Cat Hicks

Psychologist for the humans of tech
Evidence strategy for technical teams

The Psychology of Software Teams (July, 2026): https://www.drcathicks.com/#book

Co-host at Change, Technically: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/

Seizing the means of scientific production. "Too much psychology for a software engineering audience" - Reviewer 2

She/her
Founded: Catharsis Consulting, Developer Success Lab, Travrse
Neighborhood Cool Aunt of Science

Podcast: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/
Book: https://www.drcathicks.com/#book
Developer Science: https://www.drcathicks.com/projects
Newsletter: https://fight-for-the-human.ghost.io/

Public Key

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grimalkina_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-05-07 15:15:55 UTC

"there is little evidence that the brain’s fundamental ability to concentrate has been impaired. This suggests that if we can shut down the distractions of our environment, it is possible to recover focus."
Inevitability and "ability decay" explanations essentially teach us learned helplessness about the things we experience, when really, we could change our environments. This is why I'm so against brain-based scare tactics.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01407-w

2026-04-19 17:25:49 UTC

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We do often learn about history of technology as being about guns, steel, hardware and hard objects. I have always felt like understanding technology is as much about soft objects: fabrics, home goods, cooking ingredients. Data decisions and software :)

2026-04-19 17:25:37 UTC

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So many things that sound beautiful in one description (protect the local industry that makes wool!) are ugly in another (wage war on more comfortable fabrics that allow women to feel more comfortable every day and attempt to assert imperial control over who profits globally from innovation)

2026-04-19 17:25:27 UTC

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I try to either buy fabric from ethical and sustainable shops that source as directly from producers as possible (there is no perfect in the textile supply chain, there's just trying to find better) or buy discard/recycle, but every time I do I also think about other waste like shipping and climate

2026-04-19 17:25:16 UTC

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...there was so much societal strife eg riots and banning its import, I'm not a textile historian or expert but it's just fascinating to think about the moral weight assigned to clothing and technologies of its production. Many of the "luddite" threads you see are fairly oversimplified imho

2026-04-19 17:25:05 UTC

I was just watching a video about the recreation of knitwear from historical patterns for the new Little House on the Prairie show and thinking about how the things that were being discussed as period clothing for that show (like calico) defined the rural American west but just a bit earlier...

2026-04-14 15:45:55 UTC

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Genuinely have to do mindfulness meditation about it, I cannot let this affect my blood pressure

2026-04-14 15:44:49 UTC

Default tendency of tech cultures to try to explain everything instead of just being curious is going to kill me

2026-04-07 16:07:27 UTC

This exact same type of story is happening across our community.
https://www.statnews.com/2026/04/07/brian-donovan-fighting-racism-with-genetics-education/

2026-04-01 15:25:57 UTC

14 pages into my book and I've already mentioned how expensive I thought coffee was when I moved to San Francisco 😂 I think you can tell I grew up far away from silicon valley working minimum wage and honestly I love that about me and will never change

2026-03-30 14:24:07 UTC

I expected to love Project Hail Mary, I LOVED Project Hail Mary, it also destroyed me in a particularly unique way as the wife of a science teacher after a year of watching all science teaching be relentlessly attacked and defunded. People love this movie, which I'm sure will be a success, and they hate my wife's work and destroy her programs and want us to lose our careers. How is it possible for all this to be true at once.

2026-03-20 15:50:55 UTC

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I will figure out a path to my own sharing of work, but it is sad to me to feel there is this intellectual community you need to have a FAANG credit card to be part of. That's just not how it should work and we will see the consequences of these structures quickly in who gets to be on stage. This isn't a call out of any single organization, I'm always really honored to be thought of, but it's hard for me to understand how you can sell $1000 tickets on our content and not support creators

2026-03-20 15:48:49 UTC

I have been invited to but turned down 3 conferences talks already this year because they're told me it's new policy to not cover speaker travel under the assumption that your tech employer will cover it. I own my own small business as a researcher and my wife is an academic teaching professor, so I cannot ask my household to absorb that. I just want to generally observe that we are filtering the voices we're going to be able to hear from, with all this contraction

2026-03-17 15:15:26 UTC

Because mastodon is like a 99% male audience, I will say this: if you have an aging mother you are in relationship with and care about, do NOT make her go through medical stuff alone. I am skilled & mean enough to fight through medical stuff and even so you would not believe how bad it is. Just accept that you cannot imagine.
I talk to a lot of people's aging moms and they are abandoned & alone even in nice families. I don't care how awkward it is, you have to try to ask them about it.

2026-03-16 19:58:44 UTC

Getting a random troll about whether my "talking to people" in a side project is IRB approved....... while working on an IRB for an academic partnership 🙄 incredible how everyone online is a world class expert at things they don't do

2026-03-13 15:38:16 UTC

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I am convinced that people enjoy hearing about how people get book deals and how people find motivation to write books and [@analog_ashley](https://mastodon.social/@analog_ashley ) is skeptical so prove me right here 😂

2026-03-13 15:34:56 UTC

As some may know, [@analog_ashley](https://mastodon.social/@analog_ashley ) & I both have books coming out! We're thinking of doing a "Book Exploder" style of episode of Change, Technically where we talk about the process and habits that help you write a book, science of creativity, and....? What would YOU want to hear??

2026-03-11 22:31:52 UTC

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you need to peace out of my thread with all this whataboutism

2026-03-11 18:13:14 UTC

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the research says many early grade mathematically gifted women go into life sciences to avoid discrimination / as a function of discriminatory tracking (whether intentionally or implicitly)

2026-03-11 15:38:19 UTC

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There's a paper in psychology this makes me think of: "Penalties for success: reactions to women who succeed at male gender-typed tasks"
Even when women prove themselves competent at tasks, there is "bias in evaluative judgments."
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15161402/

2026-03-11 15:37:55 UTC

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And I started beating my college boyfriend at chess, every time. He deeply resented it but I didn't realize it because he was pretty good at pretending otherwise. I was just happy. Right up until the day I won a match and he threw the board & pieces off the table so violently it felt like a threat

2026-03-11 15:37:44 UTC

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It turned out I didn't have to work five times as hard as everyone else. College was so easy I was nearly bored to tears a lot of the time. So, in my big spare time because I always finished every assignment with weeks to spare, I started playing chess

2026-03-11 15:37:33 UTC

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Since every day of my life I was kept out of school while I saw boys' schooling invested in, it was just how I thought the world worked. But I got myself into college anyway; I remember thinking to myself that I would always be at a disadvantage but I would work five times as hard as everyone else

2026-03-11 15:37:18 UTC

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I remember quite vividly a male teacher at the school my dad ran, an all boys' boarding school, saying it was remarkable how much I could "imitate" solutions without "understanding" them.

2026-03-11 15:37:05 UTC

In college I discovered I was good at chess, which was a surprise to me. My dad was into chess, and taught classes titled Logic; I was always fascinated by the exercises of those courses, but simultaneously, the men of that church community treated any demonstration of my success as a party trick

2026-03-05 22:39:58 UTC

Ghoulish to direct people to dogpile individual developers and scream insults about their technical ability and then turn around and pretend to give a fuck about technical cultures and "psychological safety"

2026-02-23 20:18:02 UTC

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https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116121459251617437

2026-02-23 18:31:18 UTC

I made a promise to myself to never post a recruiting call for my research projects on mastodon ever again. However, I do know lots of folks follow me here who care about this part of my work and might want to participate in an open science project for developers. This is a note that I will be posting recruiting calls on other platforms and my sites in the next week, if you are curious to check that out.

2026-02-13 19:08:09 UTC

Wow, your open source community isn't behaving with respect for people's effort and generosity in contributing to knowledge? The same open source community that tolerated people harassing women out of it on the regular and still put those people on stage? That open source community doesn't have the social norms to protect YOU now?
Shocker

2026-02-12 16:45:42 UTC

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Ashley's interactive online textbook, with its lessons that were tested with real-world learners, was supported by the Kavli Foundation. While there is an explosion of data in neuroscience, many are rightfully recognizing that for us to benefit from that explosion of data, we need to pursue goals they name as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)
https://www.kavlifoundation.org/science/neuroscience/open-data-in-neuroscience

2026-02-12 16:38:45 UTC

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Hopefully this isn't thinking out loud too much but I always find it useful when I see other people sharing their thoughts in progress, so these are some of the things I'm dwelling on

2026-02-12 16:37:55 UTC

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For me and the work I've carved out for myself there are no such mechanisms, understandably because I know I'm not at a university. But I do wish that tech organizations could think bigger about who builds for tech communities and how. At any rate, it is interesting to think about Catharsis as a potential vehicle for my open science work; that was how I did the Learning in the Dark study, funded freely giving back with enough client work.
I don't know if that's possible in this market

2026-02-12 16:35:00 UTC

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For Ashley, there are explicit funding sources for this curricula and teaching work (not enough of course). I've seen how she never could have carved out time for this without some funding -- and frankly it's time away from our life together, of course I deeply support it, but just to be honest about the continual cost -- and it's the kind of thing that has impact outward on many but isn't much rewarded on a single campus. That makes it right for a grant.

2026-02-12 16:28:53 UTC

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Or perhaps open shared community datasets needs to be the thing that exists first, and then materials to learn with them. I have been thinking about the possibilities of this the next time I get the space to run open science through Catharsis (ever optimistically assuming I can). I have been thinking for a long while that the only way we get out from the passive recipient model that "big industry report about developers" teaches us, is thinking of this as a real scientific practice

2026-02-12 16:24:19 UTC

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Or maybe just a general real-world research basics guide to becoming a better *reader* of all the studies you might see that come out about developers and technical problem-solving and technical work?

2026-02-12 16:23:20 UTC

Ashley does things like write online textbooks for open neuroscience datasets. The explosion of these open datasets in neuroscience is a real inspiration to me, as is the teaching and community commitment of STEM educators -- all while their field is being defunded, attacked, and kicked out from under them.
I think about what I would do if I had the space to write an interactive online learning thing: intro research design in the real world w/software teams?
(see:
https://jose.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/jose.00309 )

2026-02-03 19:31:57 UTC

I have been getting some requests to put together really straightforward intro content to things like, "what is a social science experiment," and "what is a measure for human behavior," and intro research design. To be honest I think that kind of content is REALLY valuable, but also much higher effort to produce than you might think. I wonder how to fit it into everything else I'm doing and where and how that effort might pay off

2026-01-26 21:41:09 UTC

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everyone is going to bring a small and relevant to them project, I personally have a couple ongoing things we could work on if people stall out. We're getting some basic tools and workflows set up across all

2026-01-26 20:41:54 UTC

I am planning a hackathon with my neighborhood queer lady friends what is happening to me

2026-01-24 20:46:53 UTC

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Literally nothing feels like enough but we are finding what tiny ways to connect and be in person with neighbors and say do you see what's happening, what can we do here and now

2026-01-24 20:46:42 UTC

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Put a note in your neighbor's mailbox with your phone number to text if they are in trouble
We are putting out coffee and donuts tomorrow and sitting outside
You can't help people if you don't know people

2026-01-24 20:46:27 UTC

If you are feeling as helpless and no words are enough enraged as we are, get together with neighbors. We are doing that today and tomorrow and the next day

2026-01-22 16:32:08 UTC

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I think some people have a problem reasoning with numbers. When a field is 80-90% male and we can compare its segregation to other similar fields it is now demonstrated that something is going on with gender and a field. Well explored and documented across the literature. This is not something I need to prove and I'm not going to waste my time defending this position when I could instead be spending my time working on the next steps around what helps shift this kind of problem.

2026-01-22 16:29:44 UTC

Obviously scicomm doesn't always work and when you are trying to speak succinctly online it won't always work but I do find it very shocking how OFTEN I am told, by men in software, that my talking about gender effects and how they operate in technical cultures is CAUSING the problems in technical cultures. It is not. My thoughts on that:
https://bsky.app/profile/grimalkina.bsky.social/post/3mcxins3qok26

2026-01-18 17:13:28 UTC

"You see, it's about making sure we restrict working in technology to the people who were born with the innate gift of CRAFT, you can't understand" - software people chirping at me while I'm trying to log into a website generated by their Craft that has two different log-in pages for separate issues

2026-01-07 17:00:52 UTC

This is like social media for babies, but I offer it anyway, I started asking "how am I going to sit around feeling, anticipating, and bracing myself if I post this?"
have found it a helpful habit of mind for identifying things where I do have thoughts/experience, but don't want the activation

2025-12-15 17:46:19 UTC

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yes totally. That's actually why I like Campbell's law because it explicitly names the distortion of social processes

2025-12-15 17:19:57 UTC

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Of course, many people come to these conversations so convinced that no shared meaningful measurement is ever possible, they would prefer to say: all measures are always going to be subject to goodhart's law
I don't believe that, though. I think for most of us, if you're going to take a medicine you will want to know how many people were helped or died after that medicine was administered. Measurement is necessary. I do understand we may have reasonable disagreements about the when and how

2025-12-15 17:18:21 UTC

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First of all I actually think people usually mean to reference behavioral incentive change, in which case you should say Campbell's Law probably; second of all neither of these "laws" ever meant that measurement can't be meaningful
"So the message of Goodhart’s Law is that if you’re setting targets, they ought to target the thing that you care about, not something which you believe to be related to it, no matter how much easier that intermediate thing is to measure."

2025-12-15 17:17:17 UTC

"Goodhart’s Law is really a statement about the process of trying to make policy based on proxy measures of “internal states of complex systems” which are not themselves directly observable. "
Got to this piece from a link from Ben Recht and it finally nailed something that's always bothered me about the constant reference to Goodhart's law across software.
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/goodhart-as-epistemologist

2025-12-11 21:47:38 UTC

I just saw a tiktok where this woman said "leaders get paid, helpers get thanked" and it's really sitting like a rock in my stomach tbh
capitalism is just destroying us isn't it

2025-12-10 15:49:07 UTC

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"For a substantial group of U.S. researchers, 2025 will be remembered as the year their path to a career in science was closed off, their dreams dashed."

2025-12-10 15:48:28 UTC

A series worth sitting with
https://www.statnews.com/american-science-shattered/

2025-11-25 22:40:47 UTC

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In addition: "Women earn 46% of the Ph.D.'s in biology but, despite evidence for gender similarities, they earn only 25% of the Ph.D.'s in physical science and 15% in engineering. Women comprise 30% of the assistant professors in biology but only 16% in physical science and 17% in engineering"
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1132154?casa_token=JZb4VBMANcUAAAAA%3AemIlIevFmmDvQCncw5rEwmdFH7aWLieK2rnNWGLF5Mg-Hi_4Ezyg1h7Y-BGDAy4RTIzIVA4MPKMNHw
Many differences are larger by *culture* than by gender, and fall away or are different for disaggregated identity groups, once again indicating a social explanation

2025-11-25 22:31:35 UTC

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"It is easy to assume that these differences are “hard wired” and that they explain gender differences in performance, but an equally viable interpretation is that males and females have different experiences related to mathematics as they grow up, and that these different experiences have, on average, enhanced synaptic connections in some regions for males and in other regions for females."
Janet + Me: CAN YOU EVEN LOGIC.

2025-11-25 22:31:10 UTC

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from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00516.x?casa_token=0Ho5Eu_an2sAAAAA%3AjaYbXyFxDaRzvfoqvFoGp6021Q-0iwSXW3ZNS1nw_OjhbhpTnKLonfwNYpOtPbN5kVLNt74UzVDj
"In the era of functional magnetic resonance imaging research, it is common to see reports of studies finding that different brain regions are activated in males compared with females during activities such as solving difficult mathematics problems."

2025-11-25 22:22:11 UTC

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you may get the impression that gender and ability assessment is a professional area of mine. It is not really and it's just something I HAVE to know SO MUCH ABOUT to survive these psychological onslaughts, it's required to work anywhere near software conversations, it's wild

2025-11-25 22:14:23 UTC

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also Hyde, responding to 'historical' arguments with the drollness that you must HAVE to have to do work on this: "With women prohibited from pursuing doctoral studies in mathematics at essentially all universities in the world before the 1890s, let alone being mathematics professors at major research universities, their extreme scarcity before the 20th century was, undoubtedly, largely due to very few women having had the opportunity to develop and use their mathematical talents. "

2025-11-25 22:08:41 UTC

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And the main psychological one? Aggression. Also obviously.

2025-11-25 22:08:09 UTC

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by the way all those gender differences in group averages that people scream about forever? largely miniscule compared to the size of socioenvironmental effects. You want to know what the biggest ones are? For motor tasks. Obviously.

2025-11-25 22:06:22 UTC

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Here is an actual citation used correctly:
"Furthermore, data from several studies indicate that greater male variability with respect to mathematics is not ubiquitous. Rather, its presence correlates with several measures of gender inequality. Thus, it is largely an artifact of changeable sociocultural factors, not immutable, innate biological differences between the sexes"
KICK. ROCKS.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0901265106

2025-11-25 22:05:10 UTC

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YOU ARE GOING TO CITE THHHHHHHEEEEEEE DR. JANET HYDE IN THIS WAY!!!!
not on my watch

2025-11-25 22:01:20 UTC

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holy fucking shit, I need to go work on something else but I looked up one of the citations they use in the section where they argue for *female deficits* and it is LITERALLY FROM JANET HYDE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME. THE AUTHOR OF THE GENDER SIMILARITIES HYPOTHESIS
am I THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN READ

2025-11-25 20:36:43 UTC

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Written by women by the way. Lord Almighty

2025-11-25 20:33:23 UTC

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I hate when it SNEAKS IN and you're AMBUSHED

2025-11-25 20:32:59 UTC

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This stuff doesn't usually get me by surprise anymore but sometimes it just does

2025-11-25 20:32:38 UTC

I just read a piece about women and STEM ability that I disagree with so much I'm physically shaking God damn

2025-11-24 16:52:33 UTC

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what would be the way to "make sure they're unemployable"?

2025-11-24 16:18:02 UTC

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Our tech community needs SO much more repair, processing, and collective reflection. The people who worked to support government and science were so betrayed by other groups. The people in flashy big tech cos feeling like their values were betrayed. Just so much repair needed here

2025-11-24 16:13:08 UTC

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I do not believe that the majority of the software people I have worked with all these years sit around thinking, "I want cancer research to be destroyed." We have mountains to climb no doubt, we are trapped in some bad cultures no doubt, but I do not believe this of you for one moment.

2025-11-24 16:05:00 UTC

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Engineering can be so much better than this and more than this. It's absurd how much we're resigned to this entire area of human work being held hostage by this kind of culture.

2025-11-24 16:00:42 UTC

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I would write it except I want to stay safe

2025-11-24 16:00:31 UTC

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all I see are "they're not engineers" "that's not what engineering is" I want a thick good really real piece to sink my teeth in about all the parts of this that IS "like engineering"

2025-11-24 15:59:57 UTC

There actually has not been enough reflection in the tech community about DOGE

2025-11-17 23:47:29 UTC

I cannot finish these book edits under these conditions
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/567/699/932/957/062/original/7155b9eb9cb88792.jpg

2025-11-11 17:42:35 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/115532267025434060
long story short, we have a "psychological immune system" to protect the self from threat, but just like the real immune system can become damaged by persistent viral threat and become an autoimmune reaction... so too, people facing chronic psychological threat can develop maladaptive internalization of how they've been treated.
This is why "tough love" interventions might work for privileged students and not for marginalized ones. An entirely different belief structure is in place
#note15sd…5x26

2025-11-11 17:34:52 UTC

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My area of psychology has been much more about focusing on groups of people for whom *negative* appraisals happen too often, whether from discrimination by others or inability to safely make mistakes. So a counterpoint to the idea that everyone needs to correct the FAE, is that some people are a better served by support with consistently re-affirming a positive view of the self. This is especially true for ppl who experience greater environmental threat
https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/sherman/david/sites/labs.psych.ucsb.edu.sherman.david/files/pubs/self_defense.pdf

2025-11-11 17:32:48 UTC

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FAE is part of what we call "self-serving attribution biases" of which you can identify *a lot*, including people overclaiming personal responsibility for team success but less for team failure, that positive self-attributions are "overly stable", that failures are "externalized."
But, right in the era when you learned about it, we also started to question the cultural and other interactions with these biases, e.g.:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Amy-Mezulis/publication/8347816_Is_There_a_Universal_Positivity_Bias_in_Attributions_A_Meta-Analytic_Review_of_Individual_Developmental_and_Cultural_Differences_in_the_Self-Serving_Attributional_Bias/links/0deec517175a025084000000/Is-There-a-Universal-Positivity-Bias-in-Attributions-A-Meta-Analytic-Review-of-Individual-Developmental-and-Cultural-Differences-in-the-Self-Serving-Attributional-Bias.pdf

2025-11-11 17:25:07 UTC

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But the FAE is a totally great entrypoint to all of this because it is a great way to start to realize that we DO make systematic errors in our attributions about the world. Realizing the differences between how we explain the patterns between "self" and "other" is a phenomenal place to start.
That being said, also important to note some people are much harder on *themselves than others*, especially if they've been marginalized. So you might see the reverse, too much internalizing!

2025-11-11 17:23:01 UTC

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We also do it between *domains* of human activity! Fields-specific ability beliefs (the FAB rather than the FAE :D ) differ reliably, such that we are more likely to attribute success in a domain like physics to an innate trait of brilliance compared to other fields (this then leads us to make stereotypes about the "type of person who can be good at physics")
Attributions are absolutely fascinating and a rich area of emerging theory, for the last decade!

2025-11-11 17:21:00 UTC

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we do this across social identities: men's emotions like anger are more likely to be explained as a reaction to the environment, whereas women's are more likely to be explained as deriving from an internal source (high sensitivity, unjustified)

2025-11-11 17:19:47 UTC

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I love this and just to add on as a beliefs psychologist, it's not *just* FAE you're describing, but we exercise domain-specific and contextually-different attribution errors about this type of explanation.
For instance, we do this across groups with ingroup bias. We attribute greater morality to the actions of ingroup members, and are more likely to see justified reasons for their actions, but flatten the reasons we see for outgroup members' actions

2025-11-03 17:31:08 UTC

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I have many goals and they include being able to take care of my family and thrive and hey maybe even feeling like I could pay out of pocket without much worry if Ashley or I needed an expensive drug our insurance wouldn't cover. Those are as real to me as anything
But I also believe that the success of that one person out there might have some connection to people like us being able to thrive and I'm willing to keep betting on it

2025-11-03 17:28:17 UTC

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I face this animosity from other scientists sometimes because I explicitly say I work with software teams and to them, it's like, how on earth could the richest industry around possibly be a place that needs scientific compassion and generosity?
What they don't see is that I really don't care if 100 people who didn't "deserve" to get a thing for free get it as a side effect of the fact that one person who really NEEDED it does get it when they're trying to fight some battle we don't know about

2025-11-03 17:22:34 UTC

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I value my work so highly that I KNOW the tech community often can't afford it actually, but none of us really can "afford" each other. Science is a societal gamble on something else, a collective good. And if you can't understand that some of us see a path to creating an ecosystem in which *different jobs will be possible* then that's a gap in your vision.
"People will believe x is too abundant" is a problem that's way downstream of "people believe x actually exists at all"

2025-11-03 17:05:39 UTC

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I feel mildly angry that people seem to so often think what I do is by accident and that I need Jobs 101 explained to me rather than the possibility being considered that I have a strategic point of view on this

2025-11-03 17:03:54 UTC

I got an interesting accusation that providing science education stuff for free is devaluing the work and suppressing the fair payment of scientific/research labor
It's like a lot of concepts that I believe are real in general but arranged into an argument I strongly disagree with and believe is pretty unkind to level at a single individual using her energy in the way I use mine
I distinguish very carefully between things I consider gifts and services I do not

2025-10-30 17:30:45 UTC

Omg I have been on the candidate pool lists for some long covid RCT clinical trials for nearly three years and I just got a serious eligibility inquiry for a super exciting RCT, cross your fingers for me that 1) I get selected 2) I get assigned to the treatment condition !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2025-10-28 15:09:04 UTC

Honestly, if you value content you've created always make sure it has a home outside of a single company. Always.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/tech/google-diversity-programs-women-techmakers

2025-10-25 16:27:50 UTC

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The constant chant that "x nation will win now" misses the real global picture of science. Unfortunately (this is a bad thing that makes our world more fragile) many many fields really do only exist at the cutting edge in the US. But also this framing doesn't really reflect the truly international nature of the best of science. It's a knowledge ecosystem that capitalist competition won't give the right language for.

2025-10-25 16:25:50 UTC

People popping up in my mentions to hand wave about science in China should probably know I did an entire dissertation that was a cross-cultural collaboration with Chinese psychologists and with populations in the US and China. Not a topic where I enjoy stereotypes. We (scientists who have collaborated internationally) understand the stakes are for all of humanity. The typical internationally collaborating scientist is brave & generous like you wouldn't believe. Especially after covid.

2025-10-25 15:51:55 UTC

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I'm adding onto this thread because I think I missed emphasizing an important take-away (protip -- read papers over a couple of days)
This isn't *inevitable*: men who didn't hold this strong belief in a masculine default for STEM careers actually embraced examples of the success of women in STEM, and the researchers found those success examples *lowered* rather than increased threat.

2025-10-25 15:10:09 UTC

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I'm honestly really fucking angry I don't see anyone in tech talking about this, ever.

2025-10-25 15:09:41 UTC

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Someone I know who is a young grad student studying genetics posted on LinkedIn that his grant was defunded, with zero political commentary literally just sharing the information about what his work was, and got drowned in hundreds of DOGE supporting, sickening comments attacking every single thing about him and making up endless other lies besides.
I have been online as a researcher for a while, but it's never been like this for science. It's like science gamergate happening everywhere

2025-10-25 15:05:11 UTC

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In fact, we know people working in these areas who've gone entirely dark across social media and no longer can tolerate the stress and danger of doing public facing communication about their work. Think about that for a moment. Think about the people who have poured out their lives trying to help you, afraid for their families and afraid of being made a target on tv for it.
I will never forget what this year has been like for my loved ones in science, never.

2025-10-25 15:00:36 UTC

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They deal out conspiracy theories that make anyone who researches vaccines fear for their lives and they've cancelled over 500 million in mRNA research -- YES, THE SAME RESEARCH THAT IS DISCOVERING CANCER TREATMENT
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-025-02826-2

2025-10-25 14:46:42 UTC

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Also they hate biology because it's half women. No I completely believe a big part of our social issue is as simple as that and I will not be taking notes. They hate biology and need to sabotage it even though it is literally the thing that gives us a light in the darkness of all human disease because biology managed to desegregate gender.

2025-10-25 14:39:52 UTC

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We should be throwing unbelievable amounts of money into funding science right now given how many frontiers are being pushed that could transform things WITHIN OUR LIFETIMES but instead we're fighting for our lives inside of a psyop that's convinced everyone nothing is worth anything unless it comes in a smartphone
The gaslighting we are all experiencing about science is monumental

2025-10-25 14:37:14 UTC

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Also yet another demonstration of the critical power of retrospective analysis, not everything can be an RCT (obviously) and breakthroughs in disease treatment often have to come from real world observational studies coupled with careful mechanism work in animal models.
Exactly the methods RFK JR is trying to destroy and that the Republicans mock as unnecessary because they only have a kindergarten crayon drawing understanding of science
And unfortunately that's what techbros have too

2025-10-25 14:34:14 UTC

This is just unreal
mRNA vaccines are going to be a turning point in human history if we're ever allowed to fucking do science again in this country
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09655-y