6 ms·

>Children gathered much more evidence than the adults and were much better at learning. Most of the children did figure out the right rule. However, they earned

>Children gathered much more evidence than the adults and were much better at learning. Most of the children did figure out the right rule. However, they earned fewer stars than the grown-ups. For me, this sentence at the end breaks the whole argument down - so the adult strategy was indeed more effective at the the thing being optimized for! The question then is - could they set this up such that kids actually perform better than adults?

bsder 5y ago
Yeah, it kind of undermines the whole thing. The adults learned a "good enough" rule that works until someone gives them a provably better one.
Jensson 5y ago
Repeat it 1000 times and the better learning should start to kick in. That kinda mimics life, you learn as a kid and the execute as an adult.
- wisty 5y ago
  IIRC if you repeat it 1000 times the adults can start to figure out the rules. Kids are quicker at solving totally novel problems where pre-existing knowledge actually makes it harder, but adults are usually capable of figuring out their priors are bad if they have enough time. The exception is when they don't have good feedback, and are satisficing (their mistake isn't so bad that they realise they need to keep working on the solution).
  - notahacker 5y ago
    Because the "trap" was a local optimum for solving the problem adults would probably only figure out they were applying the wrong rule if you told them their score was low. But they'd figure it out pretty quickly if you did... Skimming the study, it seems like the kids' ability to learn the correct rule by "exploring" was cancelled out in some of their tests by their ability to completely forget it when new [irrelevant] information was introduced in the form making the objects a different colour Also kids aren't guaranteed to catch up adult scores if they're more likely to lose motivation. We're talking about a study that noted it excluded a participant who "refused to continue after seeing the sad face" :D
    - Jensson 5y ago
      > Also kids aren't guaranteed to catch up adult scores if they're more likely to lose motivation Those kids would of course grow up to become adults with all the knowledge gained from the exploration but without any of the costs of exploring further, that is how the kids strategy becomes the winning one.
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  Is kid vs. adult just a proxy for brain plasticity? (Or is that concept debunked?)
  - Jensson 5y ago
    I don't think that brain plasticity can affect a persons tendency to jump to conclusions. You just choose an answer rather than look for more answers, there isn't enough time to grow or remove connections.
rxhernandez 5y ago
It seems it was only more effective in the short term. If the children had learned the rules better, they would ostensibly win in a longer session.
- watwut 5y ago
  Had you ever played board games with children?
AussieWog93 5y ago
Incidentally, I've noticed the same outcome between groups of more or less curious adults. The people who try to figure out the exact rules of everything they do tend to be less effective than people who figure out a strategy that works and simply execute.
- abathur 5y ago
  Unless it's being intentionally adjusted for, this may be encoding a bit of bias regarding experiment duration and explore/exploit strategies. (It isn't a given that the results would hold over 10x the duration, for example?)
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    I would also argue that the adults would suddenly become a lot more curious if they knew that the experiment would be 10x the duration, and each of those stars were instead dollar bills.
    - Ginden 5y ago
      > if they knew that the experiment would be 10x the duration, and each of those stars were instead dollar bills. There is catch - adding money into equation can trigger "avoid risk" behaviours.
  - watwut 5y ago
    The thing is, adults are in general more effective in figuring out strategy for changed situation. There is a reason why boardgames for adults are more complex then those for 9 years old. If the game was 10x longer, adults would behave differently.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      The power of adults vs kids is the same difference as large codebase vs small codebase. Large codebases can do many amazing things quickly, but they tend to have a lot of technical debt making other things very hard to do. Kids are small codebases, they lack all those abstractions for solving problems quickly but they also lack all the technical debt, allowing them to quickly change and adapt their thinking. Why are adults better at playing games? Because good board games are designed to align with abstractions adults are likely to have and don't hit the parts with lots of technical debts. It is very easy to design games that goes against the abstractions adults have learned, but those games will be horrible to play so you wont see them. Edit: Also board games aren't meant to be mastered, you just need people to learn the simple basics. If you add the requirement to master the board game, then we can look at chess and see that people who started learning as a kid becomes way stronger than people who started learning as adults. Adults can learn to play chess much quicker than children, but an adult wont master the game.
peterkelly 5y ago
> the the thing being optimized for And that's the problem. In the adult world, we too often optimise for short-term gain instead of learning. This comes at the cost of long-term benefits. Focusing on learning costs you in the short term, but can pay immense dividends in the long run.
ordu 5y ago
> For me, this sentence at the end breaks the whole argument down - so the adult strategy was indeed more effective at the the thing being optimized for! I see no such an argument in the article. It is modern psychology, it tries to avoid judgements like "good" or "bad", it doesn't try to prove that kids are dumb (or geniuses), it tries to learn how it is. The core principle can be expressed roughly "people acts the best possible way until proven otherwise". It is like an axiom, though it lacks a mathematical rigor. So this article points to an another direction: while it is beneficial for children to sacrifice material rewards in exchange for better learning, for adults it is more beneficial to concentrate on the rewards. This difference causes them to employ different strategies shown in the experiment. Though this last sentence is not proven by the experiment, there may be other causes, but Gopnik did a lot of research pointing to the same direction: babies and kids are optimized for the learning. From this follows a practically helpful advice: if you cannot understand your kid's behavior, try to find what she/he is trying to learn by doing what is she/he doing. For example, you told her not to open a cupboard, you know she learned the rule "do not open the cupboard", but now she opens it while looking you in the eye? ("terrible twos" may do this) She is trying to learn how would you react to her misbehavior, and what the best way to deal with it. So you'd better get a grip on yourself, turn on your inner teacher and show her exemplary reaction to misbehavior, which she may adopt later herself against other people breaking rules. She needs to explore the role of a rule breaker to learn how to deal with the rule breaking from both sides, so let her play that role by playing the role of a rule enforcer. > The question then is - could they set this up such that kids actually perform better than adults? Probably they can, but what the point of such an experiment? To prove that a strategy stressing learning can give more material rewards when compared to a strategy maximizing material rewards? It is not a psychology per se, it is more like a research of different strategies of a decision making, so it would be better if such a research was done by an AI-researcher.
- kreeben 5y ago
  >> babies and kids are optimized for the learning ... in a way adults are not, I suppose. Begs the question, when do you go from being a kid to being an adult and can we postpone this transition, and should we? I recently realized that I had failed to uphold the promise I made to teenage me to never become adult. I consider it a failure because of my view that most adults transition way, way too early and therefor have minds that are too narrow for comfort. Unfortunately, transitioning back to "kid state of mind" seems impossible.
Ginden 5y ago
> so the adult strategy was indeed more effective at the the thing being optimized for! You miss confounding factor, children have abysmal cognitive performance compared to adults. So you compare 1 heuristic algorithm running on weak CPU and RAM-starved, with another heuristic algorithm running on many times stronger CPU with up to 3x times more RAM (working memory).

bsder 5y ago

Yeah, it kind of undermines the whole thing. The adults learned a "good enough" rule that works until someone gives them a provably better one.

Jensson 5y ago

Repeat it 1000 times and the better learning should start to kick in. That kinda mimics life, you learn as a kid and the execute as an adult.

wisty 5y ago
IIRC if you repeat it 1000 times the adults can start to figure out the rules. Kids are quicker at solving totally novel problems where pre-existing knowledge actually makes it harder, but adults are usually capable of figuring out their priors are bad if they have enough time. The exception is when they don't have good feedback, and are satisficing (their mistake isn't so bad that they realise they need to keep working on the solution).
- notahacker 5y ago
  Because the "trap" was a local optimum for solving the problem adults would probably only figure out they were applying the wrong rule if you told them their score was low. But they'd figure it out pretty quickly if you did... Skimming the study, it seems like the kids' ability to learn the correct rule by "exploring" was cancelled out in some of their tests by their ability to completely forget it when new [irrelevant] information was introduced in the form making the objects a different colour Also kids aren't guaranteed to catch up adult scores if they're more likely to lose motivation. We're talking about a study that noted it excluded a participant who "refused to continue after seeing the sad face" :D
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > Also kids aren't guaranteed to catch up adult scores if they're more likely to lose motivation Those kids would of course grow up to become adults with all the knowledge gained from the exploration but without any of the costs of exploring further, that is how the kids strategy becomes the winning one.
Waterluvian 5y ago
Is kid vs. adult just a proxy for brain plasticity? (Or is that concept debunked?)
- Jensson 5y ago
  I don't think that brain plasticity can affect a persons tendency to jump to conclusions. You just choose an answer rather than look for more answers, there isn't enough time to grow or remove connections.

rxhernandez 5y ago

It seems it was only more effective in the short term. If the children had learned the rules better, they would ostensibly win in a longer session.

watwut 5y ago
Had you ever played board games with children?

AussieWog93 5y ago

Incidentally, I've noticed the same outcome between groups of more or less curious adults. The people who try to figure out the exact rules of everything they do tend to be less effective than people who figure out a strategy that works and simply execute.

abathur 5y ago
Unless it's being intentionally adjusted for, this may be encoding a bit of bias regarding experiment duration and explore/exploit strategies. (It isn't a given that the results would hold over 10x the duration, for example?)
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  I would also argue that the adults would suddenly become a lot more curious if they knew that the experiment would be 10x the duration, and each of those stars were instead dollar bills.
  - Ginden 5y ago
    > if they knew that the experiment would be 10x the duration, and each of those stars were instead dollar bills. There is catch - adding money into equation can trigger "avoid risk" behaviours.
- watwut 5y ago
  The thing is, adults are in general more effective in figuring out strategy for changed situation. There is a reason why boardgames for adults are more complex then those for 9 years old. If the game was 10x longer, adults would behave differently.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    The power of adults vs kids is the same difference as large codebase vs small codebase. Large codebases can do many amazing things quickly, but they tend to have a lot of technical debt making other things very hard to do. Kids are small codebases, they lack all those abstractions for solving problems quickly but they also lack all the technical debt, allowing them to quickly change and adapt their thinking. Why are adults better at playing games? Because good board games are designed to align with abstractions adults are likely to have and don't hit the parts with lots of technical debts. It is very easy to design games that goes against the abstractions adults have learned, but those games will be horrible to play so you wont see them. Edit: Also board games aren't meant to be mastered, you just need people to learn the simple basics. If you add the requirement to master the board game, then we can look at chess and see that people who started learning as a kid becomes way stronger than people who started learning as adults. Adults can learn to play chess much quicker than children, but an adult wont master the game.

peterkelly 5y ago

> the the thing being optimized for And that's the problem. In the adult world, we too often optimise for short-term gain instead of learning. This comes at the cost of long-term benefits. Focusing on learning costs you in the short term, but can pay immense dividends in the long run.

ordu 5y ago

> For me, this sentence at the end breaks the whole argument down - so the adult strategy was indeed more effective at the the thing being optimized for! I see no such an argument in the article. It is modern psychology, it tries to avoid judgements like "good" or "bad", it doesn't try to prove that kids are dumb (or geniuses), it tries to learn how it is. The core principle can be expressed roughly "people acts the best possible way until proven otherwise". It is like an axiom, though it lacks a mathematical rigor. So this article points to an another direction: while it is beneficial for children to sacrifice material rewards in exchange for better learning, for adults it is more beneficial to concentrate on the rewards. This difference causes them to employ different strategies shown in the experiment. Though this last sentence is not proven by the experiment, there may be other causes, but Gopnik did a lot of research pointing to the same direction: babies and kids are optimized for the learning. From this follows a practically helpful advice: if you cannot understand your kid's behavior, try to find what she/he is trying to learn by doing what is she/he doing. For example, you told her not to open a cupboard, you know she learned the rule "do not open the cupboard", but now she opens it while looking you in the eye? ("terrible twos" may do this) She is trying to learn how would you react to her misbehavior, and what the best way to deal with it. So you'd better get a grip on yourself, turn on your inner teacher and show her exemplary reaction to misbehavior, which she may adopt later herself against other people breaking rules. She needs to explore the role of a rule breaker to learn how to deal with the rule breaking from both sides, so let her play that role by playing the role of a rule enforcer. > The question then is - could they set this up such that kids actually perform better than adults? Probably they can, but what the point of such an experiment? To prove that a strategy stressing learning can give more material rewards when compared to a strategy maximizing material rewards? It is not a psychology per se, it is more like a research of different strategies of a decision making, so it would be better if such a research was done by an AI-researcher.

kreeben 5y ago
>> babies and kids are optimized for the learning ... in a way adults are not, I suppose. Begs the question, when do you go from being a kid to being an adult and can we postpone this transition, and should we? I recently realized that I had failed to uphold the promise I made to teenage me to never become adult. I consider it a failure because of my view that most adults transition way, way too early and therefor have minds that are too narrow for comfort. Unfortunately, transitioning back to "kid state of mind" seems impossible.

Ginden 5y ago

> so the adult strategy was indeed more effective at the the thing being optimized for! You miss confounding factor, children have abysmal cognitive performance compared to adults. So you compare 1 heuristic algorithm running on weak CPU and RAM-starved, with another heuristic algorithm running on many times stronger CPU with up to 3x times more RAM (working memory).