Cat @ VirtualDDD: "a barn burner of a talk" References & Resources

HERE is the full video of the talk!

Thank you to Amy Hoy for this charming description of my talk, and to Hazel Weakly for a delightful live thread + the phrase "Toddler Driven Development" which will never leave my brain! I chatted across the globe with VirtualDDD, many thanks to Andrea Magnorsky for the kind invitation! Also many kudos to VirtualDDD for recording and posting their talks as community resources.

• My first ref is to our Cumulative Culture preprint; I also shout out my co-author Ana Hevesi and her work at Uploop

• I played a video of a New Caledonian crow solving a problem! That video is from the Behavioural Ecology Research Group at University of Oxford and you can see many things from them here. I also linked this paper, for some rooks representation, and I recommend the videos in those supplemental materials because they're super fun, you can watch rooks do things like use stones to get a platform to fall. Never say I never got you anything.

• I cited & talked about findings in this paper on problem-solving development, and this fun paper on the development of innovation

• I cite Cristine Legare's work, specifically this paper, on culture. Dr. Legare directs the Center for Applied Cognitive Science which you can explore for loads of interesting work. But also hey! We had the lovely experience of hosting her on our podcast Change, Technically and you can listen to that full conversation here: https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/16592513-stepping-out-of-the-silo

• I took a bit of a sledgehammer to this paper which is quoted, as I have oft critiqued, uncritically in Fred Brooks' Mythical Man-Month. There's actually a really heartening (I thought) bit in the introduction to the 20th edition preface of this book where Brooks laments the fact that few of his propositions have been critiqued, proven or disproven. I live to serve! Nichols (2019) also critiqued the 1968 10x programmer claim and from what I can tell there are several pieces floating around the internet from this author criticizing this claim.

• I quoted Mar Hicks' chapter from Your Computer Is on Fire which is an incredible read; it's titled Sexism is a Feature, Not a Bug and can also be found here. Quote: “Although the complexity of the work did not suddenly change, the perception of its worth skyrocketed.”

• I mention the ecological validity of cognitive measures and reframing supposed deficits as domain-specific cognitive strengths: this paper is a good reference to that, but there are several other examples in our Cumulative Culture paper.

• This is an influential old paper on cognitive load; I mention a recent update by Sweller and I was thinking of this one. The specific quote that we also use in our paper from that 2019 paper is: “If emotions, stress and uncertainty are seen as undesirable states for learning, one might say that they cause extraneous load that should be decreased by preventing these states. But if emotion, stress and uncertainty are seen as an integral element of the task that must be learned [...] they contribute to intrinsic cognitive load and must be dealt with in another way. Then, future research should contribute to identifying instructional interventions that help learners deal more effectively with stress, emotions and uncertainty.”

• This is a nice review about learning from Bjork et al! There are quite a few nice papers from Bjork that cover the kind of effects I was talking about when I talked about cognitive scaffolding -- desirable difficulties and learner misconceptions will get you far in a lit keyword search.

• I talk a bit about future thinking and mental time travel - this paper relates that to cumulative cultures. I also really enjoyed this paper and its overall summaries around problem-solving and tools (more for the Toddler Driven Development bucket), and I cite myself (after all these citations maybe I'm allowed), my work from a while ago on learning experiences and developers I made way too many slides for this talk, so I need to find another place to chat cultures and tech teams :). Sneak peek, I did not get to talk about our very big preprint that takes variation within developer problem-solving seriously. More rising to Brooks' challenge!