Alison Gopnik: recommendation

Transcript context

…Let’s say you have $100 million unconstrained to run experiments on young humans and how they learn. Now, there’s an ethics constraint. You’re not going to do anything you don’t think is right, but what would you actually study with those resources? One of the good things about being a developmental psychologist is that it’s really cheap, like little chairs and a little table. The thing we use for causal inference is about a $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. Someone like Mike Frank at Stanford is putting GoPros on babies, little GoPros that the babies don’t mind. Then you end up with this giant amount of data about what is it that the babies are actually experiencing. Of course, you’d want to do that for a very large group of babies because they’re all different. Then it would take some real computational power to analyze all of that data. That might be a direction that you could go in that you could use the extra money for. What do you want to test? Let’s say you have that set up. You hire the assistants. You have the quant people. What hypothesis do you want to look at?…

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