Gregory's ServerI guess "burnout" is the new "imposter syndrome" because apparently it explains absolutely everything (and nothing at the same time)
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7 posts total
I've spent the week reading like 50+ papers on learning to remember what I know about how people learn and this is what I know: -people are bad at deciding what to learn Had brunch with a scientist friend who's an expert in one of the more exciting emerging areas of applied biology. She said: "People are like why are you so tired. People don't understand that our brains are on FIRE for at least eight hours a day. This is biology's heyday and yet the worst time to be a scientist because we're expected to know a million new things a day and discarded if we don't. All the tools none of the humanity." I felt the software developers I work with can relate
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 @grimalkina I want to be poetic and say something along the lines of how we‘re exchanging understanding the world to tell better stories for better understanding the world as a mechanical endeavor without A Point but that also feels like missing the margin by a mile. But even so: when did become understanding and knowledge such a… dehumanized process, when arguably understanding and improvement and self-reflection is so very human?  @grimalkina It was a lot easier to be a Renaissance person when the sum total of knowledge was much smaller. A real challenge for me in this life is that for years and years because of my areas of research I have it firmly in my brain that "performance orientation" is generally speaking a pretty maladaptive thing and I am used to thinking of "performance cultures" quite negatively in terms of, this is a place where you don't feel you can be authentic or show your effort (only outcomes) and that's a known bad thing but in business, uhhhh.....the word performance is MUCH more positive 😂
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 @grimalkina I was having a conversation some years back with someone with a neuroscience PhD and a psych background. I acknowledged that I was feeling real insecurity about having recently joined “a really high performing team”. She says to me “You know who else is high performing? Dogs in dog shows.” I will never stop thinking about that. @grimalkina between how short-term metrics are BS and easily gamed to the detriment of actual progress and the fact that an essential part of being effective in engineering jobs is accurately predicting and preparing for the future…   @grimalkina Oh my goodness, Cat: thank you so much for reading, and for the kind words. And that’s just *beautifully* put. Thanks for that, too 💜 @grimalkina oh, the quote in the post about planned vs. situational sounds like lucy suchman, will have to read deeper When I watched my neuroscientist wife teach herself hardware engineering to adapt a piece of tooling to physically fit the rest of the tools used by her research area, it became real in a new way for me that huge areas of our insight and data about the world depend on small numbers of people innovating in their own quiet ways, often unrecognized. Scientific insight is not mass produced.
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 @grimalkina @grimalkina This is so true and, I think, a strong argument for reinventing the wheel in science and diving into the tools you use at a minute level. They’re likely to be the result of a largely accidental process. Across about ten things this week, I'll say this: mastodon has a real toxic reply guy culture going on and it is exhausting to receive this EVERY SINGLE TIME you dare say something that gets attention, as a marginalized female scientist. Worse to me tbh than typical trolling because it is so deeply rooted in credibility deficit "know your place" patterns. You all are worse than birdsite for me, where I have nearly five times more followers. Definitely thinking about leaving. Fix your hearts.
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 ( ... sigh ... ) I just found you. Edit: I've nothing to compare to. People keep telling me this place is much better than Twitter, Threads, etc ... but that Bluesky is also much better than here. I saw a wonderful analysis by @kissane a week ago, on why people leave here for Bluesky ... and my biggest takeaway was that all the top problems here, have been problems here since before I joined, 5+ years ago. In 5+ years, we've fixed nothing here.  @grimalkina it's almost certainly related to being on mastodon.social. I was on there for years and moderation got worse as it grew bigger. It federates with some of the worst instances. Finding a home that works for you is a chore and only you can decide if that's worthwhile on fedi or jumping to something else. Whatever happens I hope you find your fit. |
@grimalkina “the social safety net was replaced with a bed of spikes so you’d better work even if you can’t” was my first introduction to burnout, conceptually
so it’s yet another one of those reflections of the system turned into a conveniently individualizable condition