I think we picture a lot of psychological effects as simple linear things where you have a single line going up that's like "support women" instead of what it really is, dynamic states that can phase flip into dramatically different patterns if triggered by the right set of things

See also: UX, "design thinking," etc

I'll tell you something. I have a private theory that this kind of division (which is clear as day to ppl in tech and like, baffling to ppl outside of it) is a version of the "I will help you survive but not thrive" phenomenon but worked out re: tech belonging journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Scaling back DEI isn’t just a moral setback—it’s a loss of innovation. Bhalla, Trejo & @marymunson4.bsky.social in Nature Cell Biology: limiting who can participate in science “weakens research capacity and stifles discovery.” doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Wow it is so weird to see the arguments I am familiar with from my childhood and the extremely right-wing college I went to out here, today. They never change

here is my story about how Zohran's focus on community amid the loneliness epidemic helped young people connect their politics to an organizing infrastructure, that interviewed ZM, and does not use the NYT's framing of "they don't know how to make friends" :-) and also ran 4 days before NYT's lol

Folks! I'm so looking forward to this Catharsis Dev Science Office Hour. Still some spots if you want to join us November 13th to do a hackathon-style mad dash of a study design! www.eventbrite.com/e/design-a-s...

When you speak positively of somebody else's study and your wife knows you

I can't believe how much math ed reform got turned into a warped punching bag like this. Literally math education pathways FAIL LOTS OF PEOPLE and efforts to improve it and look seriously at it are just demonized & misrepresented wildly. And demonized *by the left* I saw plenty of tech people do it

Throughout my career people have both blamed me for not being something else (a wet lab scientist! a statistician! a programmer!) and also demanded to know why I haven't solved the biggest psychological problems in the universe

Published today: One of the biggest #science #communication studies to date. We asked 71,922 people in 68 countries how they #engage with information about #science and combined the data with several country-level factors: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #OpenAccess

How do people around the world encounter science, and what shapes those encounters? Our new global study found that social media now carries much of the world’s science content, but local culture, infrastructure, and curiosity still determine how people engage. #ScienceSky #scicomm

Me bolting to the references when software development makes a rare appearance in intervention science literature!

That means the next Developer Science Office Hour is going to be Design-a-Study with Cat! Get your (free) spot here for our online event, space is limited for the vibes, but the enthusiasm will be unlimited: www.eventbrite.com/e/design-a-s...

I think this is really great and I also think (based on both my experience talking to folks endlessly in this industry but also an empirically-informed take having measured learning culture a number of times at this point) it isn't happening a lot!

Never hit a "skip this version" as hard as I just hit the option in the software update popup for the software I am currently using to write the very last chapter of my complex book project NOT TODAY SATAN

By the way if you're struggling with your faith in humanity due to ~ the horrors ~ I do highly recommend blackmailing yourself into committing to some tangible effort to supporting what you want to see more of in your community. Action > avoidance, always!

I am a firm believer in 2 things: - software folks can't pass up an opportunity to learn, & - people help a lot more than you'd ever expect if you ask So last month I ran an experiment asking my tech community to share my newsletter & promising if they did, I'd host a free mini workshop

Is there a tech community discord or slack you think I should be in that I'm not? Let me know! I have been checking out a few over the last year, but have not identified one that feels like a place I can truly have the conversations I'm wanting to have in tech.

This is why if you learn nothing else for evidence literacy, learn to look up survey items and read them for yourself and think about how someone might interpret them.

The thing about the cactus project is I could do a photoshoot in our local desert with it when my book launches 🤠

It's November and that means NEW SEWING PROJECT TIME

What Ashley's understating is she ran a free community event where scientists tell stories in one of San Diego's hopping neighborhoods and they absolutely packed the house of a woman-led business (Bivouac Ciderworks!) and the entire thing was a delight Like 3x the people we expected showed up

Have a harp and can confirm!!! The soft body ones anyway. The hard flight cases look like "I have a lot of money" 😆

TIL about Faculty First Responders, a group that offers "peer-to-peer counseling and advice to academic workers experiencing media attacks, campaigns of harassment, doxing, or other threats to their academic freedom and free speech." facultyfirstresponders.com Thanks @hormiga.bsky.social !

Kind of feels like if you are "retired early" off the comfy big tech co ride era you should maybe consider sitting out giving advice to the rest of us right now Same vibes as talking to my friends whose parents bought their house tbh

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

"Authoritarianism thrives on the suppression of dissent not just for control, but because it simplifies cognition"

I haven't read this in full yet but absolutely love the question. In tech there is often an assumption that precision in personalization will = effectiveness, with very little evidence behind that assumption!!

I’m happy to offer this same thing from the perspective of a community builder/cultural griot. Happy to do it with Cat or separately as time allows!

Technical blogs: "for 230k words and ten months I have focused on the blippert pipeline and its many nuances. But now, a word about teams! Dysfunctional teams are bad, don't do it. No blippert can thrive on a bad team. Thank you." Technical communities: give this man a keynote immediately!!!!

I feel like you're allowed (1) major beef per nonfiction science book, one chapter section where you just go ham about it

Funny to me that a going folk theory on social media about AI is that people's minds might break when encountering distributions of unpredictable outcomes ("slot machine" metaphor) like that isn't already an extremely big part of what your mind does

Someone asked me the other day*: How do we replace all the science that’s being lost across the US as NIH, NSF etc are being lawlessly destroyed? The answer is: we cannot. It is impossible. The task now is to defend #NIH and public funding for medical research. 1/ 🧪 #neuroscience

@grimalkina.bsky.social icymi (I have not yet listened to the whole thing)

WE - people writing today - get to define by our citations what will be considered the canon in the future. When I think something deserves to be seen as canonical, then I cite it and assign it with wild abandon. When I think the current canon doesn’t deserve that status, I pay it no mind.

i find photography and painting to be such useful practice for my other creative work (design, write, teach, build…) bc photography + painting FORCE you to frame you literally CAN'T paint a painting or take a photograph without choosing what to include and that means excluding everything else

It's an action killer, that so many people get stuck in, to never be able to stop your mind spinning out endless ruminations about the thousand threads that your thing connects to! They're real things! But the people who can't overcome this don't finish their creative work.

Feels like some fields are big on citing only by precedence, but don't realize there's another side which is NOT citing the work that is outdated, misleading, had poor methods in the first place, or otherwise made choices an author considers poorly done. I exercise this judgment constantly

I don't know a single Black economist who doesn't cite widely and source inspiration from history, sociology, gender studies, Black studies, psychology, or a combination of all them. Stop saying all [fill in field experts] are the same when a search on #bluesky would disprove that in two seconds.

I wonder what the global cognitive effect is from using enterprise software built by software teams 🫣 like what does slack do to your cognitive and socioemotional health

The motte and baileys are a real epidemic on this site

Just finished watching this incredible talk by Dr. Greg Wilson (sadly I can't find a bsky account for him, find him at third-bit.com ) which cites a lot of great work including that of the incomparable @grimalkina.bsky.social - really a masterclass, I highly recommend it.

Incredible how many people are like: the devastatingly horrific thing about AI is that the way it talks to you is bad for your mental health. I will now scream at a real person via social media and dehumanize them with insults!

Having named a phenomenon hardly means we have figured it out. Oftentimes we rush to putting a stake in the ground before having done enough to understand what we are dealing with.

I wish more folks running A/B tests at tech companies thought more about experiment design than unsubstantiated projections based on vibes and OKRs

Thank you for saying so. It really is. Obviously the biggest blockers for folks trying to implement change with my help are social and structural in their larger ecosystems and I try very hard to be an ally in that too ❤️

Hi! Since others are talking about my book, thought I'd share a little about it. The book is a love letter to women everywhere wondering why their time just isn't adding up. It turns out, it's not you! We are getting massively squeezed by structural changes! 🧵 www.amazon.com/Having-All-T...

Got notes on a chapter back from my primary book reviewer* and the first note is "that's too cheesy", absolutely devastating *my wife