Be curious, not judgmental

Creating a welcoming learning environment through radical transparency and judgment-free curiosity

Andrew Heiss

March 21, 2024

Plan for today

• Embracing radical transparency
• Overcoming the fear of being wrong
• Judgment-free curiosity

Embracing radical transparency

 

How we normally think of our work and goals

 

How we should think of our work and goals

 

Why work in public?

• Get famous
• Demystify the process of learning and gaining expertise
• Good for providing public goods for teaching and research
• Good for the scientific process and reproducibility
• Strengthen the R community
• Provide resources for future you

Easy ways to work in public

Play with data

• Tidy Tuesday
• “Road trip analysis! How to use and play with Google Location History in R”
• “Quickly play with Polity IV and OECD data”
• “Tidy text, parts of speech, and unique words in the Qur’an”

Easy ways to work in public

Play with methods

• “The ultimate practical guide to multilevel multinomial conjoint analysis with R”
• “Visualizing the differences between Bayesian posterior predictions, linear predictions, and the expectation of posterior predictions”

Easy ways to work in public

Teach yourself concepts

• “Demystifying causal inference estimands: ATE, ATT, and ATU”
• “Marginalia: A guide to figuring out what the heck marginal effects, marginal slopes, average marginal effects, marginal effects at the mean, and all these other marginal things are”
• “Guide to understanding the intuition behind the Dirichlet distribution”

Easy ways to work in public

Make your materials open

• Teaching websites
• Research notebooks
• Random GitHub repos and gists

What about confidential / NDA / scoopable work?

• Use different data
• Reprexes!

How does this apply to Academy?

• Resources for questions!
• Models good behavior
• Builds community

Overcoming the fear of being wrong

The biggest hurdle to public work is a fear of being wrong

This is hard to do!

 

Feel comfortable being wrong

Help others feel comfortable being wrong

Judgment-free curiosity

Be curious, not judgmental

My strategies for encouraging wrongness and judgment-free curiosity

• Less informative grading
• Discover exciting and muddy things
• Work together live
• “Ask me X questions”

Less informative grading =
better motivation

• Granular grading systems (A, A−, B+, B, etc.) hurt motivation
• Use less informative grading (but still give feedback)

Less informative grading =
better motivation

Discover exciting and muddy things

 

Discover exciting and muddy things

 

In milestone sessions, ask learners:

• what made them excited
• what they got stuck on
• what they really wanted to do

Work together live

 

Time-permitting, help a couple learners live code the “what they really wanted to do” part

Work together live

 

Time-permitting, help a couple learners live code the “what they really wanted to do” part

Mistakes will be made; questions will be asked; stuff will be learned

“Ask me X questions”

Summary

Try radical transparency to build community

Learn and teach how to be wrong in public

Encourage judgment-free curiosity