grimalkina

grimalkina, 4 hours ago

Not everyone has my background (of actually consulting in hiring and expertise in how we evaluate skills), but I think every leader can sit down with recruiters and ask them "what do YOU see our process struggle with. What keeps you up at night with candidates. Where do you think our process could be more humane." The humans around us at work may be perpetuating a poor process because they truly feel they have no other choice and they'll be penalized otherwise.

grimalkina, 4 hours ago

@inthehands I have very very little patience with teams and managers like this. I have found that most people simply can't be bothered to even be in contact with their HR and participate in their own recruiting enough to solve these issues. Especially in eng, where people feel above "people ops." Yes so much recruiting is bad but so many recruiters are just young people trying to do a good job and paid a million times less than an eng team. Reach out and fix your hiring.

grimalkina, 4 hours ago

@inthehands hiring must always be thoughtfully designed, and it's very representative of the learned helplessness that eng takes towards its own human processes to just think you don't have to put any effort into designing better evaluation, better recruiting. I have advocated and poured effort into fixing hiring evaluations in every place I've ever been and I've never, I mean never, seen an engineering leader do the same or be an ally for people like me in this.

grimalkina, 4 hours ago

@ggggbbybby @inthehands by teams and managers I meant generally, everyone with power in the situation including the HR leadership. I'm very sorry you had this experience and I've had it too.

grimalkina, 4 hours ago

@osma @inthehands I have experienced the same, good lord. People ask me how I manage to reach pools of candidates that are so diverse. Um, I TRY

grimalkina, 3 hours ago

@sashag @inthehands so great to hear about people and places that put the care in!

grimalkina, 3 hours ago

@BayesForDays so sorry :( I had constant chest pain for a year and then it gradually went away. I wish you the same. For me it was obviously post covid stuff but never any answers or fixes. No advice intended at all but just thought it might be comforting to hear it can change.

grimalkina, 3 hours ago

@BayesForDays ugggh, sympathies. it colored my experience and life for months and months. I mean I'm glad that you got some things ruled out but it's awful to have no answer. For me I think it was deeply related to some kind of small airways issue (maybe airways + inflammation idk, respiratory stuff is like SUPER complicated and SO hard to get care for), but didn't 'present' like asthma, kicked up a lot after talking. Just had to heal over time. Was also very unpredictable as it healed!

grimalkina, 5 hours ago

Source: "Causal Inference About the Effects of Interventions From Observational Studies in Medical Journals"

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2818746

grimalkina, 5 hours ago

Folks outside of science may not be familiar with this but there is an absolutely massive struggle across so many fields to think about whether our scientific conventions around evidence from the 1900s are suitable to this century. I am firmly on the side of observational causal inference; the principle of "randomization" is almost never ACTUALLY implemented in the real world and our ecological validity suffers. We need all forms of evidence. RCTs are not possible for MOST questions.

grimalkina, 5 hours ago

it is also necessary to acknowledge the deep sociological realities that keep us from advancing: grad students who are massively underserved and undertrained in new methods, the devaluing of "practical statistics" education (despite all the hype about data); if we had healthier more inclusive pathways of learning for trainees of course we would have healthier methods. Many of us out here doing applied science have to entirely self-teach and un-learn poor statistics and poor methods training

grimalkina, 5 hours ago

It's really interesting to see health, achingly and terribly slowly, BEGIN to acknowledge the scale of the problem. Ironically in many ways health research has gone backwards in terms of not respecting or investing in high quality observations, as MDs churn out salami-sliced papers with stats they farm out to somebody else. The med school<>med publishing cycles are really something else. Can't tell you how many friends I've had consult on med papers' stats and get treated like shit by MDs.

grimalkina, 5 hours ago

I think what really gets me about this stuff is remembering how deeply I was interested in and motivated by the possibilities of large observational datasets in the world, and how soundly that was discouraged and made to feel lesser by the scientific establishment. How I was always more interested in properties of observed data and confounding and interactions, how it was never recognized that these are deep mathematical and technical skills I had, just because it wasn't in vogue posturing

grimalkina, 5 hours ago

@JeffGrigg yeah totally. Very wild how these things became denialist catch phrases

grimalkina, 5 hours ago

We have to somehow thread this needle: we need to be hard on the way we do science but gentle as hell on the scientists because I know -- I KNOW -- we won't change or fix anything by making a scared grad student who's being yelled at by their PI feel lesser and like they're messing up their analyses. Instead we need to create pathways and acceptance for learning, for welcoming people who genuinely have been trying really hard to create evidence in this world.

grimalkina, 5 hours ago

Finally it's VERY freeing to embrace the reality that all scientific evidence is useful-but-wrong in some way and that this is the nature of it and that we are not defined as scientists by Being Right but by Trying To Be More Right and that is an incredibly human-centered philosophy that opens up your mind and heart to non-extractive, collaborative science, to seeing yourself as a collaborator not a ruler in this world and ecosystem of which we are all such a tiny part. So many fears fall away.

grimalkina, 4 hours ago

@Jackiemauro ❤️

grimalkina, 4 hours ago

@Jackiemauro wow are you inside my brain? YEAH. I feel we need a blanket moratorium on economists presenting to congress for like a decade

grimalkina, 4 hours ago

@ratkins It's not dumb at all, this is very frequently a model that's used and absolutely exists for some labs/teams/fields HOWEVER there are lots of different ways to be a "scientist" and for many types of work you also want scientists to know the research statistics and make research statistical choices (it is a large part of our authorship. Disinterest is not the only way we safeguard results because informed knowledge and expertise in the area can also be really important. So...

grimalkina, 4 hours ago

@ratkins ...it is better to have pre-registration of analysis plans and other things like that that ensure we commit to a path rather than "hack" the results; I don't personally believe good science comes from just reducing all the pieces to vendors and contractors. This is kind of how business school research works a lot of the time 🙃 which many of us feel VERY negatively about because it's like uuuh, you're just paying for someone else to do your science and then getting authorship??

grimalkina, 4 hours ago

@ratkins But for departments, labs, and teams to sometimes or often have a dedicated "statistician" role? That is a model I believe in (assuming it is supported, respected, well staffed etc) and in fact one that I just created for my own lab. And I have a number of friends who are "staff statistician" kind of roles within scientific departments. It can be really good to have this as a dedicated team member!