grimalkina

grimalkina, 9 days ago

Possibly too niche to be useful, but what else is blogging for??

grimalkina, 9 days ago

@tess yeah I can see that....the mental model that people are fixed and lifetime homogenous certainly seems like it would plausibly lead you to think such a situation would be attainable/easy/desired ...? Not sure I'm familiar enough with this variety of tech thinking :D Like, "if we forced people to use Real Names it would fix all poor online behavior"? That kind of thinking?

grimalkina, 9 days ago

@tess ah yeah totally. Well I'm sure it would be very CONVENIENT for people to be the unit of analysis and for that unit of analysis to never change when you want people to be, you know, the currency. So liberating to see conversations as the unit of analysis instead or "people I get to be in this particular community" and so much closer to a social constructivist view of folks. Plus more accurate to the developmental lifespan

grimalkina, 9 days ago

@kleaders oh lots of strengths-based literature in education would apply here. Does feel related like a true growth mindset/mastery orientation sees strengths and is nonpunitive about learning vs a mental model that says you're always trying to detect whether someone is the "wrong" group

grimalkina, 9 days ago

@robryk sure, far different timescales are possible than that example! Like developmental lifespan changes you're thinking?

Can you give me a little more of an example or expand at all on "written in a way friendly to people who have a reductionist approach to reality"? What does such a person look like to you and what might you hope a piece of writing would do for them?

grimalkina, 9 days ago

@complexmath yeah I think that's probably very true. I do think software engineering is in some specific ways both inside and outside of business tho

grimalkina, 9 days ago

Yes, measuring stuff is objectively frustrating. Yes measures don't capture everything important (or even most important things in our experience). But you know what consistent measurements over time give you?

LEVERAGE

grimalkina, 9 days ago

Better, design the (always not capturing everything) measurement plan before you're just swimming through a trash pile of everybody's post hoc justifications of everything.

A lot of scientific thinking is fundamentally about how we can mislead ourselves less and you should put that power to work for you.

grimalkina, 9 days ago

@faassen what do you think would help people in this situation?

grimalkina, 9 days ago

@dtauvdiodr @faassen I mean I think that could be framed any number of ways from "we will maintain some healthy flex and ambition and also not be hard on ourselves if we list a few too many things and don't hit all of them" (could be big or small tbh) all the way to "let's grind ubermax hard and force curve everybody so only a few ever win in this competition of endless do more with less". Not enough context in "OKR" to know what world we're living in.

grimalkina, 9 days ago

@matthewskelton truth. at the end of the day I think this is why 'the data people'/researchers/scientists and other roles where people are strongly committed to telling the truth about the world can be treated with such hostility and rarely get leadership roles. I see this brokering of early buy-in/agreement to structured experiments and evidence strategy as a way to protect ourselves and teach our allies how to prevent a culture from calcifying into no-evidence opinion land

grimalkina, 9 days ago

@matthewskelton but as with all change making, you may also find engaging in this process teaches you that a place will never do it. That's illuminating information imo. But so many places are in the messy middle!

grimalkina, 10 days ago

We recruit any huge number of capacities that we have available to us in order to succeed at solving real world problems and do our complex knowledge work. Looking for the "real strongest predictor" can be a very dangerous game even when it might line up with something we want to believe. Language feels more inclusive vs math ability! But is it? Take it too far and what are we saying about the enormous % of people in the world with language disabilities?

grimalkina, 10 days ago

So I have no doubt there are interesting things to surface using the many technologies available to us in measurement. But folks in tech are generally not aware, and should be more aware, of the enormous critiques leveled against biological reductionism in how we talk about aptitude and the many ways modern neuroscience and cognitive science both give us strong signals against this. I've done a few threads on how cog sci "basics" like working memory are questioned or measure differently

grimalkina, 10 days ago

Individual differences research cannot be divorced from its very long and very ugly history of exclusionary, discriminatory arguments. We need to understand that history when we seek to extend research on "human ability" into areas that have such enormous economic and social implications for people. Against this isn't really against this one paper but a caution to not overindex on this kind of approach. Like I said..."programming ability" is not necessarily one thing in the real world.

grimalkina, 10 days ago

@aetataureate yaaah it's a little bit "language part of brain is used when brain is reading text characters, wow" ok I get that their claim is about the % predicted in learning outcomes but I do need to read the stats and consult with my neuroscientist in house to understand what the counterfactual is and if this is an overbroad claim which I'm basically sure it is because ability research of this sort always is

grimalkina, 10 days ago

This is like the worst stuff EVER to try to scicomm about (simply saying "intelligence" on social media as a queer scientist is to get in the sights of so many scary groups of racist "IQ" Bell Curve types) but for a long long time in grad school I was super interested in how we model and understand human potential and aptitude and lord when I started reading the "programming ability" research I was like, oh god. Oh no.

grimalkina, 10 days ago

@sue yes totally it's still coming from a meritocracy perspective to say "well maybe there are some smart ones we missed" vs "maybe what we think of as smart is actually very much a function of the environment and opportunity and we should be building for learning and development"

grimalkina, 10 days ago

@sue and also "perhaps there actually are many possible types of person we need to build technology and there's not a single essential attribute here..." We're quite locked in the "innate brilliance" beliefs EVEN IN attempts to give people chances when we're like, "oh well maybe the environment stifled your innate brilliance and we can detect it" like... So close but so far

grimalkina, 10 days ago

To this paper's credit, for sure, they situate this work in a context that I strongly agree with. For instance the very real world problem that we gatekeep programming classes on advanced math prereqs with incredibly poor evidence for it, and while ignoring the huge cost this introduces because of the inequitable access to math. Like if the choice is "see programming ability more like language than like math" I am making that choice. There's just a lot to the entire search for neural correlates.

grimalkina, 10 days ago

@Graffotti oh yeah same experience. I mean our beliefs about and education pipeline for math are essentially the poster child for the worst example of this stuff. I want us to fix how we think about math but while we haven't done that I also don't want math to keep getting to contaminate, pollute and destroy other pathways which it very much is