Alison Gopnik: belief

Transcript context

…How you would do on an IQ test. What does genetics mean? It’s interesting, Tyler, that IQ tests, for example — they have their own scholarly and scientific universe, but they’re not something that we would teach about or think about in a developmental psychology class, and there’s a good principled reason for that. The good principled reason — this has come up a lot in AI recently. There’s this idea in AI of artificial general intelligence, and that is assuming that there’s something called general intelligence. Again, I think, a lot like consciousness or life, it’s one of these lay ideas about how people work. When you actually look at children, for example, what you see is not just that there isn’t a single thing that’s general intelligence. You actually see different cognitive capacities that are in tension with one another. You mentioned one about the scientist who’s trying to think of some new idea versus the scientist who’s looking at a more specific idea, right? A classic example of this tension that I’ve talked about and studied is in computer sciences: exploration versus exploitation. What do you count as IQ? In fact, most of what IQ is about is how well do you do in school? How well do you do on school tests? That’s actually, in many respects, in tension with how good are you at exploring the world around you? The kinds of things that you need to do to have particular goals, to accomplish them, the kinds of things that we emphasize a lot, say, in a school context, are actually in tension. This gets back to the point about babies being more conscious than we are — are actually in tension with the kinds of things that will let you explore. Think about the Bayesian example. If you have a flatter prior, and you pay more attention to evidence, you are probably not going to do as well on an IQ test. Say, in five-factor theory, openness is positively correlated with IQ, right?…

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