YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Bloom

lines on the record: 69
first: 2024-08-07
most recent: 2024-08-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“No longer a sort of logical truth. It's something which you have to do empirical research. If you gave an LLM, and I know people are doing this very research, gave an LLM the same speech that your average developing child gets, will it learn to talk to?”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The success of large language models is the biggest surprise in my intellectual life. And we learn that a lot of what we used to believe may be false. And what I used to believe may be false. So I used to really accept to a large degree to Chomskyan argument that the structures of language are too complex and not manifest in input so that you need to have innate machinery to learn them. You need to have a language module or language instinct. And it's impossible to learn them simply by observing statistics in the environment. If it's true that, and I think it is true, the LLMs learn language through statistical analysis just shows Chachomskian view is wrong. This shows that at least in theory it's possible to learn languages by observing a billion tokens of language. It doesn't mean that that's how children do it. It's possible. I do believe that kids have some sort of innate apparatus that helps them do it.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe for me shame and guilt, I think I've made a lot of mistakes and moral mistakes in my life by being too caught up in empathy. And so my argument against empathy is limited. It argues that empathy is a poor moral guide. It leads to bad decisions. And to some extent, if I have to ground on my own emotions, it might be over my own bad decisions. I think I suffer from an abundance of empathy.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the whole, some views are more rational than others. So, I mean, I'm the wrong person to ask. Everybody's going to tell you their views are grounded in a sort of rational equation they thought them out and everything like that. And, you know, I'm sympathetic enough to John Heitz line that often we delude ourselves and we're driven by these emotions. But I don't know. I wouldn't say that the person who says black people and white people shouldn't marry because it grosses me out should be thought of on the same level as somebody who says, eh, you know, what harm does it do? I think to what harm does it do a person is being a better person?”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, your view is, and I think, and I've written on empathy and I've heard a sort of similar argument for this, which is you could have a decision which you ground and you maybe think about immigration on a sort of rational cost-benefit analysis, but you might say, look, for people to act towards this decision, your average person won't do it my way. They would need some emotion. So maybe they need disgust or empathy to take them there. And so you might want to argue that would argument go that without disgust, Canadians wouldn't be motivated to a policy that on balance would be better for them.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm conscious enough about the limits of our knowledge, which is that I would be very trepidatious before removing an emotion from people, because you don't know what the consequences would be. But yeah, it's hard to think, and maybe you could think of an example where disgust has made the world better.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got them. I think Gemini is the one who wanted to go the woke LLM of choice because I think the doctrine called wokeness leads to a lot of moral problems and makes the world worse in certain ways. But I wouldn't mind left-wing LLMs. And in fact, I'm not a fan of disgust. You're right that disgust is often associated with right wing. But in the very worst instantiation of it, so disgust is what drives hatred towards gay people. It involves hatred of interracial marriage, exclusion of immigrants, exclusion of other races. So if there's one emotion I would take away from people, it would be disgust, at least discussed in sort of the moral realm. They could keep their disgust towards rotten food and that sort of thing. And so I wouldn't, that's the one thing I wouldn't put into LLMs. I'd rather put, I don't know, anger, pity, gratitude. Disgust is the one thing I'd keep away.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Double down on a few things. So my utilitarian friends tell me that my affection and the resources I put into my children are irrational, that I should not be favoring them over strangers, certainly not to the extent I do. And I hold back on that. If you offered me a pill that would get rid of my favoring my children, I would not take it. For animals and treatment of animals and cat strangling, I think we should try to talk ourselves out of this. I think we should in some way try to make reason to make the world a better place, even if it involves wrangling some cats.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One reason why I like that question is people want a lot of money. And in fact, this is an experiment done by Thorndike, the great behaviorist over 100 years ago. And he asked that question. He also asked people, how much would I have to pay you to take a pair of pliers and pull out one of your front tooth? And people want more money to strangle a cat than to have this painful, agonizing and disfiguring thing, which I think says something nice about people. But then the fact is that it's not so nice about people from sort of a strict utilitarian calculus. You should actually ask to be paid some amount of money for which you can then save many, many lives, or for that matter save many, many cats, and our morality doesn't work that way. We have a sort of visceral response to certain behavior that doesn't translate to a sort of cold-blooded assessment of pain and pleasure.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to make some, I mean, maybe we can't in some way we have to when we think about animal experimentation or of course using animal. We have to, if somebody said there's research we're going to do which will save a child's life but it will involve killing a million dogs. I think people might bulk at it, but if it was killing two dogs, people wouldn't. But I also can't fix a number.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a challenge because if I say I'm wrong, you can just keep that no one human is worth more. You could keep upping the number of dogs. Your view aligns with that of Maddie Wilkes, who is my collaborator and ex-postdoc, who ran this research, and she's very much of a utilitarian and an animal rights person. And so she thinks kids are superior. What she finds in this work you're talking about, kids are less speciesist than adults. They even will favor 10 pigs over one human. And adults in our sample never do that. And gradually, these speciesism comes in until you get to a person like me who think, oh my God, a person's so much more valuable. And Maddie would say, what happens is this irrational prejudice creeps in that I have. And maybe you don't have. I don't know. I'm a troubled utilitarian, where for the most part I am, I just would find it very difficult to trade any number of dollars.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that makes sense. There's a sense in which wealthy countries might be at a disadvantage where in a lot of wealthy countries babies sleep apart from their parents as a separate room with a crib. You cry it out and so on. And I'm not judging. I did that with one of my kids a long time ago. But it's very hard on the kid. And in less wealthy countries, the kid co-sleeps and sleeps in the same room. And I think that's better offered a kid. Rough on the parents, but better for the kid.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In our society, I think I'd think the life of a baby is actually of a young baby is probably pretty difficult. Your needs are not immediately satisfied. You have a lot of needs, you're in a lot of pain all the time. You have gas pain, you're hungry, you have to, you're struggling, you're afraid. I would think that roughly around the age of two, you get much more autonomy. And then life starts looking up, and then it just gets better and better.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did a Twitter poll asking people, our baby's overall happy or sad based on your experience. And happy sort of one, it probably depends on a baby.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very critical of it as an evolutionary mechanism. I've been convinced that it could happen in principle, but I've been convinced the sort of Dawkins viewed it, that it doesn't happen in practice. But it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to talk in terms of cultures, to say that some cultures do better than others. Those cultures thrive. And now we're not talking about genes, we're talking about communities of people.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one idea, and this is Robert Wright's claim, I think other people have argued, is polytheism is sort of the default. Societies start off polytheistic. Even in the Hebrew Bible, it might begin rather polytheistic. When God talks about not worshipping other gods instead of him, he's literally talking about other gods. But you're right, monotheism has won. And then sir, there has to be some sort of design features that allow it to win, even though it may not be our natural default. One argument, Azure is I don't know, but one argument that I have heard is that these singular big gods actually serve moral purposes. They hold communities together. If you believe in a single omniscient god that looks at you and looks at me, it could govern our behavior in certain ways, coordinate it, cause us to be nicer when we're not being observed and so on. And so the claim is that societies that have that have an advantage over societies that have a hundred mischievous little gods running around.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's fundamentalist parents who don't want their kids to believe in Santa Claus. And the logic is, once they hear that Santa Claus isn't real, they'll jettison guide as well. I think in some way Santa Claus is an easier client because he's just a big guy who looks like a big beard and who climbs down chimneys and gives gifts. It's kind of a small step from a sort of very capable and kind person to Santa Claus. Well, God, in the sense that we're talking about it, is invisible and omniscient and all good. So I think God's a much bigger claim. So I'll say Santa Claus at two or three.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a student Cony Banergy, we wrote an article a while ago, Would Tarzan Believe in God? Will somebody who without a cultural support come to believe in God? And we came to conclusion that he'd end up being polytheistic, that he'd see gods everywhere. He'd see them as triggered by nature and everything. I think children early on believe in invisible agents causing things. They had that sort of bias when it rises to the level where you could coherently say, oh, that kid believes in God, I think that probably is a bit later. I think you need some sort of cultural support to make it into a God as opposed to just some sort of strange stuff is happening that you can't explain.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's some lovely work by Katie Kensler on how children break the world up into us versus them. And you might think that they do it like adults do on a basis of race, which is very, very common and in some way, and sooner or later they do that. But early on, they take language very seriously. So children at a very young age prefer to affiliate with an American child, prefers to affiliate with an English speaker than a French speaker, also prefers to affiliate to give toys with, to play with, somebody who speaks English without an accent than someone who speaks English with a faint accent. So the importance of language as a sort of marker of group affiliation shows up very early.”
2024-08-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Bloom on the Psychology of Children, and the Morality of Empathy and Disgust · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source