@grimalkina@mastodon.social
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grimalkina

@grimalkina@mastodon.social

Social & Evidence Scientist. Defender of the mismeasured. 🦄🏳️‍🌈 she/they

I do #psychology and #measurement theory and #research with #software teams on how developers thrive. My focus areas include how people form beliefs about #learning and build strategies for #resilience #productivity & #motivation. Quant Psych PhD (but with a love for qual) and VP of Getting Tech to Do Real Open Science.

Founder of the Developer Success Lab ❤️
Neighborhood Cool Science Aunt

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kzodasnowman, to random
@kzodasnowman@spore.social avatar

Contempt culture! I love learning new terms that perfectly encapsulate an idea. A reminder to redouble efforts to be generous and graceful

From: @grimalkina
https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112469110584168773

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@kzodasnowman I heard this from Aurynn Shaw! https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture/

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@kzodasnowman that being said I think it is closely related to Contest cultures which I have developed a bit empirically in software :) https://www.drcathicks.com/post/new-research-from-me-ai-skill-threat-contest-cultures-on-software-teams

grimalkina, to random
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

I have enough followers on here (👋 💞) that I think it is worth a little thread on how I relate to social media and online conversations & try to cultivate community

  1. I am a person, not an object. I have personal thoughts, feelings, experiences, a family, & a life. Angry interactions from strangers & esp those interested in exploiting me as An Example Of Some Battle of Yours are dehumanizing & will get blocked (e.g.: "this is why those Ex Twitter people should be banned by default")
grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar
  1. I am a scientist, and science is very hard and complicated. That means I think out loud and ponder and am wrong sometimes, including on topics that are very personal and real to many of us. Genuine questions ("basic" or otherwise) give me great joy; credibility deficit behavior and being asked to prove my credentials over and over again does not. To hold space for being warm and welcoming on science communication I opt out quickly from one-way "prove it" style conversations.
grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar
  1. For some reason I find it peaceful to treat social media like my own open-in-public lab notebook but am not as prone to being embedded in a lot of replying (feels like walking up onto somebody else's porch??). I don't think this is how everyone else feels and it's just how I feel. It leads me to expect folks to do their homework by paying attention to cues outside of one post like reading replies, reading my bio, spending time to figure out who I am before leaping to interpret something.
grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar
  1. The quickest route to a block from me is creating contempt culture. I value when people want to interact with my conversations (esp on social science in tech) as a space to ponder WITH me, & I am honored when people share with all of us their personal experiences and deep feelings in response to & alongside science. Plus, I work in topics where many people have felt little room for it and have many scars.

Contemptuous dismissive reactions against those feelings is brutal & not the vibe here.

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar
  1. Not everything I share is for everyone -- how could it be? Sometimes I make silly jokes, or sideways references; sometimes I might understand a word differently than you do or make a typo or don't finish a clause. I also have , which means managing my stress, fatigue, and exposure to threat is quite LITERALLY life and death for me.

I block anyone who reads into this as moral failing. I don't tolerate "you didn't mention x, therefore you must be evil and hate x" on social media.

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

I think these are my main "rules" (more like guidelines, really :D ) that I keep in my head to try and cultivate the type of social media that I want for me and the folks who join me in conversation around here.

Feel free to share your own strategies for wellbeing, dialogue, and online social communities in reply to this thread, I do really enjoy knowing how others think about this!

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@benjamincox what does this mean? 😅

grimalkina, to random
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

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,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

The framing of all scientific findings as "SURPRISE! SCIENTISTS DISCOVER X" is so driven by media headline writing! Yes sometimes this is a lovely human version of discovery, the "oh my goodness new species we never imagined" type of thing. But so often it distorts the true work of iteratively building a shared scientific knowledge base for humanity.

Also it is terrible when a great study gets rejected by reviewers for "lack of novelty". Centering novelty above all really leads to problems

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

Also like, if you're not in a field not all scientific progress is apparent to you from the headline and the bullet point. This is hard technical work folks and why are we so bad at allowing for the fact that much is lost in translation? So many of my friends have worked on "useless" basic science that turned out to inform huge medical advances later but no one is ever like "sorry I made fun of the fact that you studied flies and told the govt to defund you"

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@plainoldcheese right on, that's what I allude to by reviewers in the next comment. It's tough because in many ways of course we have an obligation to produce new knowledge but there is such a tension in what gets counted and valued as discovery

grimalkina,
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@UncivilServant yah we really do persist and survive long enough in these fields to suddenly be called the very things we had to fight tooth and nail to survive

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@brad Amen 🥹🥹

grimalkina, to random
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I have NOT read this paper yet so this is not a Cat endorsement yet but the title and premise is good enough to share 👀

https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(24)00105-0

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@ryoung39 I totally agree, I don't think by "reasonable" they mean "well intended" or "choosing the right thing for the future"

Nevertheless I agree strongly with the overall point that intervention designers and implementers are not BETTER than individuals who are being asked to participate in an intervention, and that we need to start from a position of respect and consideration of their agency

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@CIT people who work on behavioral science interventions is what I'm talking about here. This is typically informed by many different fields and is cross-disciplinary work. Yes, plenty of ethnography has influenced here but that tends to be more academic theory rather than those of us who explicitly work with govts and other entities that are putting interventions into place in the real world (I am sure there are some though, I've just never worked with an ethnographer in it)

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@CIT both? I'm just using this term informally I'm not establishing a job boundary here?? I just mean scientists who have expertise on interventions distinguishing this from non scientists specifically because there are plenty of "researchers" in the world who do valuable work but don't develop methods and methods development and progress is what I'm talking about in that post

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@CIT typically in applied science the intervention implementation and research on it go hand in hand and yes typically you'd have at least a PhD

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@CIT what do you mean no debate about constructivist approaches? My original field is psychology which originated social constructivism :) although as a behavioral scientist I consider myself cross disciplinary. plenty of such debates! If you scroll back on my posts here you'll see me summarize a recent paper from psych that's squarely on these debates

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@CIT for further on my work, you can check out the lit reviews on every paper we've shared as a great starting place for guiding bodies of research evidence we draw from.

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@CIT perhaps the confusion is that the paper I happen to be reading above is cognitive science, which isn't my background. As I mention in my replies, I don't necessarily agree with the authors large assertion that this idea is "new" but appreciate their desire to bring it to the attention of policy makers for whom it might be

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@gdinwiddie well put

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@pencilears lol, this is the eternal struggle of policy

matthewskelton, to random
@matthewskelton@mastodon.social avatar

"Surprisingly, our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's. However, when a woman's gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308716997_Gender_bias_in_open_source_Pull_request_acceptance_of_women_versus_men

🤬

grimalkina,
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

@EVDHmn @SRDas @matthewskelton yeah extremely. "Weathering" is a good area of research to look at for this

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