Alison Gopnik: evaluation

Transcript context

…To get food into his mouth, right? At least to do that. I don’t mean proper manners in the Ann Landers sense. Yes. 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. 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. Of course, eating an avocado with a spoon when you’re two years old is extremely challenging. It’s a full avocado. 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 and an avocado. He bangs it on the side. He picks it up and turns it over. A lot of them don’t have the output of actually getting any of the avocado at all. That’s something that’s completely characteristic of what you see with little kids. You see them doing these kinds of experiments all the time. With scientists, we underestimate how much that — we sometimes dismissively call it a fishing expedition — how much that very general experimentation is playing a role in scientific progress. 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?” Then they write the grant to get money to do the things that they’ve already done by doing all these experiments. There’s an alternative vision of how people learn, if learning’s even the right word, and it comes from Karl Friston. I think of it as a minimized surprise kind of theory, that you’re confronted with data from the world, and then you interpret the data and coordinate your actions in such a way to minimize surprise. That will imply a lot of cognitive biases, but that’s his basic model of humans. What do you think of that theory?…

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