Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
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Claim ledger
29 published records
01 / recommendation
“If I use GPT-5 Pro edition, it will outperform a very good human lawyer for a typical query.”
02 / belief
“I think the fact that they’re so good in this mysterious way at picking up patterns and reproducing patterns — that’s clearly a really important thing that these technologies can do, but that’s not what humans are doing, and it’s not even what animal agents are doing.”
03 / belief
“Again, I think the reality beyond just thinking about the spectrum is that there’s a whole incredibly wide range of ways of interacting with the world, some of which you think of as being in the normal variation, some of which cause trouble for the people who have them, to the point of kids who can’t speak, never learn how to use language, need to be taken care of all the time.”
04 / belief
“I think if you look at someone like Eric Turkheimer’s work, one of the things that comes out of that is that your intuition to begin with, “Okay, well, we’re going to look at the twins, and if there’s a high correlation between what one twin does and the other twin, it’s going to be nature.”
05 / belief
“I think the nature-nurture is one of those examples of something that intuitively seems like a good way of characterizing things, but is, again — like the example of life — just isn’t the right framework, that what we have to do is say, “Okay, here’s a particular trait, here’s a particular capacity.”
06 / uncertainty
“As you probably know, Tyler, I have a brother who wrote the definitive biography of Andy Warhol. I don’t know if you did know.”
07 / belief
“I think of them as not very Bayesian at all, that they’re mostly pretty stubborn.”
08 / observation
“Again, part of the problem is, if the effect of nurture is not on the mean but on the variation, on the standard deviation, you’re not going to see it in any straightforward way in a twin study.”
09 / belief
“Life is an example of something that we thought, back in the 19th century, was going to turn out to be a simple thing, and there were whole research programs about what is it that makes a living thing living? It turned out that was just the wrong question, that actually there’re many, many different kinds of processes that are all involved in different things that we think of as life.”
10 / belief
“I think what happens in science — we’ve just been doing some work about this — is that there’s also a social factor, where having a big distribution of people who are more likely to go with the prior versus people who are more likely to go with the evidence, which seems to be true in science, that collectively can get you to the right answer.”
11 / belief
“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.”
12 / belief
“I think arguably, if you think about the children, for example — they don’t have as much episodic memory, especially the little ones, like the two-, three-year-olds.”
13 / belief
“On the surface, it just looks like baby, kid crawling around doing a bunch of things, and a bunch of things are happening, but I think you’d find that there was much more systematic relationships between what happens, what the baby does next, what the outcome is, than you might think on the surface.”
14 / belief
“I think what’s going on is that all of us, in our ordinary experience, when we’re doing something like making an image, are doing this cognitive work of generating a visual representation.”
15 / belief
“I think the reason why they’re hallucinating is because their objective function isn’t about truth in the way that it is for even a little baby.”
16 / belief
“Again, I think, a lot like consciousness or life, it’s one of these lay ideas about how people work.”
17 / belief
“I think of the kids as much more Bayesian than the scientists, and here’s what worries me about the scientists.”
18 / belief
“I guess that’s what dropsy was about, but it didn’t actually track something that was going on in the external world about what was going on inside of that person. I think that’s the situation with autism as well.”
19 / belief
“I think that’s true in general, that we have to think about ways that there’re these interactions between the environment that you find yourself in and something like whatever the combination of genetics and development is that lets you have a particular phenotype, and you’re trying to figure out how those two things interact.”
20 / evaluation
“some of the Freudians have been very enthusiastic about the work that people like me and my colleagues have done because, I think, the intuition that there was more going on in even little infants, that even small babies and young children could make inferences about the social world around them or the psychological world around them, and that was influencing how they grew up — I think that idea has turned out to be right, and it wasn’t obvious that that was going to turn out to be right.”
21 / evaluation
“I think that what the aphantasia work shows you is that business of generating an image when you’re trying to solve a problem is epiphenomenal, that it’s not that you’re solving the problem by looking in your head and seeing the picture.”
22 / evaluation
“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.”
23 / evaluation
“Some people have argued — I like this idea — that they’re like Derrida’s revenge, that the postmodernist idea that all you had to do is have text, and as long as you had more and more text, you didn’t have to worry about whether the text actually was making contact with some external reality.”
24 / preference
“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.”
25 / preference
“Scientists — I think, mostly, not necessarily consciously, but just as part of what they do — and little kids are looking at data and systematically figuring out what kind of structure out there in the world could have caused this pattern of data.”
26 / recommendation
“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.”
27 / evaluation
“Even the fundamental structure of caregiving, which is that you’re giving resources to someone else to accomplish their goals exactly because they don’t have resources that are very different from the usual social contract power kinds of relations.”
28 / prediction
“When you get big paradigm shifts, as Kuhn said, when you get big changes in science, a lot of times it’s because someone found an idea that looked like it was improbable.”
29 / prediction
“If you taught baseball that way, you wouldn’t think that people would be as good at baseball. It’s funny because, of course, what kids end up — I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but I think a lot of faculty have had this experience — because kids are so naturally tuned to this model, what do they get to be good at at school?”