Alison Gopnik
@alisongopnik.bsky.social
Cognitive scientist, philosopher, and psychologist at Berkeley, author of The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby and The Gardener and the Carpenter and grandmother of six.
Thats great Melanie, and so well-deserved!
October 23, 2025 at 9:01 PM
Thats great Melanie, and so well-deserved!
Reposted by Alison Gopnik
I suggested that play is an example where the metric maximized by adults in the ARC games (task completion) is precisely the metric minimized by children during play: the ideal imaginative play is never completed. "Success" is failure. Learning "efficiency" in this setting is irrelevant.
September 28, 2025 at 10:46 PM
I suggested that play is an example where the metric maximized by adults in the ARC games (task completion) is precisely the metric minimized by children during play: the ideal imaginative play is never completed. "Success" is failure. Learning "efficiency" in this setting is irrelevant.
You can see this particularly clearly in development where explore (children) and (exploit) adult intelligences are in clear tension, and the division of labor is necessary to resolve it. But its about learning versus acting, not just different skills
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....
Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
I argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected
human childhood, allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration,
before the demands of goal-di...
royalsocietypublishing.org
September 28, 2025 at 8:18 PM
You can see this particularly clearly in development where explore (children) and (exploit) adult intelligences are in clear tension, and the division of labor is necessary to resolve it. But its about learning versus acting, not just different skills
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....
Reposted by Alison Gopnik
vindicating I think for @himself.bsky.social, @alisongopnik.bsky.social, et al, particularly the drift toward GPT-as-reference-librarian usage
September 16, 2025 at 2:36 PM
vindicating I think for @himself.bsky.social, @alisongopnik.bsky.social, et al, particularly the drift toward GPT-as-reference-librarian usage
Humans usually extract info from these fictive agents (Zeus, Pooh, E. Bennett) without believing they're real. But in psychopathologies people treat fictive agents - saints, spirits, actors, celebrities - as real influences on their actions. Chat GPT is just the latest example.
August 20, 2025 at 2:23 AM
Humans usually extract info from these fictive agents (Zeus, Pooh, E. Bennett) without believing they're real. But in psychopathologies people treat fictive agents - saints, spirits, actors, celebrities - as real influences on their actions. Chat GPT is just the latest example.