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2Pixar(Bao) When you look at someone whos in the scanner, whos really absorbed in a great movie, neither of those parts are really active. Just think about the breath right at the edge of the nostril. So if you look at the social parts of the brain, you see this kind of rebirth of plasticity and flexibility in adolescence. It can change really easily, essentially. Youre not doing it with much experience. And one of them in particular that I read recently is The Philosophical Baby, which blew my mind a little bit. And its interesting that, as I say, the hard-headed engineers, who are trying to do things like design robots, are increasingly realizing that play is something thats going to actually be able to get you systems that do better in going through the world. Well, we know something about the sort of functions that this child-like brain serves. Thats more like their natural state than adults are. Theres even a nice study by Marjorie Taylor who studied a lot of this imaginative play that when you talk to people who are adult writers, for example, they tell you that they remember their imaginary friends from when they were kids. Planets and stars, eclipses and conjunctions would seem to have no direct effect on our lives, unlike the mundane and sublunary antics of our fellow humans. All Stories by Alison Gopnik - The Atlantic Thats the child form. Some of the things that were looking at, for instance, is with children, when theyre learning to identify objects in the world, one thing they do is they pick them up and then they move around. systems can do is really striking. Because over and over again, something that is so simple, say, for young children that we just take it for granted, like the fact that when you go into a new maze, you explore it, that turns out to be really hard to figure out how to do with an A.I. They can sit for longer than anybody else can. You look at any kid, right? And again, maybe not surprisingly, people have acted as if that kind of consciousness is what consciousness is really all about. Even if youre not very good at it, someone once said that if somethings worth doing, its worth doing badly. What counted as being the good thing, the value 10 years ago might be really different from the thing that we think is important or valuable now. You could just find it at calmywriter.com. Alison Gopnik's The Philosophical Baby. - Slate Magazine Two Days Mattered Most. Kids' brains may hold the secret to building better AI - Vox News Corp is a global, diversified media and information services company focused on creating and distributing authoritative and engaging content and other products and services. Heres a sobering thought: The older we get, the harder it is for us to learn, to question, to reimagine. And you look at parental environment, and thats responsible for some of it. So they can play chess, but if you turn to a child and said, OK, were just going to change the rules now so that instead of the knight moving this way, it moves another way, theyd be able to figure out how to adopt what theyre doing. So the A.I. And I think that for A.I., the challenge is, how could we get a system thats capable of doing something thats really new, which is what you want if you want robustness and resilience, and isnt just random, but is new, but appropriately new. So just by doing just by being a caregiver, just by caring, what youre doing is providing the context in which this kind of exploration can take place. And if you think about play, the definition of play is that its the thing that you do when youre not working. But one of the thoughts it triggered for me, as somebody whos been pretty involved in meditation for the last decade or so, theres a real dominance of the vipassana style concentration meditation, single point meditations. But nope, now you lost that game, so figure out something else to do. Batteries are the single most expensive element of an EV. Thats what were all about. And when you tune a mind to learn, it actually used to work really differently than a mind that already knows a lot. What are the trade-offs to have that flexibility? So I think both of you can appreciate the fact that caring for children is this fundamental foundational important thing that is allowing exploration and learning to take place, rather than thinking that thats just kind of the scut work and what you really need to do is go out and do explicit teaching. And it turns out that if you have a system like that, it will be very good at doing the things that it was optimized for, but not very good at being resilient, not very good at changing when things are different, right? So there are these children who are just leading this very ordinary British middle class life in the 30s. Its a conversation about humans for humans. And its kind of striking that the very best state of the art systems that we have that are great at playing Go and playing chess and maybe even driving in some circumstances, are terrible at doing the kinds of things that every two-year-old can do. Contrast that view with a new one that's quickly gaining ground. Theres this constant tension between imitation and innovation. 50% off + free delivery on any order with DoorDash promo code, 60% off running shoes and apparel at Nike without a promo code, Score up to 50% off Nintendo Switch video games with GameStop coupon code, The Tax Play That Saves Some Couples Big Bucks, How Gas From Texas Becomes Cooking Fuel in France, Amazon Pausing Construction of Washington, D.C.-Area Second Headquarters. And that could pick things up and put them in boxes and now when you gave it a screw that looked a little different from the previous screw and a box that looked a little different from the previous box, that they could figure out, oh, yeah, no, that ones a screw, and it goes in the screw box, not the other box. So it isnt just a choice between lantern and spotlight. Alison GOPNIK | Professor (Full) | Ph. D. | University of California Customer Service. July 8, 2010 Alison Gopnik. Sign in | Create an account. But I do think that counts as play for adults. So the meta message of this conversation of what I took from your book is that learning a lot about a childs brain actually throws a totally different light on the adult brain. What Is It Like to Be a Baby? - Scientific American And again, theres this kind of tradeoff tension between all us cranky, old people saying, whats wrong with kids nowadays? The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn. But if you think that actually having all that variability is not a bad thing, its a good thing its what you want its what childhood and parenting is all about then having that kind of variation that you cant really explain either by genetics or by what the parents do, thats exactly what being a parent, being a caregiver is all about, is for. In The Philosophical Baby, Alison Gopnik writes that developmental psychologist John Flavell once told her that he would give up all his degrees and honors for just five minutes in the head of. Now its not so much about youre visually taking in all the information around you the way that you do when youre exploring. Something that strikes me about this conversation is exactly what you are touching on, this idea that you can have one objective function. One of them is the one thats sort of heres the goal-directed pathway, what they sometimes call the task dependent activity. Im a writing nerd. Yet, as Alison Gopnik notes in her deeply researched book The Gardener and the Carpenter, the word parenting became common only in the 1970s, rising in popularity as traditional sources of. When he was 4, he was talking to his grandfather, who said, "I really wish. And it turns out that even if you just do the math, its really impossible to get a system that optimizes both of those things at the same time, that is exploring and exploiting simultaneously because theyre really deeply in tension with one another. How so? Do you think theres something to that? Alex Murdaugh Receives Life Sentence: What Happens Now? Thats a way of appreciating it. And yet, they seem to be really smart, and they have these big brains with lots of neurons. You will be charged Early reasoning about desires: evidence from 14-and 18-month-olds. Psychologist Alison Gopnik, a world-renowned expert in child development and author of several popular books including The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and the Carpenter, has won the 2021 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. Possible Worlds Why Do Children Attend By Alain De Botton Its so rich. The following articles are merged in Scholar. By Alison Gopnik | The Wall Street Journal Humans have always looked up to the heavens and been fascinated and inspired by celestial events. And then the other thing is that I think being with children in that way is a great way for adults to get a sense of what it would be like to have that broader focus. people love acronyms, it turns out. Do you think for kids that play or imaginative play should be understood as a form of consciousness, a state? The childs mind is tuned to learn. And I was really pleased because my intuitions about the best books were completely confirmed by this great reunion with the grandchildren. But of course, what you also want is for that new generation to be able to modify and tweak and change and alter the things that the previous generation has done. Because I think theres cultural pressure to not play, but I think that your research and some of the others suggest maybe weve made a terrible mistake on that by not honoring play more. Their health is better. Now its more like youre actually doing things on the world to try to explore the space of possibilities. Child development: A cognitive case for unparenting | Nature Alison Gopnik is a Professor in the Department of Psychology. The robots are much more resilient. And the same thing is true with Mary Poppins. And yet, theres all this strangeness, this weirdness, the surreal things just about those everyday experiences. All of the Maurice Sendak books, but especially Where the Wild Things Are is a fantastic, wonderful book. You go out and maximize that goal. But I think that babies and young children are in that explore state all the time. And I think for adults, a lot of the function, which has always been kind of mysterious like, why would reading about something that hasnt happened help you to understand things that have happened, or why would it be good in general I think for adults a lot of that kind of activity is the equivalent of play. It could just be your garden or the street that youre walking on. And then it turns out that that house is full of spirits and ghosts and traditions and things that youve learned from the past. You can listen to our whole conversation by following The Ezra Klein Show on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. Alison Gopnik: There's been a lot of fascinating research over the last 10-15 years on the role of childhood in evolution and about how children learn, from grownups in particular. This byline is mine, but I want my name removed. It is produced by Roge Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checked by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; and mixing by Jeff Geld. Alison Gopnik and the Cognitive World of Babies and Young Children Alison Gopnik The Wall Street Journal Columns . The Inflation Story Has Changed Significantly. Now, again, thats different than the conscious agent, right, that has to make its way through the world on its own. And he said, the book is so much better than the movie. Theres, again, an intrinsic tension between how much you know and how open you are to new possibilities. But I do think something thats important is that the very mundane investment that we make as caregivers, keeping the kids alive, figuring out what it is that they want or need at any moment, those things that are often very time consuming and require a lot of work, its that context of being secure and having resources and not having to worry about the immediate circumstances that youre in. Thats actually working against the very function of this early period of exploration and learning. 2022. And they wont be able to generalize, even to say a dog on a video thats actually moving. Exploration vs. Exploitation: Adults Are Learning (Once Again) From And its having a previous generation thats willing to do both those things. PSY222_Project_Two_Milestone.docx - 1 Project Two Milestone now and Ive been spending a lot of time collaborating with people in computer science at Berkeley who are trying to design better artificial intelligence systems the current systems that we have, I mean, the languages theyre designed to optimize, theyre really exploit systems. is whats come to be called the alignment problem, is how can you get the A.I. And of course, youve got the best play thing there could be, which is if youve got a two-year-old or a three-year-old or a four-year-old, they kind of force you to be in that state, whether you start out wanting to be or not. But I think especially for sort of self-reflective parents, the fact that part of what youre doing is allowing that to happen is really important. In this conversation on The Ezra Klein Show, Gopnik and I discuss the way children think, the cognitive reasons social change so often starts with the young, and the power of play. And of course, once we develop a culture, that just gets to be more true because each generation is going to change its environment in various ways that affect its culture. If youve got this kind of strategy of, heres the goal, try to accomplish the goal as best as you possibly can, then its really kind of worrying about what the goal is, what the values are that youre giving these A.I. Children's Understanding of Representational Change and Its - JSTOR And you yourself sort of disappear. And it turns out that even to do just these really, really simple things that we would really like to have artificial systems do, its really hard. I think that theres a paradox about, for example, going out and saying, I am going to meditate and stop trying to get goals. But if you think that what being a parent does is not make children more like themselves and more like you, but actually make them more different from each other and different from you, then when you do a twin study, youre not going to see that. Search results for `gopnik myrna` - PhilPapers Just play with them. That ones a dog. So if youre thinking about intelligence, theres a real genuine tradeoff between your ability to explore as many options as you can versus your ability to quickly, efficiently commit to a particular option and implement it. I mean, obviously, Im a writer, but I like writing software. And this constant touching back, I dont think I appreciated what a big part of development it was until I was a parent. And those are things that two-year-olds do really well. Unlike my son and I dont want to brag here unlike my son, I can make it from his bedroom to the kitchen without any stops along the way. Gopnik, a psychology and philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says that many parents are carpenters but they should really be cultivating that garden. But it turns out that if you look 30 years later, you have these sleeper effects where these children who played are not necessarily getting better grades three years later. I saw this other person do something a little different. values to be aligned with the values of humans? So, basically, you put a child in a rich environment where theres lots of opportunities for play. A.I. .css-i6hrxa-Italic{font-style:italic;}Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature. Whats something different from what weve done before? The theory theory. Its encoded into the way our brains change as we age. A New Way to Solve the Mind-Body Problem Has Been Proposed But now, whether youre a philosopher or not, or an academic or a journalist or just somebody who spends a lot of time on their computer or a student, we now have a modernity that is constantly training something more like spotlight consciousness, probably more so than would have been true at other times in human history. They keep in touch with their imaginary friends. And it just goes around and turns everything in the world, including all the humans and all the houses and everything else, into paper clips. And if you look at the literature about cultural evolution, I think its true that culture is one of the really distinctive human capacities. So, going for a walk with a two-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake. And I think thats kind of the best analogy I can think of for the state that the children are in. Alison Gopnik - Wikipedia So part of it kind of goes in circles. Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School - Slate Magazine working group there. But its sort of like they keep them in their Rolodex. Many Minds: Happiness and the predictive mind on Apple Podcasts Previously she was articles editor for the magazine . After all, if we can learn how infants learn, that might teach us about how we learn and understand our world. So one thing is being able to deal with a lot of new information. Yeah, so I think a really deep idea that comes out of computer science originally in fact, came out of the original design of the computer is this idea of the explore or exploit trade-off is what they call it. So you just heard earlier in the conversation they began doing a lot of work around A.I. Its partially this ability to exist within the imaginarium and have a little bit more of a porous border between what exists and what could than you have when youre 50.