choice to make a highly exploratory artsy little game (Journey) my mom's first video game but I think it's right 🙈🙈