iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Weird slide from apps to "content." All you are doing is pontificating at a parent sharing about their own situation as if they don't care about investing in education. I didn't say teachers don't do work I said parents can also contribute.

100

Then why did you say the difference was a team making system allocation decisions with expertise and not *that specific belief/worth calculation*? Sometimes you're arguing for utilitarian calculations sometimes you're saying they fail that's what's confusing

100

this seems different than this

100

this makes me feel less insane thank you

hm I also disagree with that particular example and find it odd/troubling but seems in the realm of personal beliefs that often drive diffs in giving; doesn't seem to be what you were saying was the "specific difference" was in the post I replied to! Perhaps I am not tracking your replies correctly

100

So I could say well, GiveWell says x thing pays off, plus I'm looking for something that touches what I personally find important. I may not agree with the reasons listed in this quoted piece but the activity of melding personal values plus some eval of impact doesn't seem beyond common thinking

I don't particularly align with some of the oddness of this type of reasoning myself, but I doubt you would consider it a slippery slope for me to give a personal reason like "my life has been touched by x disease so I've decided to give to it, it's something I care about" either, right?

220

isn't taking a cost effectiveness measure FROM orgs that specifically is setting out to systematically evaluate charities' impacts, an example of trying to respond to the summaries of a "team of trained professionals"? I mean, one could debate how good those things are or sources etc but in form

350

we must maintain a holy distance from our decisions and only make them via vague networked beliefs about morality formed through exchange of memes

020

doesn't surprise me, the worst thing about my former work as an efficacy scientist was learning how many people thought the entire idea of "trying to measure whether a thing works" is E V I L Q U A N T

270

I am always trying to pay attention to what organizations/society thinks is "free" intellectual work that is borne by individuals, to kind of put it better in context. Problem-solving that isn't given enough time, or brought to the forefront vs other glitzier, fancier, more viral explanations!

right! I think as soon as you point it out it's kind of like, oh yeah of course! But I keep being struck by how little people talk about this explicitly, or how in the grander conversations around leadership and AI it's just taken as a "free" activity

oh yes I hear the general complaint about output, but I was speaking more specifically, that when I watch us debate what is happening cognitively, we are often glossing over the cognitive activity of reading. Speaking a little more from my "commentary" side

I was v suspicious of antimemetics because I often dislike books by software authors that touch on psychology but I felt psych & the nature of how we form beliefs was so well interrogated and courage in the face of that 😱 my jam. DW I read at a lakehouse surrounded by dripping lichenous trees 👨‍🍳😘

Where do AI norms come from?

Part 1 of our series: charity.wtf/p/where-do-a... Part 2: www.fightforthehuman.com/what-helps-a... Part 3: charity.wtf/p/if-your-te... & Part 4: www.fightforthehuman.com/organization...

charity.wtf

A dialogue with Dr Cat Hicks on ethics, learning, and what we owe each other. Part one: start by listening.

060

An AMA on AI, Trust, and Identity in Engineering Teams

ICYMI I am doing a lively AMA where @charity.wtf and I field tough questions live, on October 21! This follows a series we've been doing on our newsletters where we bat more tough questions back and forth. :) Register here: www.honeycomb.io/go/ama-debug...

honeycomb.io

Join Charity Majors and Dr. Cat Hicks for a live discussion and AMA on why AI-related conflict surface on engineering teams and what to do about it.

1162

More to the point @zachweinersmith.bsky.social if you ever wanted to do a zoom call about this to think about building personalized learning outcomes into this I would be more than happy to chat and at least share what I've seen work across children's edtech apps <3

020

So many parents experience unbelievable burden being the only advocate for their child trying to track what works. The possibility of creating personalized evidence about what COULD help your individual child is amazing. That evidence simply does not exist for many children.

100

I've also evaluated the evidence behind MULTIPLE edtech apps for my friends with kids with many needs. The evidence behind most of them is horrifically bad, and teachers are not equipped to evaluate that, and frequently push bad approaches themselves.

100

This is a ridiculous reply. Special ed teachers - I know plenty & worked with schools on edtech - are not making personalized intervention apps, much of life happens outside of a classroom, and there's no reason to tell a parent supporting their child that they're somehow in competition with that.

290

I have a really hard time sharing books I've loved because I hate when other people don't like what made an impact on me but I loved There is No Antimemetics Division and The Devoured Worlds series. Gave me some body horror/grief comfort with all my health shit, the second one especially

The idea of personalized education intervention has been, like the idea of personalized medicine, very difficult for the vast majority of people on the planet to access. Such a change to the attainability of this is incredibly moving to me.

1200

Speaking from both having directly assessed edtech apps for kids' learning outcomes, AND having a nonverbal family member, AND as a psychologist interested in AI and technology empowerment, AND years of ed&tech efficacy work: this rules

3572

yes, I get that there is math involved in areas (as in all fields), but speaking about the stereotypical skill connections we have assumed a lot of translation between early school math achievement and software achievement that's either not tested or not particularly predictive when tested!

very "I'll tell you what you're REALLY into" waggling eyebrows. Stereotype incongruence theory in action!

man the part that hurt my little feelings was he spouted this off directly in response to me sharing a sincere bit about how I had always loved reading scifi and one positive thing about reading in this era is the diverse voices in scifi, he just wanted to backlash effect on that

free-flowing debates really need some common ground of behavior/or moderators who are skilled at directing that, in my experience!

yes something that's funny/weird for me to think about as a social scientist is that we've stereotypically associated programming w/math (& its gender effects - I don't think it's justified but we have) and now programming is highly associated with reading?? (which has uh, VERY diff gender effects)

100

I hear you. As a queer person that is why it is so hurtful to me too to see this kind of stuff and one of the connections I make whenever I see degrading language about minds. The ingroup/outgroup hostility is massive and very painful. I hope you can protect yourself from seeing much of it!

truly 'tis the age for all of us to be thinking about the cost of information

What a kind thing to say!! Blanking on other recs. Almost all the psychologists or org psych people I follow on this are not on bsky nor very social media active. My own network is very tech so maybe I just don't know. But I appreciate this feedback bc I'm really trying to go in this direction

200

That's so cool! It was a group with a lively discussion which I normally would love (and contribute to) but lots of people I didn't know, quite large, primarily discusses articles and non-book things. Has taken a sort of hot take bent lately so I opted out. Just started to feel like social media

another woman in the group (my hero) dryly announced "well let's move off the topic of LADYBRAINS" to save me

140

totally. You have to do a lot of metacognitive co-calibration

020

the cost of inflexibility of expertise has gone up!

121

are we yet in a safe enough space that I can admit how confused I've always found that distinction when it comes to real work

140

did I already post about the book club I went to that discussed that article where a guy at it loudly asked me (as a psychologist) to explain why women like fantasy smut? I was like, no more book clubs for me ever

260

I think my interest is much less in extreme thinkers and much more the larger numbers of people confusedly seeing this language. Either way, as a psychologist I think about how we think about behavior, and even a joke can be part of analyzing those beliefs, so it serves my purposes as an individual!

100

Feels like astute ecological validity to that one

Yes! This is such a missing piece that needs to be brought into the picture

felt on the parsing of bizarre idioms 🙄 made even worse I think if you're outside of software because the software way of talking is STRONG in every one of these imho

(or they're getting better at it....didn't mean to locate the solution inside of you!)

Do you feel you are getting better at it, or does it feel constant?

220

rings another bell in my head bc my friends and colleagues who are very heavily using AI at work are quick to reject/restart a process vs laboriously reading through all the output, which really helps with the exhaustion part, and I wonder what structural analysis skills are needed for that eval