> 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.
... 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.
Im now 30 and still feel a lot less adult than I thought being adult would be.
The difference is I’ve learned how to handle various adult tasks that did not interest me before. Bureaucracy, taxes, investment, insurances etc.
But I also still watch the shit out of TV, love video games and other various things I loved as a kid. I’ve just learned to be passionate about even more things than I was, and love them even more.
There have been some changes in my tastes but they’ve been fairly rare by comparison. Most changes came from learning and maturing.
For what it’s worth though I don’t think most people are like this. All in all, I’ve found this to be the minority case.
At 30 you are still a young adult. I bet you are still playing those video games at 50, because that is a cultural and generational thing rather than an age related thing, but that the mindset around the activity would have changed slightly. Call it a middle aged mindset, if you will. Middle age adult is a different phase of life than young adult.
> Unfortunately, transitioning back to "kid state of mind" seems impossible.
I don't think it's impossible, though it certainly requires practice and deliberate cultivation in most adults.
Besides the advantages to learning new things, I think it's also a beautiful way to look at the world: to see everything as if for the first time, your mind filled with wonder, curiosity, eagerness to explore.
Practically, I have found this attitude to also lead to more rewarding social interactions. When someone explains something to me that (I think) I already know, or have some experience with, my mind doesn't jump to "heard that before" and shut off, but I can remain engaged and interested in the conversation, letting my prior knowledge just be there in the background.
It depends how long you intend to live. If you live as long as humans did while evolving, you should stop learning when it is natural to. However, if you plan to live past your 40's, it would be a worthwhile investment to keep learning longer.
In addition, we live in a more rapidly changing world than our evolutionary ancestors did, which makes necessary to continue learning throughout our adult lives. e.g. I'll probably have to learn new JavaScript frameworks until the day I retire
If the kids really figured out the "better" rule, they should be able to accumulate more stars if the game runs longer.
Given the study didn't choose to do that, it's a dubious claim imo that the kids figured anything out at all. Likely they were just putting a bunch of blocks in the machine ad hoc.
Not sure about the "material rewards" part. Kids were playing for (useless) stars, adults were playing for money. The conclusion may just as well have been that people take more risks when useless than useful prizes.
This is just wild speculation. You overestimate the external validity of this study. Why did adults leap faster to conclusions? One obvious explanation would be that adults are simply smarter and can get to a working heuristic faster. Maybe, maybe not, but we can’t know because the incentives in the study were ill-defined.
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.