Fascinated lately by the idea of measuring how easily/swiftly some people incorporate new skills into their professional identity vs struggling with this. I think this is much more nuanced than "imposter syndrome"
You see this emerge in within-field splits like who calls themselves a "computational" social scientist or not. Who thinks that taking a little stab at Python means you're a "data scientist" or not (I took years to think I could use that term even though I did tons of stats)
Obviously whether you think OTHER people will afford you that identity, credit, and credibility is strongly enmeshed here.
What do we think is the "location" of skill proof? (Too often in a tool, or a particular protocol, not in higher level problem solving? Like we judge people for their verbal fluency in biased ways, we judge problem solving by the tools that constrain it. None of this is direct observation of someone else's mind)
@grimalkina
Can you expand further on what you mean? Judging the cook by the pudding and not their Chess ELO sounds uncontroversial?
Or do you mean when the situation when a team leader is hired because of their ELO ranking ahead of the Cheerleader captain?
@tobychev I'm thinking about how often we decide that we have observed skill but the thing we're observing is very far away from the actual skill. So maybe it's not missing a cook's pudding but saying oh well a great cook should walk like this and ruling out people who don't :).
@grimalkina
Sorry, I'm not really sure how to translate between "in a tool" and "she's got the look"?
I guess I don't understand what you meant by "tool" in this context? You mean like "he's using an IDE, so must be better than the guy using notepad"? Something like that?
@tobychev right, like many people do not have access to a certain programming language or even know it exists but still do great biology research, let's say. They have a ton of other important skills to be a "computational biologist", like they know advanced statistics. But people who overly fixate on a programming language as the only proof of someone's potential (without considering the context) could make a mistake in saying this person doesn't have potential to be a "computational biologist"