grimalkina

grimalkina, 2 months ago to random

I have a really silly question. Why are some people able to write really long posts on mastodon 😅

Not sure I should unlock this power I'd be unbearable but why

grimalkina, 4 months ago to random

Yet another cursed hotline idea: a hotline for the sweet caring CS grad students of CS faculty who are trying really hard to do social topics. We staff it with interdisciplinary social scientists and we answer and say things like "they want you to invent a measure for WHAT? Do you know how hard that is?" and "You're one hundred percent right to be wondering if demographics actually matter. They said YOU were a bigot for caring about it???? Sweetie it's time to come to our workshop on this one"

grimalkina, 2 months ago to random

Reading a paper about how controlling for the amount of time people are willing to spend on a task pretty much knocks out a huge amount of the task's supposed predictive value and uh 😬 persistence/motivation/ability to spend effort sure is a wild unmeasured confounder on a LOT of things

grimalkina, 6 months ago to random

I guess I'm back here specifically only for the use case of people tagging me to talk about research I love :)

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

Look, when computer science departments have some of the worst learning outcomes of any department on campus maybe they SHOULDN'T be elevated as the experts on how students should "learn with AI" with the only reason being "computers"??? Just saying. I will gladly listen to the absolute heroes in CS who HAVE centered teaching and ARE incredible teachers but I guarantee their colleagues aren't.

grimalkina, 4 months ago to random

What could developers do if they worked in the kindest and most humane industry in the world. What would the world look like.

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

Lambda School /BloomTech is old news; always talked about like it was run by Satan himself by all of us who worked on actual education and learning access issues in tech.

But what's not old news and will always emerge again is that probably now people will just be more biased against e.g. bootcamp learners who are trying their damndest to claw into a better life, rather than taking it out on the men who find toying with education a way to make their own terrible imperium

grimalkina, 28 days ago to random

Life would be easier for many scientists if the general public would get past the stereotype that all science is just about "surprise" and novelty and completely unknown things and that studies don't matter if they match your lived experience 😭 there is massive need to document well known things into the scientific record and establish specific evidence examples for them in ways that will be legible and useful for policy, public action, etc....!

Media really fuels this misconception

grimalkina, 10 months ago to random

The most disappointingly simplistic thinking in tech, to me personally, is when people think just because something is being deployed IN education, in a classroom, or in a school, that means it's an unquestionable public good.

Instead of seeing the many, many complex ways that we take advantage of schools, or indeed damage schools, with our technology.

I'm always amazed by the strength of this association for people who haven't worked directly in education.

grimalkina, 11 days ago to random

I just straight up walked out of a medical appointment. Stopped speaking when it was clear I was not being respected and that I was not being allowed to correct inaccurate information. Got up and walked out with her yelling through the building after me.

Like that was a miserable experience but on the other hand the power I felt???? Untouchable. Did you know you can just leave?? Happy Pride Month my friends!!!

grimalkina, 6 months ago to random

To revive (jk it's never gone just buried under administrivia and the weight of healing from general occupational hazards like researcher harassment) my love for science, I've been rereading the early and famous papers that helped us understand that smoking causes lung cancer. Famous beautiful examples of causal reasoning and difficult to remember how HARD IT WAS to tell this story back then. Profoundly poignant to see people use the weapons of evidence reasoning to create real health change.

grimalkina, 10 months ago to random

I just think it's so funny every time a new paper in software research has to position in their intro like "it's hard to believe but developers actually spend a lot of their time at work doing non-coding activities and it seems like some of that is important"

(I feel like this isn't usually an author thing but a defensive writing thing because of what gets reviewed and doubted and how here)

grimalkina, 4 months ago to random

I was thinking this morning about how I taught myself R and advanced statistics while working ridiculously hard with no real incentive to do so at the time and I've actually never mentally given myself any credit for that??? Like I literally work on problems of learning and upskilling and computational pathways and I NEVER EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT IT as a thing to be proud of vs kind of covertly worried about

grimalkina, 3 months ago to random

Here's a thing you really can't do as a mixed methods researcher in an applied field with strong beliefs: confuse a commitment to community-based methods and participant co-design with personality cultish practices of echo chambers and "loudest voice in the room" amplification. Qualitative methods that are used to cement existing echo chambers via emotional insistence are just as bad as statistical methods that are used to cement poor theoretical frameworks via mathematical insistence.

grimalkina, 2 months ago to random

It is IMPOSSIBLE to answer many of the things that the general public puts in front of social scientists and demands that we solve. Particularly when you work on social topics, people will ask you questions like: why is my boss mean, why doesn't government work, why am I sad.

When you build foundational theory it's too broad. When you do specific investigations it's too narrow. When you take some breather to talk technical shop you're accused of only talking to scientists and being unfeeling.

grimalkina, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

Do you know about Discipline Based Education Research (DBER)? Teaching researchers in fields like biological sciences, physics, & chemistry w/expertise in both the domain of their discipline AND teaching have been doing amazing work on how students learn STEM skills, addressing misconceptions, and scaffolding inclusive cross-field goals.

"new knowledge developed within DBER has led to meaningful improvements in student learning and participation in STEM disciplines" (Henderson et al., 2017)

grimalkina, 5 months ago to random

You've probably heard of "stereotype threat" before. Did you know there is also "stereotype LIFT"? And it may be an even more important psychological effect to understand.

Stereotype lift is a boost - instead of a penalty, like stereotype threat - that people gain when making denigrating comparisons to an outgroup. It's been documented across performance in fields with strong stereotypes about group ability differences -- e.g., math.

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

Fascinating when a total stranger on here links out one of my posts to talk about how I'm a terrible person and all the men who follow and reply to me are just here to educate me. Lmfao I wonder what the difference is. I wonder if I made my profile pic an equation what they would infer instead.

grimalkina, 3 months ago to random

Got brunch with a dear friend who is a psych professor at a public university and so is deeply affected by state laws passing restricting what they can teach; we talked a great deal about the laws in her state that include not questioning "meritocracy." Every aspect of psychology that has informed a more just and holistic understanding of human ability, entire subfields of our work that include important evidence about underestimation and misestimation in achievement systems, disallowed.

grimalkina, 2 months ago to random

In my forever battle to understand a better way to talk about "load" in human problem solving I'm reading about team-level resource allocation theory as intersecting with goal orientation and gd I think this is a better model than a purely individual cognition way of thinking about it.

Team attentional load is much bigger and invokes social-behavioral processes much more than indiv cognitive load. And to my read it's potentially something you can actually intervene on much more.

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

The New Developer research project from the Developer Success Lab + yours truly is now available as a preprint -- we hope this will facilitate easier downloading/sharing/and citing of the work

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/2gej5

In this work we study how beliefs about brilliance & toxic "contest cultures" undermine software teams' capacity to confront the last few years of genAI in software e.g. by fomenting AI Skill Threat. But we also explore the protective effects of learning and belonging cultures

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

I'm reading Wool for the first time and wow that's some social science fiction right there

grimalkina, 4 months ago to random

A general PSA is that if you don't like criticism, you shouldn't claim to be doing science or engaging with scientists. It's who we are and it's what we do.

The literal entire point of doing science is that we can get better together by scrutinizing evidence together. No one, absolutely no one, gets to be an authority simply by virtue of who they ARE versus the data they are attempting to get you to believe. It is, in the end, what we have.

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

Random but: just before I got really ill I did a cool research project with my consultancy Catharsis about mid career women in tech using sudden pandemic WFH (along and despite its adversities) to advocate for being seen differently or to get chances that were denied when they were in person. Qualitative interviews with really cool stories about strategy in these moments. Then obviously I got crushed by illness so the data is just sitting on my shelf.

I should find the time to write it up 🥰

grimalkina, 29 days ago to random

I stumbled across this post while looking for our workbook and omg! What a very thoughtful and understanding summary of our code review anxiety paper, model, and takeaways. I don't know this person to tag them but 👏👏👏

https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-understanding-and-effectively-mitigating-code-review-anxiety.html