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

"getting teams to talk to each other and feel well enough to solve basic issues is boring" YES WELL. LIFE IS ABOUT SOLVING BORING THINGS.

Forgive me for not being able to believe these folks in software who tell me known problems are all solved problems and not worth thinking about while I sit here unable to log into my medical portal because I'm stuck in some kind of self-eating login fail loop

@shauna e.g., the mechanism of dehumanization that is often at play allowing a perpetrator of violence to see their victims in a sweeping category-level as less than human and more objectlike, directly work to *shield* them from trauma. This is clear in domestic violence models

@shauna I think this phrase reduces all forms of violence to some kind of victimization, which is demonstrably not true for many sources of gendered violence. "Toxic masculinity" is not about the men being toxic, but the system being toxic to people in it. I strongly disagree with labeling all gender-based power actions in the world as being the result of trauma. They're not. Nor would we explain all racism as a result of trauma vs a model with non-traumatized actor accountability in it.

@shauna yes I think that's right! this isn't my area of research, but by my read of the literature and evidence on this kind of cycle in psych, engaging in that dehumanization can be driven by multiple causes, including causes in the psychology of not-traumatized-people. Strong norms of oppression might ameliorate any sense of wrongdoing, too. So that's what I meant by "not true for many sources of gendered violence." Unless you have a wider definition for trauma than I do, which is possible!

@shauna ...the existence of people who probably cannot form the same type of traumatic responses and who enact gendered violence, in psychopathologies. That's why I tend to fall on, if we are trying to have a term that encompasses the system, it's not just about describing a common pattern, but it's also about acknowledging perpetrators who aren't victims, so that's why "toxic" seems more universal than "traumatic" to me.

@shauna some general references in this paper! https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08862605231204897?casa_token=N_GX2TSUHeoAAAAA%3ASm3YpPGARUT3GsCg-t_VeJVp6ALhmumy3N1J_boPvfPlSC_jVZ-PCuP-r2UE3VKbdu4R9e6boItG

I totally buy that trauma is a very strong predictor for later violence for some cases, but not others. For instance many female populations have significantly higher rates of PTSD than many male populations but they do not react with the same level of violence. So it is not necessarily a *sufficient cause*, nor is the fact that it's a strong predictor a reason to say it's the *only* predictor, e.g., there is...

@inthehands thank you Paul this really means so much to me!!

End of the year is hitting me harder than I'd like. I'm tired of no amount of production ever being enough; I'm tired of people asking me to teach and give talks for free; I'm tired of making new websites and content; I'm tired of being evaluated continually on nothing but production

@inthehands this happens absolutely nonstop across everywhere I am online these days. People are just absolutely rageful and bad-faith-reading on social media in a way I feel is worse than I've seen over the last ten years idk

I understand that I am perceived to have some manner of technology reach and influence based on my shitposting, for which I am grateful!

But I do not understand where people think they will get yelling at me if I even just mention using something that's a tech product instead of idk, as a classic example let's say, using some open source thing I have genuinely never heard of run by 2 strangers in a basement, one of whom has a years-long history of bigotry online. I will not do it.

We recorded a podcast episode about the research on gender and math ability yesterday. I did so much research for it that honestly, I feel a little overwhelmed trying to go through it and summarize it. These issues and discriminatory experiences are too massive -- like physics massive, like they want to pull you over with their gravity.

But I feel it is so important to try. We are losing so much ground on these battles. We have to use whatever we have to try to protect folks.

"I’ve never experienced it a single time where someone who learned slowly in early life had anything remotely valuable to contribute later in life."

Comment I read this morning on one of my posts

I can't believe this is the kind of thing people say with their chests in software. Incredibly inhumane conceptions of human value in this industry. Incredibly simplistic ideas about human achievement.

Never do I feel more like an open source maintainer than when people tell me my research is bad because I didn't interact with them as promptly and cheerfully as they wanted on social media

I'm so tired of having to be a perfect patient AND my own scientist AND my own doctor

It took a full calendar year of episodes of excruciating, life-disturbing and very classic nerve pain to get a neurology referral that was accepted. Watching TikToks where medical providers all pat each other on the back for making the stupid joke about dropping everything to treat a "farmer" who comes in with pain, I wonder how long it would have taken if I were a different gender.

Sometimes people have given me (well intentioned) feedback that I can come off as overly precise, careful, scientifically pedantic, I don't know. Sometimes you may find that in how I express myself on social media because I am in so much goddamn pain. I'm just in so much pain and it's hard.

I bounced off the sharp edge of a very weird citation about programming ability and I was like, "what are they talking about, this claim about being able to predict such a reliable percentage of student outcomes sounds very sus"

And lord, it was

I just caught up on this "the camel has two humps" saga about predicting programming ability and

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- you all never met a goddamn distribution you couldn't turn into a mystical statement about programming ability. Distributions of achievement (again, not ability) can reflect factors that have nothing to do with the domain in which you are capturing them in. E.g., would you find this "bimodal success" in any intro class? Soooooo does that mean you're just capturing poverty? first year struggle? Where is the THEORY. Achievement is actually something we STUDY