Today I'm launching something near and dear to my heart...VERY near and dear 😂 -- a podcast project with my phenomenal favorite neuroscientist (& wife), @analog_ashley !
On "Change, Technically" we're coming to your ears to share tales of who gets to be technical. We dig into STEM pathways & how leaders can learn from psych and neuroscience to think about cultivating innovation. We share our stories from classrooms to software teams. Plus new Cat & Ashley lore!
@grimalkina THANK YOU FOR YOUR GENEROUS CURIOSITY ABOUT THIS EXPERIMENT
what a blast to dig into this with y'all!
@grimalkina @danilo
What a delightful episode! I learned a lot from this, and it has me thinking about how to meet people in their spheres of interest to contextualize coding. I'm not sure I'm equipped to do that, but it sounds like great fun!
Since I grew up in an age when essentially *all* coders were self-taught, it's weird to me that people think they are "the only one" who learned programming that way.
@bogosity @grimalkina @danilo this is such a great point; it's the double-edge sword of formalizing these kinds of things in coursework and degree programs, imho.
might i recommend @thecarpentries for finding folks in their respective disciplines!
@internic love your thoughtfulness about this. Yes!! I think this is a super underappreciated thing. I don't know that I've articulated it on the podcast super eloquently yet 😅 but it blew my mind when I learned more about these layered biases that go deeper than just "STEM or not-STEM" & include associations we make about "pure intellect" & "technical prowess" (a non-STEM example is music). & ++ to the context of when we first learnt as a heritage we don't always see!
@grimalkina On the hiring front, when I've been involved in making hiring decisions my issue has been that I recognize really great contributions can come from people who are self-taught or have less conventional backgrounds, but what isn't clear is how to recognize those people. Part of me thinks "just spend time with them and talk to them and you'll figure it out," but that also seems like the sort of highly subjective gut judgement where unconscious bias looms large, so I fear it might do more harm than good.
It is ironic that in the hiring where I've been involved, I'm often the only one in the discussion with a PhD, but I often find myself arguing not to weight education too strongly. My feeling is just that if you are trying to find someone to do task X, having actually done task X before is better evidence of capability than having been in a program that nominally teaches how to do X (especially if X isn't domain-specific research).
@grimalkina @analog_ashley ...yeah. Finished listening to this 45 minutes ago and am still just sitting here thinking it over.
I had a very different experience growing up homeschooled and haven't had much to do with tech or education in a couple decades except as a hobby and it's heartbreaking hearing you telling stories about the effects of those fields apparently doubling down on lots of the worst ideas and attitudes and behaviors in that time... grah.
So hey, thank you for all you do.
@Qenupve @analog_ashley MY PEOPLE 😭😭😭😭
I only just started getting comfortable being more open about the fact that I was homeschooled so this means a lot, fr 😭
@grimalkina @analog_ashley
I finally found the time to listen to this today. It is SO FANTASTIC. I hope you encourage people from all sorts of starting points to take control of their own computers and bend them to their will.
After all, the computers are supposed to be OUR servants. We just have to learn to speak their language.
@grimalkina
@analog_ashley
I AM LOVING THIS. esp when ya'll are getting to this conversation of "do only the rich kids get to have fun" - if there's one way I would describe how I teach it would be "empowerment first," and that includes all the things like giving license for errors by conspicuously making them myself, telling them about the kinds of mistakes that can be made, and creating conditions where I can say to them "now there is nothing you could possibly do to break anything," BUT ALSO CULTIVATING JOY like "you get to invent the reason for why you are doing this, so lets pick a fun thing you would never have imagined being able to talk to a computer about and make that happen"
First podcast ive ever listened to about programming (except darknet diaries, which is sorta a different thing) and only time I feel like I can hard relate to how people are talking about programming education in particular
@analog_ashley @grimalkina It‘s kinda messy, and idk if Merchant ever wrote it out like that.
But he framed it repeatedly like this in a podcast: “The fact that this was a profoundly undemocratic process, that [The Luddites] are being forced to either succumb, to either go work in the factories or to find and give up, which wasn't an option, by the way. This isn't a diverse economy that we recognize today.”
Better Offline: Enzittification with Cory Doctorow & Brian Merchant, 7. Aug. 2024
I love this and it makes me think of "green" ways to deploy industry
So this strategy would be "morally green" forms of deploying automation
And I also wonder if there are "morally regreening" strategies to deal with automation that deal with industries that have been wrecked by bad automation, just as there are ways to clean up environmentally distressed areas after a spill
@trochee @analog_ashley @grimalkina there's definitely a connection there. Both the aspect of "rolling back the bad material impacts" and "rolling back the impacts on the community".
also I just love "moral regreening". It's very evocative. Would make for a nice image on a mug :D
I'm pretty happy with "morally green tech" in general
And "moral regreening" is a fun idea.
@grimalkina I was really interested to hear the story of your first grad stats class in this first episode. Hearing you talk about having to ask about all the Greek symbols (due to the less conventional path you took to get there), put me in mind of two things:
1. Once in grad school I sat through a whole lecture on nonlinear dynamics I really wasn't following. At the end someone asked a question on some specific point, and this lead to another few and then a deluge. It became clear that no one had followed the lecture, and the professor actually started over in the next class. So you were braver than a room full of physics grad students (including me).
2. I was recently helping a colleague who was taking a course in quantum computing. He is a couple years out of CS undergrad, and he said that his university was not very math and science focused, so his math training was not that rigorous. One result of this was that he was not familiar with the Greek alphabet (names or symbols), and this was a constant source of confusion for a while; it's hard to keep the symbols straight when they're unfamiliar. Before this experience I had never thought about what an unnecessary stumbling block this can be, and how radically different that is for students from different backgrounds.
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