Yeah, so I was thinking a lot about this, and I actually had converged on two childrens books. agents and children literally in the same environment. It can change really easily, essentially. And you dont see the things that are on the other side. Previously she was articles editor for the magazine . So what play is really about is about this ability to change, to be resilient in the face of lots of different environments, in the face of lots of different possibilities. And it turned out that the problem was if you train the robot that way, then they learn how to do exactly the same thing that the human did. And what I like about all three of these books, in their different ways, is that I think they capture this thing thats so distinctive about childhood, the fact that on the one hand, youre in this safe place. And as you probably know if you look at something like ImageNet, you can show, say, a deep learning system a whole lot of pictures of cats and dogs on the web, and eventually youll get it so that it can, most of the time, say this is the cat, and this is the dog. Theyve really changed how I look at myself, how I look at all of us. Its a conversation about humans for humans. We are delighted that you'd like to resume your subscription. And yet, they seem to be really smart, and they have these big brains with lots of neurons. 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. But then theyre taking that information and integrating it with all the other information they have, say, from their own exploration and putting that together to try to design a new way of being, to try and do something thats different from all the things that anyone has done before. Early acquisition of verbs in Korean: A cross-linguistic study. She is the author of The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and the Carpenter. Whos this powerful and mysterious, sometimes dark, but ultimately good, creature in your experience. Contrast that view with a new one that's quickly gaining ground. The childs mind is tuned to learn. A message of Gopniks work and one I take seriously is we need to spend more time and effort as adults trying to think more like kids. And if you think about something like traveling to a new place, thats a good example for adults, where just being someplace that you havent been before. Shes in both the psychology and philosophy departments there. project, in many ways, makes the differences more salient than the similarities. 2Pixar(Bao) Theyre not always in that kind of broad state. So those are two really, really different kinds of consciousness. The Many Minds of the Octopus (15 Apr 2021). But slowing profits in other sectors and rising interest rates are warning signs. And I think the period of childhood and adolescence in particular gives you a chance to be that kind of cutting edge of change. The self and the soul both denote our efforts to grasp and work towards transcendental values, writes John Cottingham. This byline is mine, but I want my name removed. April 16, 2021 Produced by 'The Ezra Klein Show' Here's a sobering. You can even see that in the brain. I have more knowledge, and I have more experience, and I have more ability to exploit existing learnings. We describe a surprising developmental pattern we found in studies involving three different kinds of problems and age ranges. Everything around you becomes illuminated. As they get cheaper, going electric no longer has to be a costly proposition. It was called "parenting." As long as there have. And you start ruminating about other things. 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. Because I have this goal, which is I want to be a much better meditator. Both parents and policy makers increasingly push preschools to be more like schools. Our assessments, publications and research spread knowledge, spark enquiry and aid understanding around the world. You could just find it at calmywriter.com. And that means Ive also sometimes lost the ability to question things correctly. And I have done a bit of meditation and workshops, and its always a little amusing when you see the young men who are going to prove that theyre better at meditating. 1997. By Alison Gopnik. So what kind of function could that serve? And something that I took from your book is that there is the ability to train, or at least, experience different kinds of consciousness through different kinds of other experiences like travel, or you talk about meditation. One kind of consciousness this is an old metaphor is to think about attention as being like a spotlight. (if applicable) for The Wall Street Journal. And if you look at the literature about cultural evolution, I think its true that culture is one of the really distinctive human capacities. You may change your billing preferences at any time in the Customer Center or call She is the firstborn of six siblings who include Blake Gopnik, the Newsweek art critic, and Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker.She was formerly married to journalist George Lewinski and has three sons: Alexei, Nicholas, and Andres Gopnik-Lewinski. 2022. So many of those books have this weird, dude, youre going to be a dad, bro, tone. Its a terrible literature. By Alison Gopnik Jan. 16, 2005 EVERYTHING developmental psychologists have learned in the past 30 years points in one direction -- children are far, far smarter than we would ever have thought.. 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. Or to take the example about the robot imitators, this is a really lovely project that were working on with some people from Google Brain. A Very Human Answer to One of AIs Deepest Dilemmas, Children, Creativity, and the Real Key to Intelligence, Causal learning, counterfactual reasoning and pretend play: a cross-cultural comparison of Peruvian, mixed- and low-socioeconomic status U.S. children | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Love Lets Us Learn: Psychological Science Makes the Case for Policies That Help Children, The New Riddle of the Sphinx: Life History and Psychological Science, Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow review - the new thinking about feelings, What Children Lose When Their Brains Develop Too Fast, Why nation states struggle with social care. systems can do is really striking. And again, thats a lot of the times, thats a good thing because theres other things that we have to do. If you're unfamiliar with Gopnik's work, you can find a quick summary of it in her Ted Talk " What Do Babies Think ?" And then once youve done that kind of exploration of the space of possibilities, then as an adult now in that environment, you can decide which of those things you want to have happen. That ones a cat. So, let me ask you a variation on whats our final question. 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. But if you look at the social world, theres really this burst of plasticity and flexibility in adolescence. Their, This "Cited by" count includes citations to the following articles in Scholar. And its especially not good at things like inhibition. This chapter describes the threshold to intelligence and explains that the domain of intelligence is only good up to a degree by which the author describes. That context that caregivers provide, thats absolutely crucial. And we change what we do as a result. So, going for a walk with a two-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake. Cognitive scientist, psychologist, philosopher, author of Scientist in the Crib, Philosophical Baby, The Gardener & The Carpenter, WSJ Mind And Matter columnist. The murder conviction of the disbarred lawyer capped a South Carolina low country saga that attracted intense global interest. So one thing is being able to deal with a lot of new information. The adults' imagination will limit by theirshow more content Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1988. . Were talking here about the way a child becomes an adult, how do they learn, how do they play in a way that keeps them from going to jail later. March 2, 2023 11:13 am ET. Then they do something else and they look back. And in fact, I think Ive lost a lot of my capacity for play. And if theyre crows, theyre playing with twigs and figuring out how they can use the twigs. So we have more different people who are involved and engaged in taking care of children. It comes in. 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. So theres a question about why would it be. Its not very good at doing anything that is the sort of things that you need to act well. As always, my email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com, if youve got something to teach me. So its also for the children imitating the more playful things that the adults are doing, or at least, for robots, thats helping the robots to be more effective. 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. When Younger Learners Can Be Better (or at Least More Open-Minded) Than Older Ones - Alison Gopnik, Thomas L. Griffiths, Christopher G. Lucas, 2015 And the same thing is true with Mary Poppins. She is Jewish. Youre watching consciousness come online in real-time. But it turns out that if instead of that, what you do is you have the human just play with the things on the desk. researchers are borrowing from human children, the effects of different types of meditation on the brain and more. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016 P.G. It really does help the show grow. As always, if you want to help the show out, leave us a review wherever you are listening to it now. And its much harder for A.I. So its another way of having this explore state of being in the world. Thats the kind of basic rationale behind the studies. 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. And we do it partially through children. 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. 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. Alison Gopnik is a d istinguished p rofessor of psychology, affiliate professor of philosophy, and member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Im going to keep it up with these little occasional recommendations after the show. Theyre paying attention to us. One of my greatest pleasures is to be what the French call a "flneur"someone. Part of the problem and this is a general explore or exploit problem. Im sure youve seen this with your two-year-old with this phenomenon of some plane, plane, plane. According to this alter The system can't perform the operation now. Because I know I think about it all the time. . And all the time, sitting in that room, he also adventures out in this boat to these strange places where wild things are, including he himself as a wild thing. Two Days Mattered Most. So one of them is that the young brain seems to start out making many, many new connections. So one thing is to get them to explore, but another thing is to get them to do this kind of social learning. You go out and maximize that goal. March 16, 2011 2:15 PM. If I want to make my mind a little bit more childlike, aside from trying to appreciate the William Blake-like nature of children, are there things of the childs life that I should be trying to bring into mind? system that was as smart as a two-year-old basically, right? I didnt know that there was an airplane there. And all that looks as if its very evolutionarily costly. The robots are much more resilient. I think we can actually point to things like the physical makeup of a childs brain and an adult brain that makes them differently adapted for exploring and exploiting. It feels like its just a category. Another thing that people point out about play is play is fun. Its not just going to be a goal function, its going to be a conversation. Psychologist Alison Gopnik explores new discoveries in the science of human nature. But its sort of like they keep them in their Rolodex. So with the Wild Things, hes in his room, where mom is, where supper is going to be. Thank you for listening. Or another example is just trying to learn a skill that you havent learned before. For example, several stud-ies have reported relations between the development of disappearance words and the solution to certain object-permanence prob-lems (Corrigan, 1978; Gopnik, 1984b; Gopnik Do you think theres something to that? So theres this lovely concept that I like of the numinous. The most attractive ideological vision of a politics of care combines extensive redistribution with a pluralistic recognition of the many different arrangements through which care is . And Im not getting paid to promote them or anything, I just like it. people love acronyms, it turns out. And the most important thing is, is this going to teach me something? Thats a way of appreciating it. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. And the octopus is very puzzling because the octos dont have a long childhood. Something that strikes me about this conversation is exactly what you are touching on, this idea that you can have one objective function. Or send this episode to a friend, a family member, somebody you want to talk about it with. So the acronym we have for our project is MESS, which stands for Model-Building Exploratory Social Learning Systems. So thats the first one, especially for the younger children. One of the things thats really fascinating thats coming out in A.I. Alison Gopnik is a renowned developmental psychologist whose research has revealed much about the amazing learning and reasoning capacities of young children, and she may be the leading . Alison Gopnik Creativity is something we're not even in the ballpark of explaining. And we better make sure that were doing the right things, and were buying the right apps, and were reading the right books, and were doing the right things to shape that kind of learning in the way that we, as adults, think that it should be shaped. And suddenly that becomes illuminated. And he looked up at the clock tower, and he said, theres a clock at the top there. And what that suggests is the things that having a lot of experience with play was letting you do was to be able to deal with unexpected challenges better, rather than that it was allowing you to attain any particular outcome. So one piece that we think is really important is this exploration, this ability to go out and find out things about the world, do experiments, be curious. And often, quite suddenly, if youre an adult, everything in the world seems to be significant and important and important and significant in a way that makes you insignificant by comparison. How so? Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer. Her writings on psychology and cognitive science have appeared in the most prestigious scientific journals and her work also includes four books and over 100 journal articles. So, one interesting example that theres actually some studies of is to think about when youre completely absorbed in a really interesting movie. join Steve Paulson of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Alison Gopnik of the University of California, Berkeley, Carl Safina of Stony On January 17th, join Steve Paulson of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Alison Gopnik of the . Is This How a Cold War With China Begins? And I think that in other states of consciousness, especially the state of consciousness youre in when youre a child but I think there are things that adults do that put them in that state as well you have something thats much more like a lantern. Just play with them. 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 makes a compelling case for care as a matter of social responsibility. [MUSIC PLAYING]. But then you can give it something that is just obviously not a cat or a dog, and theyll make a mistake. So one thing that goes with that is this broad-based consciousness. Mr. Murdaughs gambit of taking the stand in his own defense failed. So that you are always trying to get them to stop exploring because you had to get lunch. 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. And its worth saying, its not like the children are always in that state. Ive been thinking about the old program, Kids Say the Darndest Things, if you just think about the things that kids say, collect them. The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn. But Id be interested to hear what you all like because Ive become a little bit of a nerd about these apps. Alison Gopnik Authors Info & Affiliations Science 28 Sep 2012 Vol 337, Issue 6102 pp. 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. Understanding show more content Gopnik continues her article about children using their past to shape their future. What you do with these systems is say, heres what your goal is. But also, unlike my son, I take so much for granted. I think its off, but I think its often in a way thats actually kind of interesting. And then youve got this later period where the connections that are used a lot that are working well, they get maintained, they get strengthened, they get to be more efficient. It kind of makes sense. Causal learning mechanisms in very young children: two-, three-, and four-year-olds infer causal relations from patterns of variation and covariation. And he said, thats it, thats the one with the wild things with the monsters. Now heres a specific thing that Im puzzled about that I think weve learned from looking at the A.I. All three of those books really capture whats special about childhood. So it turns out that you look at genetics, and thats responsible for some of the variance. Theres a programmer whos hovering over the A.I. And that kind of goal-directed, focused, consciousness, which goes very much with the sense of a self so theres a me thats trying to finish up the paper or answer the emails or do all the things that I have to do thats really been the focus of a lot of theories of consciousness, is if that kind of consciousness was what consciousness was all about. And the idea is maybe we could look at some of the things that the two-year-olds do when theyre learning and see if that makes a difference to what the A.I.s are doing when theyre learning. And one of the things that we discovered was that if you look at your understanding of the physical world, the preschoolers are the most flexible, and then they get less flexible at school age and then less so with adolescence. But of course, one of the things thats so fascinating about humans is we keep changing our objective functions. Anyone can read what you share. So youre actually taking in information from everything thats going on around you. Walk around to the other side, pick things up and get into everything and make a terrible mess because youre picking them up and throwing them around. Each of the children comes out differently. But I do think that counts as play for adults. And the children will put all those together to design the next thing that would be the right thing to do. Across the globe, as middle-class high investment parents anxiously track each milestone, its easy to conclude that the point of being a parent is to accelerate your childs development as much as possible. Sign in | Create an account. This, three blocks, its just amazing. Batteries are the single most expensive element of an EV. Thats what lets humans keep altering their values and goals, and most of the time, for good. And I should, to some extent, discount something new that somebody tells me. Just watch the breath. Low and consistent latency is the key to great online experiences. And the difference between just the things that we take for granted that, say, children are doing and the things that even the very best, most impressive A.I. And is that the dynamic that leads to this spotlight consciousness, lantern consciousness distinction? And you look at parental environment, and thats responsible for some of it. The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Rog Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld. I like this because its a book about a grandmother and her grandson. Could we read that book at your house? But if you look at their subtlety at their ability to deal with context, at their ability to decide when should I do this versus that, how should I deal with the whole ensemble that Im in, thats where play has its great advantages. Cambridge, Mass. It could just be your garden or the street that youre walking on. Theres, again, an intrinsic tension between how much you know and how open you are to new possibilities. Theres a certain kind of happiness and joy that goes with being in that state when youre just playing. And yet, theres all this strangeness, this weirdness, the surreal things just about those everyday experiences. Ive been really struck working with people in robotics, for example. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. is whats come to be called the alignment problem, is how can you get the A.I. And part of the numinous is it doesnt just have to be about something thats bigger than you, like a mountain. And I actually shut down all the other things that Im not paying attention to. The company has been scrutinized over fake reviews and criticized by customers who had trouble getting refunds. But another thing that goes with it is the activity of play. And we had a marvelous time reading Mary Poppins. And he said, the book is so much better than the movie. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. What should having more respect for the childs mind change not for how we care for children, but how we care for ourselves or what kinds of things we open ourselves into? We spend so much time and effort trying to teach kids to think like adults. Any kind of metric that you said, almost by definition, if its the metric, youre going to do better if you teach to the test. This isnt just habit hardening into dogma. So what Ive argued is that youd think that what having children does is introduce more variability into the world, right? Five years later, my grandson Augie was born. The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn. 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. And you yourself sort of disappear. I was thinking about how a moment ago, you said, play is what you do when youre not working. And we even can show neurologically that, for instance, what happens in that state is when I attend to something, when I pay attention to something, what happens is the thing that Im paying attention to becomes much brighter and more vivid. What are the trade-offs to have that flexibility? And I dont do that as much as I would like to or as much as I did 20 years ago, which makes me think a little about how the society has changed. So if you think from this broad evolutionary perspective about these creatures that are designed to explore, I think theres a whole lot of other things that go with that. And gradually, it gets to be clear that there are ghosts of the history of this house. And this constant touching back, I dont think I appreciated what a big part of development it was until I was a parent. And theres a very, very general relationship between how long a period of childhood an organism has and roughly how smart they are, how big their brains are, how flexible they are.
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