Notices by Cat Hicks (grimalkina@mastodon.social), page 6

Null results are important and tell us things. For example, gender bias in student evaluations is nonresponsive to several interventions tested here:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/PNMQJ9CIVUDESHKTKAIF/full?target=10.1080/02602938.2024.2407927

The logic of how good research tackles things like gender biases is truly so clever and cool and it just kills me that our gender biases diminish this work and so many people are contemptuous of it and unable to see how intellectually, not just emotionally, compelling it is

Science reform convos in academia: these magic forms will fix the universe

Science reform convos in applied research: how are we going to try to get one single member of this city legislature to listen to our "kids need food" data while the rest of them are actively screaming at us

"missing stair" is cute, some of this stuff is more like "missing radiation shielding"

hm interesting how many things open with "the value of free software is priceless" including this Stallman report, but the *cost* of gender inequity and identity-motivated violence world over, and on the human history level, is probably one of the biggest single costs to humanity's progress that there is, SO

Me: why do I feel so down and drained and in need of comfort, what is wrong with me right now

Also me: well I made it through my pile of thirty in-depth research papers about social identity threat and its mechanisms and how much we haven't cared about solving it and all the fields and subfield parallel evolutions that don't see someone with my particular combination of identities as a source of insight, or even a full human being

Spider-Verse is also different psychology I think in that it takes seriously the ways that adolescence might not only be about "successfully becoming like the adults." It can be about a new future altogether. Gifted adolescence transcending & reconstructing previous rules & constraints. That's a very NOW and present version of adolescent heroism, a really challenging psychological dilemma of needing to let go of belonging (even dearly held parts of it) in order to do something greater.

If the pixar/disney portrayal of adolescent psych is sweet and poignant but a little static/packing things into discrete boxes, Spider-Verse makes an answer out of breaking every box, visually and otherwise. And synthesizing knowledge & insight is shown in terms of physiology, cognition, emotion AND relating. In both Spider-Verse movies taking action is the complex answer to complex dilemmas of belonging and self-efficacy.

These movies are the social-constructivist's psychology!

Watching Inside Out 2 has got me thinking about where adolescent psychology and its dilemmas of belonging/self-efficacy/complex identity beliefs are lovingly and beautifully portrayed on screen lately as a complex dynamic process instead of just static category boxes. Obviously first thought is the Spider-Verse movies. I LOVE how they approach adaptive, dynamic dialogue inside of psychological dilemmas in those movies, utter art.

Also proud psychologist moment because in the beginning I whispered to Ashley "THEY'RE DOING SELF CONCEPT" and then the very next minute they introduced the "sense of self" construct hahaha

While I enjoyed the first one (I love animation of all kinds, and I always enjoy Pixar even when their jokes get a little bathos-focus group-repetitive) I didn't genuinely dig the functional emotions model. This belief formation model was WAY more interesting 🥰

I watched Inside Out 2, NOBODY TOLD ME IT WAS ABOUT PSYCHOLOGICAL BELIEF FORMATION, I am destroyed

@inthehands I actually disagree not with your first framing but with your second. I do think there are very well measured unique factors in how we excuse, privilege, and have very strong field specific biases about this type of work. I get a lot of replies that are like "so sad but...not about developers." All things are complex but I DO think it's in part about what we privilege in expertise. I have been in actual rooms with school administrators listening to engineers over me.

I would get my throat ripped out, rightfully so tbh, if I wrote a paper saying homeless children don't qualify for state funding that's specifically set aside for at-risk children battling extreme adversities. For just using my scientific platform to ARGUE that.

Why do software developers get to build products that directly implement that?

Set aside the question of whether the model(s) at hand predict a certain percentage of the variance in the constrained outcome of the model(s). You don't even need to know that.

The question is, we have an enormous real-world intervention that's being performed right now on children: the change in funding. Reclassifying these schools has an immediate, scaled effect.

What evidence does a tech team have to choose this change? What accountability? What expertise? What right to this data?

One source on this: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/11/us/nevada-ai-at-risk-students.html

Another: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/a-state-uses-ai-to-determine-school-funding-is-this-the-future-or-a-cautionary-tale/2024/02

I can't stop thinking about this story about the state of Nevada recategorizing schools as not having "at risk students" (including a school with *kids experiencing homelessness*) because of risk prediction scores from an edtech company described as AI (it is not, I'll note, described as AI by the website of the company itself but who knows how it's described in partnerships). Direct funding cuts for so many students. This is the reality of tech in education, not TED talks about idealized tutors

Either incredibly ominous or great that I found my current book writing theme song and the whole driving message is "who's gonna fix this if not you"

one thing I'm getting from this is it's a big surprise to a lot of people when "entities" turn out to be owned by a single person/or not following the entity-associated-governance-structures we might imagine for them, which is not really surprising to me actually

Entitativity is a psychological phenomenon that may be worth pondering! aka, we bestow "groupness" and cohesion and internal organization on a lot of things, based on a lot of cues, that may not deserve it

As I work on my book (Psychology of software teams! Stay tuned :D ), I have been reading DEEP in the science of in-group formation/and all the mechanisms of how we rapidly form, question, and re-form groups, and sides; this is sometimes called "coalitional cognition" (Cikara, 2021) and I think it is so important for understanding how we can create healthier organizations -- far more actionable imho than many of the isolated, individualistic stories we've been telling about "productivity"