MirandaPitcher

Word

A solution to the child care shortage is hiding in plain sight “Looking only at one half of the population is a mistake.”

New: I wrote about the shortage of men in the child care industry—and what it would take to change that.

I was glad to spend time with some of the talented men who have chosen this career path, despite the stigma and bias they sometimes face

vox.com/child-care/4...

To Fight Misinformation, We Need to Teach That Science Is Dynamic Science is a social process, and teaching students how researchers work in tandem to develop facts will make them less likely to be duped by falsehoods

8. This has been a short and honestly rather peevish thread, so if you want read more that has been written in a more equanimous tone, here's a short piece that I coauthored a few years ago, precisely about how we deal with this kind of duplicity.

7. No one on this planet who understands everything about how a Boeing 777 operates.

As a professional scientist, I work on problems of equivalent difficulty and draw upon instrumentation of equivalent complexity.

If I could not trust the social process of science, I'd never get off the ground.

6. There are such strong rewards for self-correction in science, such powerful incentives for successfully going against the grain and disproving "common knowledge", that expert opinion forms—in the medium term at least—a reliable and incorruptible basis for belief.

5. It has been centuries since any one human could know everything that is known; understand everything that is understood.

This is a remarkable power of science. We delegate trust and authority to experts as internally established in ways that are remarkably resilient to mistakes and malfeasance.

4. "No! You're not gullible. You understand the social process of science."

"You understand that

(1) there is a consensus among experts that anthropogenic climate change is occurring and

(2) this consensus provides very strong evidence of the claim, because of *how science works.*"

3. "How many of you have the expertise to critically evaluate the report?"

Usually it's just one or two hands at this point. I'm not often invited to speak to climate scientists, after all.

"So why do you believe it's real? Are y'all just gullible?"

2. When I give seminars about this, I ask my (professional scientist) audience "How many of you believe that anthropogenic climate change is real?"

Almost all hands raise.

I then ask "How many of you have read the IPCC report or equivalent"

Fewer than 25% of hands raise.

RFK Jr. in interview with Scripps News: ‘Trusting the experts is not science’ HHS Secretary RFK Jr. sat down with Scripps News for a wide-ranging interview, discussing mRNA vaccine funding policy changes and a recent shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said."

It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy.

I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

Graphic shows book cover of Mr Collins in Love by Lee Welch. Cover has ferns, raspberries, potato flowers, a blackbird in flight and a silhouette of a horse and gig. Quote from KJ Charles, author of The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, reads "A deeply kind retelling. I loved the warmth, the wisdom, and the way it offers a realistic but profound happy-ever-after to people who rarely get such a thing in romance."

MR COLLINS IN LOVE, my m/m romance retelling of Pride and Prejudice, is out now. Big thanks to @kjcharleswriter.com for the wonderful blurb quote ❤️

books2read.com/u/mgByoD

Just finished reading—if you want Jane Austen but without that mean streak; with gentleness, and openness, and painful, careful hope, and love that is never fully called that by name in the story but shines through every sentence, this is for you!
📚💙

A thing I really miss about Bluesky in this era is that I haven’t yet seen the equivalent of the epic black llama/white llama saga on Twitter back in the day. Man, I miss that silly joy.

A view of the GWB

Whoops. 🤦🏼‍♀️

The moral imperative to disobey and even take action against unjust laws is one of the defining tenets of the 20th century and defined protests such as the suffragette movement, Rosa Parks seat protest, US citizens burning their Vietnam draft cards and the fight to decriminalise homosexuality.

📚💙

FIU’s collaboration with ICE comes after Miami New Times reported last month that the detention facility was built in part by a company whose president is chair of FIU’s Board of Trustees.

Flagging for 📚💙

A dot plot titled '"nthropomorphized Animals in Popular Children's Books (*Animals That Appear in 10+ Books)" showing the proportion of animals depicted with gendered pronouns. Animals toward the left side are more often represented as male (he/him), and those toward the right are more often represented as female (she/her). Birds, ducks, and cats lean female. Bears, monkeys, dogs, elephants, foxes, wolves, and frogs lean male. Each animal is represented by a colorful, illustrated face.

Screenshot of Publishers Weekly article titled "The Sneaky Gender Bias in Picture Books: Animal Characters" that includes photo of the author, a woman with brown hair and glasses. Text reads: "Melanie Walsh is an assistant professor in the Information School and an adjunct assistant professor in the English department at the University of Washington. She uses data to analyze contemporary culture, especially literature and publishing. She is currently at work on a book, When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral: Protest, Profit, and Popular Readers in the 21st Century, which follows the surprising social media afterlives of five iconic American authors. Here she shares her investigations into the subtle gender imbalance often at play in picture books featuring animal characters. I recently published a data analysis with The Pudding, a digital publication known for data-driven storytelling, about animal characters in picture books. We read approximately 300 popular English-language picture books from the past 70+ years and noted the gender of any anthropomorphized animal character that was important to the story. We found that male animal characters were twice as common as female characters across all the books. Some strong animal stereotypes also emerged: frogs and dogs were boys; birds and cats were girls. Even more surprising, according to our data: this disparity is not obviously improving, even over the last 25 years."

For PW, I wrote about the persistent gender gap in fictional animal characters—a pattern I noticed while analyzing 100s of picture books with @puddingviz.bsky.social.

It's a more interesting (and pervasive) problem than I first thought.

#kidlit #booksky

🔗: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

Flagging for 📚💙

“Juvenile” is dehumanizing cop speak and journalists don’t ever need to use it as a noun. He’s asking whether the legal system is tough enough on CHILDREN.

Today as Los Angelenos boycott Home Depot and other major brands who have allowed ICE into their businesses, fast food workers are striking to demand bosses sign a pledge to stand with the Constitution and the community.

most people are not bigots. they might not understand but they know meanness when they see it.

I think all the time these days about how the supervillain-ification of the Nazis in media has done us all a dangerous disservice. They were a bunch of weird losers who everyone laughed at until they were in power

This thread is a cogent and blistering analysis of how we (as white people & as a society) have chosen to structure policing so that Black people are simultaneously over-policed and under-served.

If this scenario seems farfetched (or, conversely, justifiable) to you — ask yourself why.

This paper illustrates why it matters much more if Robert Jenrick says something intolerant than if Nigel Farage says the same thing - centre right politicians have much more influence on social norms policing tolerant behaviour than radical right politicians

Avi Ben-Zeev is a trans man, and his stated reason for staying in is that he will not allow his trans voice and an explicitly trans memoir to be silenced by the proximity of a transphobe.

Whether we agree with it or not, I can respect that stance.

www.instagram.com/p/DNLcKG8MdR8/

Both Karen McLeod and Avi Ben-Zeev (and possibly some others) have issued statements about their reasons for not withdrawing and their solidarity with the trans community

I think we are very much losing the sight of the fact that it is not the authors we should be mad at. The only person we should be angry with is the organiser who has created this horrific situation for a group of LGBT writers due to their own transphobic ideology.