Archive for 2010

Leaving graduate school

I know a lot of people in graduate school.  Some of them are happy, some of them are miserable.  Most are determined to finish no matter what.  But that’s not always a good idea. Grad school (and academia in general) is awful at allowing scientists to have a life outside of work. And when you’re […]

What I’ve Noticed

Instead of paying for decent healthcare or public transit, our government is paying, quite literally, for more cheese. Coming out can be really, really hard.  But funny, too: “I think I’m… well, um… a bicycle.” Overcoming gender essentialism is also really, really hard.  But it’s so worth it. Cheating is a huge problem in our […]

The Dunning-Kruger effect

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in communicating science (apart from my own struggles to explain things clearly without losing the interest of my audience), is the Dunning-Kruger effect, which Wikipedia gleefully defines as a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive […]