Another great book In my last post, I talked about Kate Manne’s book Down Girl. What got me into that book first, however, is another great book. It’s a great book on stress management written by a pair of twin sisters. I listened to it on Audible, of course. The authors performed the Audible recording —…
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Down Girl: a summary and a gentle nudge
This post is my brief summary of Kate Manne’s book Down Girl: the logic of misogyny and a gentle nudge for you all to go read it. In this post, I will primarily focus on what I take to be the core of Manne’s view. If you’d like to see her arguments and real-world case analyses,…
A case against talents
I went to a career workshop recently. The theme was that we should identify our strengths through some paid questionnaire service and structure our careers around them in some way (we didn’t get to the career part). In general, I’m not a big fan of this sort of career testing because I don’t think the…
Is data special?
This post is inspired by a twitter thread on whether you should trust a summary statistic (mean/ standard deviation/ Pearson’s correlation coefficient) without seeing a plot. Most people voted “no”, which seems to be motivated by a sentiment that accepting summary statistics without seeing the plot is trusting too much. See the full thread below.…
What make the PhD process easier/harder for me
I’ve recently encountered a lot of disciplines/areas of research that I didn’t think existed before but, after thinking about it, I’d think “of course someone needs to figure that out”. It’s an interesting experience — and a sobering one, regarding what we take for granted. In any case, one such area I discovered today is…
“the fundamental lexical hypothesis”, universal personality traits, and umami
The universal trait hypothesis Like many other psychology students, I was taught that “the various human traits and characters can be captured by five basic traits: conscientiousness, extroversion, emotional stability, openness-to-experience, agreeableness.” As someone who is not, by nature, very reflective, I never questioned what “can be captured” meant or how this caption was done.…
Is intelligence a quantity?
This post is inspired by this book, which I’m currently in the process of reading: What is a quantity? Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, defines two kinds of quantity: multitude and magnitude. A multitude is a collection of discrete objects that can be counted. A magnitude is more interesting. The Aristotelian quote says “A quantity is a…
Minority mentoring minority: just because I did it doesn’t mean I know how to do it
This post is inspired by a Chronicle Vitae piece on advice on mentoring minority students. While I’m not at all close to an “advisor” role yet, I do have some experience helping students more junior to me. This post records some reflections on the difficulties associated with it. One thing that caught my attention and…
The statistical, the scientific, the social, and p-values
My best effort searching online dates the use of the term “crisis” to describe worries concerning replication failure to an editorial piece by Pashler and Wagenmakers in 2012. The worry was voiced in the context of priming studies in social psychology, triggered by a number of unfortunate events unfolded in 2011: the Diederik Stapel fraud…
Measurement as coordination
This post is going to be more like a reading report. It’s hard to have super exciting ideas every week; sooner or later I’ll have to write something mundane. However, as Jeff Berrett (a faculty at LPS and member of my dissertation committee) says: a good paper just needs to elicit one interesting thought in…