Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…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? I think it’s very underspecified. There’s this category of theories in science of things that have a good combination 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. 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. It’s certainly very closely related to ideas that come out of the theory theory framework, which include things like, 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. 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. Why and when would you see something surprising and decide that you should follow it up, or you should go out into 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. Then that’s really the thing that’s driving your theory change.…

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