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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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“No, I don't think that's what's going on. I think what's going on is that all of us in our ordinary experience, when we're doing something like making an image, are doing this kind of cognitive work of generating a visual representation. The interesting, and I think contingent thing is that some of us also have this feedback to our actual visual system, to our actual visual cortex. And I think there's some neuroscience evidence that supports that. So what happens is almost as a kind of side effect when we're generating these ideas or generating these pictures, we actually activate the parts of our brain that are usually activated when we're really genuinely seeing something. But it's interesting that it doesn't seem to have consequences for all these other abilities, like being able to generate a picture or being able to do a lot of cognitive capacities like, you know, being an animator.”
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
“Gap between what we think of when we think about, say, an animator having a picture inside of his head and what's actually going on cognitively. So I don't think it would be relevant to the consciousness, the question about consciousness as we usually experience 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
“Well, again, I think, well, aphantage is a whole complicated story. So aphantasia is a puzzle about why it is that we have the kind of imagery that we have. It's not that people who have aphantasia aren't vividly experienced the visual world. It's that they don't use that experience when they're trying to, say, imagine something or when they're trying to generate an image. I think that what the Aphantasia work shows you is that business of generating an image when you're trying to solve a problem is sort of epiphenomenal, that it's not that you're solving the problem by looking in your head and seeing the picture because people with a fantasia, like my friend Ed Catnull, who's the co-founder of Pixar with my husband, has a fantasia. He's an animator who doesn't see pictures inside of his head. So I think it just shows that there's a big”
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
“No, I think arguably, if you think about the children, for example, they don't have as much episodic memory, especially the little ones like the two, three-year-olds. But I think that may actually be making you more conscious in the sense that, again, this adult tendency is to try to, you could think of it as being kind of reduce the compress the information around you into a particular narrative, like the kind of narrative you have in an episodic memory. And a lot of times as adults, what we're trying to do is take all this information, all this data, and just compress it into a single narrative, which is a very useful thing to do. And I think babies, before they develop a lot of episodic, you know, they have some episodic memory even from very early on, but it's around three or four that they develop the kind of autobiographical memory that grownups have. I think that actually makes them more conscious in the sense that they're more focused on the present and they're experiencing the present more.”
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
“From your experience of the world around you. And in fact, in some ways, I think professors all recognize this, it's intention with those things. So while you're sitting at your desk trying to solve this problem, you are notoriously not paying attention to all the other things going on around you. And I think if you look at the science, what you see with babies is that they are conscious of all the things that are going on around them, that the way that even their brains work is to take in lots and lots of information. Their brains are very much what neuroscientists would call plastic. They're surrounded by novelty. They're not just focusing on one thing at a time the way we do when we're grownups. And I think if you think about the kind of context as grown-ups that we are in that state, like if we travel to a new place or we're trying to do something new, I think those are times, you know, it's not like we're unconscious when we go to Paris for the first time. On the contrary, it feels like we're full 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
“One of the kind of traditional, I should say, first of all, my view about consciousness is that it's very unlikely to be a single thing. So there's a famous analogy that I think is right about consciousness and life. So life is an example of something that we thought was back in the 19th century, was going to turn out to be a simple thing. And there were a whole research programs about what is it that makes a living thing living. And it turned out that was just the wrong question, that actually there's many, many different kinds of processes that are all involved in different things that we think of as life. And I think that's likely to be what will happen with consciousness. But it is interesting that, and maybe not surprising, that the thing that, you know, professors first thought of as consciousness is that experience you have when you're sitting at your desk and you're introspecting and you're trying to solve a problem and so on and so forth. But I think that's really different from awareness from sensory.”
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
“What happens, what the baby does next, what the outcome is, then you might think on the surface. And a lot of those are going to be in the service of how can I figure out what's going on in the world”
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, what I'd really like to know is how it is that the kids experiment? So if you just took that kind of GoPro data and you looked at what did the child do, what happened just before the child did that, what was the consequence of what the child did in terms of their, you know, their data, their experience? I think that would be really interesting to analyze. And my hypothesis is that you'd find that that was actually much more systematic than it looks on the surface. So on the surface, it just looks like baby kid crawling around doing a bunch of things. Bunch of things are happening. But I think you'd find that there was much more system.”
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 because one of the good things about being a developmental psychologist is that it's really cheap, you know, like little chairs and a little table and the thing we use for causal inference is about $20 toy. There are some really interesting attempts now to use big data with kids and I think that might be something that you could use a lot of money for. So someone like Mike Frank at Stanford is putting GoPros on babies, little GoPros that the babies don't mind. And then you end up with this giant amount of data about what is it that the babies are actually experiencing. And of course, you'd want to do that for a very large group of babies because they're all different. And then it would take some real computational power to analyze all of that data. But that might be a direction that you could go and that you could use the extra, you know, you could use the extra money for.”
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
“Why and when would you see something surprising and decide that you should follow it up or you should go out in the world? And this is something that I think is a bit different from what Friston says and what I would say. I think a lot of the time, and I think this increasingly, it's not just that you're seeing something surprising and then changing your view, it's that you're seeing something surprising. You're doing an intervention, something in the world to try to explain or reproduce or find out the parameters of that surprising thing. And then that's really the thing that's driving your theory change.”
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 it's very underspecified. So, you know, there's this kind of category of theories in science of things that Have a good combination of a kind of intuitively being in the right direction and then have a lot of math, but it's actually very hard to connect them to experiments and to an empirical research program. So I think there's something right about the fact that children and people in general, when they're learning, are looking for violations of their predictions and something like surprise. But I'm a little skeptical about whether that formalism isn't going to end up accounting for everything. I think it's one of those kinds of theories. But it's certainly very closely related to ideas that come out of the sort of theory theory framework, which include things like, well, what you should be doing is making predictions and you should be exploring things that are surprising and don't fit the predictions that you already have. And, you know, it's interesting because everyone in science knows that experimentation is really crucial for science. And yet we don't have very good accounts of how to do experiments.”
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 underestimate how much that kind of, you know, we sometimes dismissively call it a fishing expedition, how much that kind of very general experimentation is playing a role in scientific progress. So, you know, you're supposed to, in the grant, you're supposed to say, here's my three hypotheses, and here are the four experiments I'm going to do to test them. But I think in practice, a lot of times scientists are being like the little boy with the avocado and the spoon. They're saying, I don't know what will happen if I try this, what will happen if I try that? And then they write the grant to get money to do the things that they've already done by doing all these experiments.”
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, I don't think any of those are really an example of the kind of exploration that I think is trying to get new evidence to change your theory. I think there are lots of things that you'll see the kids doing, like, for instance, the fork is a good example. I have a lovely video of my son that I use to do teaching. He has a spoon and he's trying to eat an avocado with a spoon. And of course, eating an avocado with a spoon when you're two years old is extremely challenging, right? It's a full avocado. And so instead of actually trying to get it in his mouth, what he does is try all these different things that you could do with a spoon in an avocado. He bangs it on the side. He picks it up and turns it over. And a lot of them don't have the output of getting any of the avocado at all. And that's something that's completely characteristic of what you see with little kids. You see them doing these kind of experiments all the time. And I think with scientists.”
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's an interesting case, I think. It's funny when you said tries to use the fork properly, right? That's a matter of conforming to a norm.”
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
“Idea that looked like it was improbable. But the nice thing about kids is because they don't have to worry about grant proposals. They can be off in the wild space all the time.”
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
“Box, high temperature kind of search through the space, and then cool off and just fill in the details. And, you know, if you think about your four-year-old, who do they sound like? Do they sound like the creature that's just moving a little bit or do they sound like they're noisy and bouncy and random and doing all sorts of weird things? Well, the four-year-old seemed to be a really good idea of this kind of random search. But if you're a scientist, of course, you have to balance those things. You can't just think of crazy new ideas. You have to figure out how you're going to test them. You have to get grant proposals. So in science, you're always kind of going back and forth between, do I do the high temperature wild, crazy out of the box kind of search? Do I think of ideas that don't look like they would be very likely to begin with? Or do I fill in the details? And I think you see both things happening. So when you get big paradigm shifts, as Kuhn said, when you get big changes in science, a lot of times it's because someone found 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
“Well, there's a beautiful idea that I've been using thinking about the kids that is in computer science and actually comes from physics called simulated annealing. And the idea behind simulated annealing is that you have some problem to solve. You have some space of solutions that you're trying to get to. And one thing you can do, which is like what you're describing about the money supply, is just make little changes to what you already know. You know, that's what you mean about moving in the predictable direction. You're just changing things a little bit. Seeing if, okay, if I change it a little bit, is it doing a better job of accounting for the data? That's what people think of as a low temperature search. The other kind of search you can do, a high temperature search, is just bounce around the space. Try wild, crazy things exactly as you were saying. Have some random, just sort of a more random walk. And the strategy that you see in computer science, this annealing is start out with this wild, crazy out of 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
“It's rational not to change it when you just have a little bit of evidence. You should require a lot of evidence to overturn something that you have a lot of confirmation for. And it's interesting that the kids actually are better at solving problems that involve sort of unusual outcomes than the scientists are. And I think what happens in science, we've just been doing some work about this, is that there's also a kind of social factor where having a big distribution of people who are more likely to, you know, go with the prior versus people who are more likely to go with the evidence, which seems to be true in science, that collectively can get you to the right answer because there's no arbitrary principle you can have about when should you abandon the theory and when should you hold on to 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
“Yeah. Well, it's interesting. One of the things that we've looked at is whether little kids are Bayesian, and you might be even more surprised to find that little kids are actually being pretty rational Bayesian. But a lot of it depends on how you ask. So if you asked a three-year-old, do you think that this pattern of conditional dependencies is giving you a confounding causal structure, right? They would probably not give you a very sensible answer. And even when you ask scientists that, they don't give you a very sensible answer. But when you look at their actual practice, what you see is that in fact kids, for example, are Bayesian. And so are scientists. Now, the thing is that, in fact, in many respects, kids are better Bayesians than scientists, but a lot of it depends on your prior. So if you have a very, as they say, you have a very peaked prior, you have a lot of experience, you have a lot of reason to believe that this prior assumption is right.”
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
“Enabling them to do what they do in addition to all sorts of other institutional and social things. And it's something about this deep capacity to figure out the structure of the world, a world model, as the AI people say, from data.”
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 scientists know about quarks and quantum phenomena. How do we ever get from the data to the theory? And one subcategory of that is how do we ever get causal structure, which is so important in science? How do we ever figure out what causes what just from a bunch of data that we have? And what's happened is that philosophers of science and computer scientists have found some systematic ways that you could talk about that. Scientists, I think mostly not necessarily consciously, but just as part of what they do and little kids are looking at data and systematically figuring out what kind of structure out there in the world could have caused this pattern of data. So if that's not the only thing, of course, that's going on in science. There's lots of other things too, but it's at least one central thing going on in science that we've started to really understand. And of course, it sort of makes sense that scientists, you know, have the same brains that we had in the police to scene. Something about in those brains must 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
“Well, this is interesting. When we started this out, one of the big puzzles that we had was it's it's fine to say that children are learning like scientists, but then the question became, but how are scientists learning? And when I started this project, a lot of the philosophers of science said, well, you know, Kuhn showed that there was nothing systematic you could say about that. It's just sociology. But interestingly, during the time that I've been working, there's been this real change in the way that people think about philosophy of science. And we have some good computational models of how scientific theory change works. And it turns out that those apply to children as well. So the specific thing that I've looked at is what is it that scientists do? Here's this big hard problem. Always seem to get from the world are a bunch of photons at the back of our retina and disturbances of air at our ears, and yet we know children know about people and things.”
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