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

Since being a scientist on a comic-con panel means I get a comic-con pass.....that justifies spending a comic-con pass' worth on comic-con cosplay, wouldn't you say??

Maybe if we're lucky I'll get some of my neuroscience friends to talk to me about it too but I have to limit their psychic damage

If you've seen a "developers' brains are like x" claim, send it my way! Bonus points if it's about gender too

I'm drafting an upcoming newsletter about inoculating yourself against the phrenology of programming: identifying it, basic red flags in claims about cognition and developer problem-solving, and unfortunately...papers about programmers that stray over the line

- I "bring up gender when no one was talking about it" this one is extremely true and valid WAIT I THOUGHT YOU GUYS SAID YOU WANTED ***SOCIO***-TECHNICAL, WHERE ARE YOU GOING WHY ARE YOU RUNNING

- sometimes I take consulting gigs that include helping people design research! god forbid a girl be trying to afford her future medical needs and think her own work has value

- I'm in tech, therefore I must "serve tech and not humanity"

- I'm NOT technical enough, a forever; therefore I have nothing of merit to say about technology

- I am "like Dr Phil" hahhahahhaha I wouldn't be sitting here incredibly worried about whether I can afford my future medical needs in that case man, oh man

so let's sum up, in order to talk about science in public, I:
- can't have a job
- can't be an academic
- can't not be an academic
- can't be in tech
- can't not be in tech
- can't publish
- can't not publish

reasons I've gotten online in the last couple days that I'm not allowed to express scientific opinions:

- I don't have a faculty job at an R1. True! Last time I was at an R1 I was stalked by a vicious person for two years so that had something to do with why I left academia.

- I'm too academic! (lol) academics distract everyone with our "insistence on facts"

- I am promoting a book! True! lol. I guess this one means if you publish you are untrustworthy

- I HAVEN'T published enough! Lol

Slowly losing every ounce of love for HCI that I formed back in my HCI/design/engineering postdoc because of all the phrenology papers I've seen get platformed by HCI/design/engineering

F me I'm going to have to write a newsletter about how to inoculate yourself against phrenology about programming aren't I

The one I always think of is the one that says we can learn about the mystical state of enlightenment that developers enter when they program by thinking about how half of dolphins' brains can go into a trance (said the paper)

Presumably the dolphins produce a lot of code in this state

sidenote most pop advice about "motivation" and "changing habits" is so clearly written for people to whom nothing much has ever happened and WE, the club of Have Been Through Tough Shit, we need different advice altogether. This is my professional opinion.

You have to do so many things you do not want to do, and/or so many things you don't want are happening to you, that you can keep yourself locked in that mental cage past when the door opens I think. At least this is my experience

Anyway, baby mindfulness stuff, but asking myself "ok but what do you WANT" many times a day, recommend!

Something being really ill for a long long while does to you is it makes you forget how to have fun. I am relearning how to have fun and it is, uh, super awesome. Recommend

@trochee @inthehands @glyph @dave @3psboyd I don't think LLMs have anything close to reasoning but I'm just saying we're all dealing with cultural technologies already

@trochee @inthehands @glyph @dave @3psboyd likewise I approach my interactions with people who have power over me -- wealthy men in tech, angry doctors -- with caution because they do not understand the bias they have internalized from their cultural and societal context, and it emerges in statistically detectable, but ultimate quite difficult to predict ways. This comes out in the words they use when writing about my body, my performance, my potential, my mortgage letters, my police reports

@glyph @dave @trochee @3psboyd I think my exposure to people working with small, contained, and scientific models, with public data not stolen, with perfectly thoughtful and intentional energy demands, is probably something that has deeply shaped *my* assumptions. To me, statistics are a part of the language of the universe and existed long before these products and I'm always going into the abstract "what model could WE make" land. That doesn't make my pov more valid just situated that way.

@glyph @dave @trochee @3psboyd in a funny way -- and I could be wrong because now I am sharing my more intuitive, ecologically thinking side, which I'm really only sharing because I appreciate the ENERGY of this convo, the modeling we are all doing of caring about each other's povs in a hard convo -- I wonder if the great lie about LLMs is that they will speed everything up. I think the answer with new technology might sometimes be where it can slow us down, can that be positive

@glyph @dave @trochee @3psboyd there are many VISCERALLY BAD parts of the commercial LLM *products* -- the bad guys are in charge no doubt imho. That is central to ever solving this, getting it away from destruction of human needs. We always need to think about how to get tech away from them; I want nevertheless to be able to *think* about how to wrestle the beautiful power of statistics and augmentation toward a human future. I recognize that means being able to hold many things in mind at once