My Conversation with Alison Gopnik

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Alison cover how children systematically experiment on the world and what study she’d run with $100 million, why babies are more conscious than adults and what consciousness even means, episodic memory and aphantasia, whether Freud got anything right about childhood and what’s held up best from Piaget, how we should teach young children versus school-age kids, how AI should change K-12 education and Gopnik’s case that it’s a cultural technology rather than intelligence, whether the enterprise of twin studies makes sense and why she sees nature versus nurture as the wrong framework entirely, autism and ADHD as diagnostic categories, whether the success of her siblings belies her skepticism about genetic inheritance, her new project on the economics and philosophy of caregiving, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: If it’s something like height, where there is clearly an environmental component, especially if the child is not well-fed, but it seems perfectly fine to say above a certain dietary level, it’s mostly genetic, right? No one says that’s ambiguous, and more and more traits will become like that.

GOPNIK: Well, first of all, I’m not sure that’s true. To a striking degree, the traits that people have looked at, like educational attainment, for example — we haven’t found consistent relationships to genetics. I think the reason for that is exactly because there’s this very complicated developmental process that goes from the genetics to the outcome.

Even if you think about fruit flies, for example. I have some geneticist colleagues who work on this — fruit fly sex determination. You’d think, “Well, that has to be just the result of genes.” It turns out that there’s this long developmental — long by fruit fly standards — developmental process that goes from the genetics to the proteins to the morphology, and there’s lots of possibility of variation throughout that. I think that hasn’t turned out to be a scientifically helpful way of understanding what’s going on in development.

The other thing, of course, is, from my perspective, the common features of, say, what kids are doing are much more interesting than the variations. What I really want to know is how is it that anyone could have a brain that enables them to accomplish these amazing capacities? Thinking about, is this child smarter than the other one, given how unbelievably smart all of them are to begin with, I just think it’s not an interesting question.

COWEN: But say, what you would call the lay belief that smarter parents give birth to smarter children, at least above subsistence — surely you would accept that, right?

GOPNIK: Again, what does smarter mean?

COWEN: How you would do on an IQ test.

GOPNIK: 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…

COWEN: There’s you — you’re tenured at Berkeley, you’re famous. There’s Blake, The Definitive Warhol Biography, and Adam, who’s amazing, writes for the New Yorker, and you don’t believe inheritability and IQ being very concrete things? I just don’t get it. I think you’re in denial.

GOPNIK: Actually, I think that example is maybe partly why I don’t believe in that. In fact, what I do believe is that the effect of caregiving is to increase variability, is to increase variation. Our family, our care — there were six of us in 11 years. My parents were graduate students, and even before they were graduate students, they were that great generation of immigrant kids.

We had this combination of a great deal of warmth, a great deal of love, an enormous amount of stuff that was around us — books and ideas. We got taken to the Guggenheim, when Adam was three and I was four, for the opening of the Guggenheim. We both remember this vividly. But we were also completely free. We were just in regular public schools. As was true in those days, in general, we came home after school, and we basically did whatever it was that we wanted. I was involved. The kids were taking care of each other a lot of the time.

The result is that you get a lot of variation. It’s an interesting example in our family where we have six kids who presumably all have somewhat similar genetics, all in that 11 years grow up in the same context, and they come out completely differently. They come out with really different strengths, really different weaknesses, things that they’re good at, things that they’re not good at. Even if you think about what Blake and Adam and I are like as thinkers, we’re all foxes instead of hedgehogs. We’re all people who have done lots of different things and thought about lots of different things.

So, my view is that what nurture will do is let you have variability. That’s the thing that, in a sense, is heritable. That’s contradictory, the idea that what’s heritable is the standard deviation instead of the mean, but that’s my view about that. I think my childhood did have the effect of making me suspicious of those simple nature-nurture oppositions.

Here are the books of Alison Gopnik.