YouSaid · the spoken record

Alison Gopnik

lines on the record: 72
first: 2025-12-17
most recent: 2025-12-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Social contract power kinds of relations. And yet it's been not very, very understudied compared to all the other kinds of social relationships that we've studied. And obviously since I'm someone who thinks about children and about taking care of children, that's true. But I think it's also true about taking care of elders. And one of the things in the new book that I'm writing is going to be about thinking about elders and the role of”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the big thing that we've been working on now, as I mentioned a couple of times, is this project about caregiving, because caregiving, and this speaks to the issues that we've been talking about with nurture and nature and what the effect of caregiving is. And caregiving is fascinating because if you ask people what's most important in your life, what are your greatest moral issues? What's most meaningful to you, they'll say something about taking care of my kids, taking care of my elderly father, taking care of my spouse. And yet you can read, I mean, economics is a really good example where that doesn't even show up in the GDP, right? All that work that we do taking care of each other, it's just completely invisible from an economic perspective. And even the sort of fundamental structure of caregiving, which is that you're giving resources to someone else to accomplish their goals exactly because they don't have resources, that is a really, that's very different from the kind of usuals.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nurture will do is let you have variability. That's the thing that is, in a sense, is heritable. And that's kind of contradictory, right? The idea that what's heritable is the standard deviation instead of the mean. But that's my view. I think my childhood did have the effect of making me suspicious of those simple nature-nurture oppositions.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Home after school, and we basically did whatever it was that we wanted. I was involved, the kids were taking care of each other a lot of the time. And the result is that you get a lot of variation. So it's an interesting example in our family where we have six kids who are presumably all have similar, somewhat similar genetics, all in that 11 years grow up in the same context. And they come out completely differently, right? They come out with really different strengths, really different weaknesses, things that they're good at, things that they're not good at. And even if you think about what Blake and Adam and I are like as thinkers, we're all, you know, foxes instead of hedgehogs. We're all people who have done lots of different things and thought about lots of different things. So my view is that what”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, I think that example is maybe partly why I don't believe in that, because we had this, in fact, what I do believe is that the effect of caregiving, right, is to increase variability, is to increase variation. family, our care, there were six of us in 11 years. My parents were graduate students and even before they were graduate students, they were that great generation of immigrant kids. And we had this combination of a great deal of warmth, a great deal of love, enormous amount of stuff that was around us, books and ideas and we got taken to the Guggenheim when Adam was three and I was four for the opening of the Guggenheim. We both remember this vividly. But we were also completely free. We were never just in regular public schools. We came home after, as was true in those days in general.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what everybody says. Interesting question about why I didn't actually feel moved to see it, but I haven't, so I don't have a good opinion about it.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I think I wouldn't say that he's underrated, but he's definitely not overrated. He's someone who made a much wider, broader difference to the way that we think about artistic practice than other artists have. He kept doing interesting things. He kept doing different things. He kept doing things that ended up having consequences for what was going on with other artists. He was someone who was really shifting the way that people thought about art. And I've talked enough with Blake and also with my various members of my family who are interested in art to think that that's really part of the thing that you want an artist to do.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, well, there's a good, you know, as you probably know, Tyler, I have a brother who wrote the definitive biography of Andy Warhol. I don't know if you did know that.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attention. We really want people to have very focused attention. And what that means is that the kind of variation in what people are like becomes dysfunctional in a way that it might not have been in the past. And I think that's true in general, you know, that we have to think about ways that there are these interactions between the environment that you find yourself in and something like whatever the combination of genetics and development is that lets you have a particular phenotype and you're trying to figure out how those two things interact.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another example where you have a lot of variation and a lot of the variation is just variation in individuals and some of it is variation in what it is that the culture thinks is important. And sometimes that variation is just variation. Sometimes that variation gets to be dysfunctional or cause difficulties. I think one thing that's interesting is, again, to go back to the consciousness point, we know and we just sort of take for granted that little kids like two-year-olds, we say that they don't pay attention. But what we really mean is that they don't not pay attention. They're paying attention to everything at once. And that's why two-year-olds are really distractible. And then as we get older, we get this more and more focused kind of attention. And people vary in how much they end up in that state of focused attention. And I think there's lots of reasons to believe that an industrial schooled society really pushes people in the direction of having very focused.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's like Dropsy, right? So diagnosis of Dropsy in the 19th century was picking up something, right? Which is that the person had swelling in their legs. I guess that's what Dropsy was about. But it didn't actually track something that was going on in the external world about what was going on inside of that person. And I think that's kind of the situation with autism as well.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Socially involved and engaged, and being good at this kind of abstract pattern induction. But I think it's just not too simple, again, to use another analogy. It's as if in the 19th century you said, do people with Dropsy have some characteristic or not? And it turns out Dropsy is not actually a thing. Dropsy is a symptom. And I think the same thing is going to turn out to be true and has turned out to be true with autism.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is another example of something where there's a simple kind of intuitive account. People have autism or people don't have autism. And again, I think the reality, beyond just thinking about the spectrum, is that there's a whole incredibly wide range of ways of interacting with the world, some of which you'd think of as being in the normal variations, some of which cause trouble for the people who have them to the point of kids who are can't speak, never learn how to use language, need to be taken care of all the time. And it's not at all clear that there's any single underlying fact about how that variation works. So it's not, you know, there's some evidence even in people who wouldn't be diagnosed with autism that there's this tension between being very”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Revenge, you know, that the postmodernist idea that all you had to do is have text. And as long as you had more and more text, you didn't have to worry about whether the text actually was making contact with some external reality. ChatGPT is kind of like Derrida in practice, right? What it's doing is putting together lots and lots of text and generating more text without ever quite making that make contact with an external reality.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something unique about that, it depends on the humans, right? So the kind of thing that, and you know, the other thing to say is we don't know. We'll actually see what happens. We'll see what the outcomes are going to be. I'm pretty skeptical because we have been trying to figure out how, you know, two-year-old babies go out and solve the kinds of problems that they solve in the world, and they're solving problems. Like, I mean, here's a really good example. If you go to robotics, for instance, There's a giant gap between what the LLMs, the large models are doing and what robotics is doing. Because in robotics, which again is the thing that the two-year-olds are doing is going out, experimenting with the real world, getting data from the real world, doing something new in the real world. And that's the thing that the LLMs are really not good at doing. You know, some people have argued I kind of like this idea that they're like dairy dogs.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But is it going to actually get a novel insight about economics that isn't there before? As opposed to it's using the kind of apparatus that you already have. Oh, the demand curve will be.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much easier to do the law. The fact that you can quickly access what previous lawyers have done makes it easier to do the law. The fact that you can answer the medical test makes it easier to do medicine. But the capacities that are the human capacities are the ones that go beyond just extracting the information from other people. Now, again, having ways of extracting that information more effectively is great. I mean, that's really going to be transformative. If I write out...”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that again gets you back to this point about what's going on in schooling, right? So what we're doing is we're working out an analogy. Who knows more, right? You or the UC Berkeley Library, right? So think about that example of the law case, right? All that legal information is there in the legal code. It's just that you don't really think about the legal code and you can access it and you could access it better. You could have more of that legal information than any individual lawyer is going to have. But you don't really think about that legal code as being a lawyer, right? The legal code is a place where you can combine and generate lots and lots of information that's come from all the lawyers who've done work before. And a great lawyer, and again, the fact that you have a legal code that's written down makes it”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We teach kids how to use the internet. And a lot of that teaching is going to be here's how this cultural technology works positively to give you some information about that's true. And here's how it works to give you information that's completely false. And it's funny that these reasoning systems are still hallucinating, right? And I think the reason why they're hallucinating is because their objective function isn't about truth in the way that it is for even a little baby. Their function is produced something that is going to be the sort of thing that a human will like with something like reinforcement learning from human feedback.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do that Way their reasoning is the way that a kid in a multiplication class who learns, here's what the formula is that you need to do for multiplication. And it's interesting that they're not good at things like basic arithmetic often, right? So you get this weird kind of combination of it's reproducing a reasoning process that you saw in a reasoning process that you could imagine in math, but it's not doing basic arithmetic. And I think the thing where another place where they're really falling down is the kind of novel relationships that humans are very good at generating. Those are the kinds of things where the generative AI is not working. But in any case, in terms of the issue about K through 12, every time we have a new way of accessing information, it's really important to teach. I mean, that's why we, you know, teach kids how to read. We teach kids how to calculate.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, that's the question, right? I think the fact that they're so good in this mysterious way at picking up patterns and reproducing patterns, that's clearly a really important thing that these technologies can do. But that's not what humans are doing, and it's not even what animal agents are doing. So I would be impressed if they were actually designing experiments that would tell you something about something new that was going on in the world that all the other people around them didn't know before.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. If you look at the way that the reasoning models work, they work the same way that all the other models work, which is that they look at patterns on text on the web. And one of the things that is a pattern that you have, and again, this is positive, right? One of the things Someone who was trying to solve the math problem, here's the steps that they took to solve that math problem. Can I find a general statistical pattern in those steps and reproduce it in this other context?”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where one of the things that is characteristic of humans and has always been, and is some people have argued, I think rightly is our superpower, is that we can get information from other people and we can use that information to make progress ourselves. And gender of AI is the latest technique for doing that. Generative AI tells you is here's a summary of what all the people on the net have said in this context or have said in this context. Learning how to use those cultural technologies and again, I mean, if you want a new intelligent, genuinely intelligent agent in the world, you know, if you have a kitten, that will be a genuinely intelligent agent. Probably won't change the world too much. You change a cultural technology, you introduce print. That really does change the world in radical ways for good or for ill.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Political scientist and James Evans, who's a sociologist. I think our whole, again, our kind of intuitive lay conception of how AI works is really misguided. So we very much have this kind of golem view about here's this non-living thing that we've given a mind to, and that always works out badly. And it's going to either be for good or for ill. It will be superintelligence. That's kind of the narrative. We think the right narrative is to think of it as what I've called a cultural technology. So it's a way of getting information from other people. And, you know, the way that generative AI works is that it's trained on all the stuff that very intelligent humans have done. So it's not surprising that a lot of times it will simulate what intelligent humans would do. So I think it's analogous to things like print or writing or internet search itself library.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My view about generative AI, and I've actually written about this in a paper in Science with Henry Farrell, who I think you know with.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ability to do a hub wide range of things as an adult, and then it ends up being a separate kind of skill. So sorry, that was a long answer.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. It's funny because I learned about it from my son-in-law who's actually the chief quant for the Seattle Mariners. And he was telling me about his difficulties in that job. And of course, in a way, GoodHart's law, what happens in school in our current school system is a really good illustration of Goodhart's law. So Goodhart's law is the idea that when you try and optimize something that you think is a signal for something else, very often what happens is that the people that you're trying to choose just try and maximize the first signal and it ceases to be correlated with the thing that you're trying to really measure. And I think the current way that we do schooling is a good example of Goodhart's law. We teach kids because kids are so good at wanting to be skilled. We teach them how to be good at school, which we think is going to be correlated with”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ball a lot to second base, and when they were in college, they could reproduce great baseball plays, but they wouldn't actually get to play the game until they were in graduate school. If you taught baseball that way, you kind of wouldn't think that people would be as good at baseball. And it's funny because, of course, what kids end up, this is, I don't know if you've had this experience, but I think a lot of faculty have had this experience that because kids are so naturally tuned to this model, what do they get to be good at at school? They get to be incredibly good at going to school. So they get to be really good at taking tests. And the ones that we get in our first year college classes, you know, just of these masters of all the things you need to do for school. And then we faculty are kind of worried because we say to them, well, think up a new experiment and they say, oh, I don't know how to do that. Nobody ever taught me, you know, nobody ever taught me to do something on my own or do something creative. There's a wonderful idea. Do you know about?”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is going to be important. You have a teacher who gives you feedback. The teacher shows you how the examples of the skill. And that kind of interaction, you know, these sometimes the teacher could be quite mean about telling you when you've done something wrong. I think that's a really good way for school-age children to learn. And I think it's not a coincidence, for instance, that so many kids really want to do music and sports, even though we all say, no, you know, learn how to code, that's the thing that will actually be helpful to you. Because music and sports are among the few examples where we actually do this kind of apprenticeship. You know, you do the thing, you get feedback, you try and do the thing again. And one of the things I say is, you know, imagine if we tried to teach baseball the way that we teach science. So how do we teach science? You know, what we would do is we would tell everybody about great baseball games when they were little and maybe when they were in high school, they could throw the ball.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I've written about this in my book, and I think there's two kind of different things to say. If you're thinking about young kids in particular, like early childhood before seven, say, I think we have a very good model of inquiry-based, often play-based education where you have a good, a warm caregiver and you get lots of opportunities to play and explore. And I think we have pretty good reason to think that's the right thing for these very young children. But I think for what we think of as the school-age children, it's a really different kind of model. It's a different kind of thing they're trying to do. So if you think about development, as I've argued as being this shift from mostly about exploration to skills that you're going to use for exploitation, how do you actually develop those skills? And I think we have good reason to believe that some kind of apprenticeship, intuitive apprenticeship model, is how you develop those skills. So you do something that you think”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, again, even if you're thinking about what's happening in the personality literature, that's another example of sort of reifying things that are going on. And, you know, again, I think an advantage of doing stuff with babies and young children is that we can actually look at what are the cognitive capacities specifically, how are kids learning, how are their computations affecting what they do. And that's just very orthogonal from the whole discussion about IQ.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exploration versus exploitation. So, what do you count as IQ? Do you count as IQ? In fact, most of what IQ is about is how well do you do on school tests. But that's actually in many respects in tension with how good are you at exploring the world around you, the kinds of things that you need to do to have particular goals, to accomplish them, the kinds of things that we emphasize a lot, say, in a school context, are actually intention. This gets back to the point about babies being more conscious than we are, are actually intention with the kinds of things that will let you explore. Or, you know, think about the Bayesian example. If you have a flatter prior and you pay more attention to evidence, you are probably not going to do as well on an IQ test.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Genetics mean? You know, it's interesting, Tyler, that IQ tests, for example, they have kind of have their own. Scholarly and scientific universe, but they're not something that we would teach about or think about in a developmental psychology class. And there's a good principled reason for that. The good principled reason, this has come up a lot in AI recently. So there's this idea in AI of artificial general intelligence. And that is assuming that there's something called general intelligence. Again, I think a lot like consciousness or life. It's one of these kind of lay ideas about how people work. When you actually look at children, for example, what you see is not just that there isn't a single thing that's general intelligence. You actually see different cognitive capacities that are in tension with one another. You know, I mentioned, you mentioned one about the scientist who's trying to think of some new idea versus the scientist who's looking at a more specific idea, right? And an example, a classic example of this tension that I've talked about and studied is in computer sciences.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It hasn't turned out to be a scientifically helpful way of understanding what's going on in development. And the other thing, of course, is from my perspective, the common features of, say, what kids are doing are much more interesting than the variations. What I really want to know is how is it that you could have anyone could have a brain that enables them to accomplish these amazing capacities. Thinking about, is this child smarter than the other one given how unbelievably smart all of them are to begin with? I just think it's not an interesting question.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I'm not sure that's true. So to a striking degree, the traits that people have looked at, like educational attainment, for example, we haven't found consistent relationships to genetics. And I think the reason for that is exactly because there's this very complicated developmental process that goes from the genetics to the outcome. And even if you think about fruit flies, for example, an example that some geneticist colleagues who work on this, fruit fly sex determination, you'd think, well, that has to be just the result of genes. But it turns out that there's this long developmental long bifruit fly standards, developmental process that goes from the genetics to the proteins to the morphology. And there's lots of possibility of variation throughout that. So I just, I think that that's just not, hasn't turned out to be a scientifically”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A more and more safe environment that actually, what's going to happen is that the potential for variability is going to get to be greater and greater, the possibility of doing something new, doing something different from what you did before. Those are the kinds of things that are going to become more important. So, you know, I just, I think the nature nurture is one of those examples of something that sort of intuitively seems like a good way of characterizing things, but is, again, like the example of life, right, just isn't the right framework, that what we have to do is say, okay, here's a particular trade, here's a particular capacity, let's track all these complicated ways that the environment and genetics are going to interact to bring a particular kind of outcome.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that, well, let me give you an example, Tyler, of another example of the kind of Turkheimer phenomenon that I think is interesting. So if you look at smoking, for example, it turns out that when smoking was very available, there was a relatively small, when you did a twin study, there was a relatively small genetic contribution to whether you smoked or not. As smoking became less and less likely, and as there were more and more restrictions to keep you from smoking, then you start seeing what looks like more of a genetic effect. And it's because the only people who are smoking are people who have a very strong tendency to smoke in the first place. So exactly what happens, how the caregiving, how the nurture is going to affect and interact with the genetics is going to be really complicated and unpredictable. So you could argue just the opposite. You could say as we develop”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some measure of what an adult is like, right? So you get siblings, it's sometimes called the non-shared environment, the things that don't seem to be the same things are playing a larger role than the shared environment. So what you might think is, okay, if you have two kids and they have the same parents, though kids are going to be more similar to one another. But if this picture about what caregiving does is allow variability is true, then you might expect the opposite. You might think if you have a really caring family, what that means is that the siblings are going to have more opportunity to develop in really different ways. So you won't see a correlation. So again, part of the problem is if the effect of nurture is not sort of on the mean, but on the variation, right, on the standard deviation, you're not going to see it in any straightforward way in a twin study.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Effect and More and more in the context of this big caregiving program is that the effect of having a protective caregiver is that it allows more variability. So when you don't have to worry at a particular moment about your particular, you know, about what your particular situation is, you can do many more different things and you can have more variability. And that's true in biology and ecology, for example. So the example I given in my book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, is if you have a garden that is protected and has a lot of possibilities, you're going to get a much wider variety of plants than if you have a much more restricted kind of circumstance in which only a few plants will thrive. Okay, so what does this have to do with kids? Well, when people say that there isn't an effect of the family environment on development, what they mean is that they don't see high correlations between kids in the same family.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Environment, then you won't get the syndrome. And that's a very specific case, but the same thing is true in Eric's work with something like SES. So what Eric found was that you had much more convergence in twin studies in upper class contexts than in poorer families. And sort of the explanation is that if you're in a poorer family, small differences in your environment can make a big difference in how the rest of your life goes. And if you're in a poor family, small differences in your environment can make a big difference, and that's less likely to be true in a richer family. One that I particularly have thought about, and I think is really interesting, is thinking about the effect of nurture on development. So the effect of having caregivers. And as you probably know, there's assorted people who've said, no, we are overestimating how much what parents do influences kids' development. But the argument that I and others have made is that the”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's one thing that's wrong with it that Eric has shown. Well, let me give you the example that I give when I'm doing my developmental psychology class. So we know that there's a particular kind of disorder in a particular gene that means that you can't metabolize a particular substance in your food. And the result is that you have mental retardation and a lot of difficulties. And we actually know pretty much what the gene is. We test babies, you know, they prick their heel when they're born to see if they have this disorder. And if they do, then we make sure that they don't eat anything that has that enzyme or that piece in it. And then they're fine. So the question is, does this come from nature or does it come from nurture? Or how much is it nature? How much is it nurture? In one sense, it's 100% nature. It depends on this particular change. In another sense, it's 100% nurture. If you get rid of the material in the...”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, any signs that people do is interesting. I think if you look at someone like Eric Turkheimer's work, one of the things that comes out of that is that your kind of intuition to begin with, okay, well, we're going to look at the twins and if there's a high correlation between what one twin does and the other twin, it's going to be nature. And if there isn't, it's going to be nurture. I think increasingly that kind of model has turned out to just be wrong. It's just the wrong model. It's just too simple.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That Piaget had, even though his interpretation of that had changed a lot over time. So he didn't think that, and I think the way that change has gone is there's much more going on in the baby's minds. It's much more abstract. There's much more of this representation than Piaget thought. It's much more theory-like.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paracist one is a good account of what's happening with kids, and Piaget just had this word constructivism about what was going on. But I think what a lot of us since then, like the Bayesian approach, the Bayesian approach quite explicitly people have called rational constructivism. We want to try and take that idea that you're really building a world model from data in a rational way that Piaget had and give it some modern juice. The other thing that's interesting about Piaget, and there's a bit of a narrative about this, is his observations, and it turns out they probably weren't his observations mostly. If you look at his books, the observations and the theory have quite a different tone. And his wife, Jacqueline, actually did a lot of the actual observations of the babies. And those observations have held up remarkably well. You can take your average nine-month-old and do one of Piaget's experiments with them, and you'll get the result.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World for Plato through evolution for someone like Chomsky, or Steve Pinker or some people like that. So one solution has been, okay, it's all just innate. And the other solution has been, it looks as if there's all this abstract structure, but really it's just statistical combinations of the data. And if you think about the current AI deep learning approach, that's like that. It looks as if there's all this knowledge and intelligence. Really, if you just put enough data, you'll get the same results. And what Piaget thought, and I think what most developmentalists thought was, you know, neither of those is a good account of what's happening with kids. Because if we look at kids from the time they're very, very little, from the literally from the time they're babies, from the time they're born, we see a lot of abstract structure. We see a lot of coherence, a lot of inference, a lot of generalizations. And we also see that change as a result of the kids' experience. So neither of those options, either the sort of nativist or...”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Piaget, on the other hand, still is, I think, the big theoretical foundation of what everyone has done since in cognitive development. And all of us, you know, we sort of, our attitude about Freud is, yeah, well, of course, here's this little bit of something that turns out to actually be right. Whereas with Piaget, we're all sort of trying to claim his legacy that what we're doing is what Piaget was trying to do. So here's what I think has held up. Well, two things that have held up. One thing is, you know, I started out talking about this problem of how is it that we could ever know as much as we do about the world around us, given that we have such a small amount of data. Well, going back to Plato and Aristotle, Plato and Aristotle talk about that problem. And the two solutions that they come to are one is, okay, that structure couldn't have been learned from the data. It must have just been there innately in a past.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question and a complicated question. When I first started doing the work that we do now, you know, Freud was, and Freud still is, I think rather surprisingly to, you know, the world of the intellectual world in general, it just doesn't show up in modern psychology. So even having someone teach a class about Freud would be unusual in, I don't think anyone does in Berkeley's department, which is the best department in the country. On the other hand, some of the ideas, some of the Freudians have been very enthusiastic about the work that people like me and my colleagues have done, because I think the intuition that there was more going on in even little infants, that even small babies and young children could make inferences about the social world around them or the psychological world around them, and that that was influencing how they grew up.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That didn't seem to help very much. On the other hand, an idea that a lot of people have had now and are formalizing is the idea of the visual system, vision as what people sometimes call inverse graphics. So the idea is that the same way that in computer vision you can take a bunch of data and get a picture of the world, that maybe something like that is happening for humans, that what we haven't, people sometimes describe it as being a game engine in the head. So the same thing that lets you generate pictures in a video game is the thing that's actually letting you figure out how the visual world works for your visual system. And that's actually been really productive.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emotion from just tiny little indicators in someone's face. And we know that babies in the first few months of life can do that. Well, it turns out that the way the animators do it is completely intuitive. They have no explicit idea what it is they're doing. They're like actors. And in fact, they have a lot of the same kind of characteristics as actors. You know, an actor can do the same thing, can give you a piece of information about the way that the world works.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's interesting. I think we all thought to begin with that when we were talking to, say, the animators at Pixar, there'd be great insights into things like facial expressions. So one thing we do know with babies is that from the time babies are born, they're incredibly tuned into facial expressions and the way that facial expressions indicate emotions, for instance. And of course, any animator, that's their stock in trade is being able to take a bunch of polygons, have them have a face, and have it express emotion. And then, you know, an example I like is in ratatouille, there's this wonderful moment where little Remy the Rat looks very embarrassed and proud at the same time. And you can just tell that from his facial expression. So we thought that if we talked to those animators, we could get an idea of how is it that babies and children and grown-ups are so good at doing that. We're incredibly good at inferring.”
2025-12-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source