grimalkina

grimalkina, 9 months ago to random

A fatal flaw in the "be really hard on yourself as the mechanism to achieve" plan is that even when you achieve you absolutely cannot believe it, because you've really overtrained being hard on yourself. You see a systematic undervaluing that robs you of true information about your work.

So, one of the hallmarks of maladaptive high achievement I look for, as a psychologist studying productivity, is inability to really celebrate.

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

Reading about this xz backdoor story from the outside as a person who is still learning much about the technical ins and outs, but as a psychologist it is just overwhelming to imagine a maintainer in this position and all of the feelings of pressure and skill based identity and social isolation that must be involved.

Imho psychology has a duty to show up for technology practitioners and work for them just like we see and work for the well-being of emergency workers, healthcare providers.

grimalkina, 9 months ago to random

Across about ten things this week, I'll say this: mastodon has a real toxic reply guy culture going on and it is exhausting to receive this EVERY SINGLE TIME you dare say something that gets attention, as a marginalized female scientist. Worse to me tbh than typical trolling because it is so deeply rooted in credibility deficit "know your place" patterns. You all are worse than birdsite for me, where I have nearly five times more followers. Definitely thinking about leaving.

Fix your hearts.

grimalkina, 8 months ago to random

Something I think about a lot lately is how physically difficult and claustrophobic being in a spacesuit and living in a space ship must be and how easily lots of people fantasize about this and are the same people who seem too stifled by masks to wear them when I sit in a cardiologist waiting room

grimalkina, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to hiring

Folks, an open call: I am #hiring TWO Principal Research #Scientists to join the Developer Success Lab!

One is a scientist with statistics/psychometrics focus (R is our ecosystem here), and one is an intervention science focus; both are fully remote roles working directly with me, our current Principal Scientist, and our brand-new Principal Dev Experience Engineer on our public-facing empirical research mission 🙌

Links in post below:

#rstats #socialscience #jobs

grimalkina, 3 months ago to random

I have ✨ a new preprint ✨ to share!!

This is a scientific review paper which seeks to provide a map, an entry point, and a call to action for improving the lives of the people who create software:

"Psychological Affordances Can Provide a Missing Explanatory Layer for Why Interventions to Improve Developer Experience Take Hold or Fail"

You can download it free and open access here:

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qz43x

grimalkina, 4 months ago to random

Fuck it. This was my 2023: getting married, almost dying, learning that the thing about almost dying is that nobody cares except for the people who care so much that it rewrites the world around you, the way that scientists love, the fact that at the end of the day we are our cells, what it means to get caught up inside of #LongCovid while everyone talks about it but nobody listens, the cruelty of doctors, how much we try not to see it all.

https://www.drcathicks.com/post/covid-data-log

grimalkina, 3 months ago to random

This is a pretty incredible piece of work impacting #LongCovid future treatments that I just made my neuroscientist wife explain to me. Potentially a big finding and here's a good readable summary:

https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/viral-protein-fragments-behind-serious-covid-19-outcomes

The virus persists but so do scientists <3

grimalkina, 1 month ago to random

Contest cultures ("constantly prove you belong! Prove you're smart! Everything here is a dog eat dog competition!") tear people down under the guise of "toughness" and "identifying brilliance." In psych, we know this is destructive to long term sustainable work and mastery. We know it's systematically leveled at marginalized folks more.

These beliefs are at the heart of it all. This cannot be what we continue to let define who belongs in technical work and cultures.

https://mastodon.world/

grimalkina, 3 months ago to random

We have measured something researchers call beliefs about "role-based communal affordances" in my lab or in other words: how much do software developers think that the job of being a software developer includes helping other people and improving their lives? And the answer is A LOT of professional developers think this is important and see this as part of their identity.

People's beliefs about the communal affordances of software work is an undermeasured, underappreciated important thing imo.

grimalkina, 11 months ago to random

I canNOT believe this but the woman making the program for my grandpa's memorial services couldn't find the poem that had been picked for the beginning and asked some LLM (I don't know what platform it was very confusing) to write the poem based on her vague memory of some lines of it and that's what she read and said was my grandpa's favorite

I'm honestly like, hysterically laughing about it and also hurt and horrified. What a time to be alive

grimalkina, 8 months ago to random

The power of seeing just one or two other people wearing a mask while I am wearing a mask in a big public space is something I think we don't talk about enough. Maybe we can't fix each other's risk overall but you decrease my isolation and the potential negative attention of other people on me and as a covid disabled person in this terrible world, that really matters

grimalkina, 3 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, 10 months ago to random

Something I can say about getting older is that every day I realize I truly had no idea JUST how many of the decisions people in control of this world make are composed entirely of vibes.

grimalkina, 4 months ago to random

Just to continue on my beat of troubling narratives of achievement & cognition... mind-blowing to consider recent points made about social cognition and the flip of our deficit narratives

Let me try to put this in non-jargon terms. For years, it's been claimed on "classic" cognition tasks that lower social class (broadly speaking) predicts worse performance.

But what happens when you look at social cognition tasks that are thought to rely on the same core factors (like working memory)?

grimalkina, 2 months ago to random

When I watched my neuroscientist wife teach herself hardware engineering to adapt a piece of tooling to physically fit the rest of the tools used by her research area, it became real in a new way for me that huge areas of our insight and data about the world depend on small numbers of people innovating in their own quiet ways, often unrecognized.

Scientific insight is not mass produced.

grimalkina, 10 days ago to random

"When people are treated unfairly, for example, when they are not allowed to have input into decisions that will affect them, or when they are not given good explanations of why certain decisions were made, the symbolic message may be that the organization does not think highly enough of them (to provide input or to be given good explanations)."

• Brockner & Sherman, 2019
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308520300058

grimalkina, 10 days ago to random

I can't figure out if mastodon is a high context culture or not. People seem to be expected to give long introductions and do a lot of identity/positionality disclosure, but also an enormous reply guy culture which is defined by low context drive-by. Conversational turn-taking is extremely low compared to other platforms ime, but depth-seeking is high. What an interesting mix.

*obviously, these experiences are all situated within my own network effects, and I'm not well networked here.

grimalkina, 8 months ago to random

I wrote about the idea of craft -- a concept I've been hearing a lot lately in conversations about software work and often find myself wrangling with. But it also turned out to be about my grandpa. In a year of many losses, I have been thinking a lot about those I love and try to take with me in everything I do.

https://www.drcathicks.com/post/on-craft

grimalkina, 4 months ago to psychology

Obligatory #psychology post about motivation for new years resolutions, some stuff I've learned both as a psych researcher and this year as a person trying to stay committed to very complex rehab!

• when we say set attainable goals WE MEAN IT! Cut the goal in half. Ambition is the mind-killer. Attainable is the recursive motivation feeder.
• mindful tracking means make it easy for yourself to see your effort, not fixate on outcomes
• we overestimate the cost of lapse, remind yourself of this

grimalkina, 9 months ago to random

A rare and uplifting win in #longcovid medical experience, UCSD doing some quite specific long covid bio research & contacted me from their patient pool. A chat with the researcher revealed what I thought, which is that her kind-heartedness set the tone even of the form study recruitment, which started by saying "we're sorry it's been hard, we hope you are feeling well." First long covid study I've seen that includes validated parking.

Our science is so shaped by the spirit we bring to it.

grimalkina, 9 months ago to mecfs

As usual Ed Yong is perhaps the only scicom journalist bringing a true patient-centered perspective to this writing. Please share -- these symptoms aren't mine but they are so wildly debilitating and happening to so many in our community. And our healthcare system and doctors are failing those of us with #LongCovid and #MECFS

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/07/chronic-fatigue-long-covid-symptoms/674834/

grimalkina, 20 days ago to random

I've spent the week reading like 50+ papers on learning to remember what I know about how people learn and this is what I know:

-people are bad at deciding what to learn
-people are bad at studying. We choose the worst ways to study and we hate the most efficient ways
-people give up on learning so much. Like more than anyone believes
-people aren't clear about what their goals really are for learning and if you try to get people to set goals they don't want to
-teachers truly work miracles

grimalkina, 4 months ago to random

I can't stop thinking about this story from a student we went to brunch with about how her entire lab group of women dropped out, she was the only one left, after the first modules of the course required using an old weird piece of software that was only available on the school computers and the prof refuses to record any lectures or give notes so there was no way to reference instructions and basically if you miss the first lab assignment you're toast.

How much we destroy. How much we waste.