11/5: Alison Gopnik

[ehuppert]

Comment below with questions or thoughts about the reading for this week's workshop.

Please make your comments by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[ziwnchen]

Thanks for the presentation! The topic of cognitive evidence of the explore-exploit learning pattern is extremely interesting! You mentioned that you are working on implementing this learning method using an experiment. Could you elaborate more on that? Also, another idea that is really interesting is building common sense using this learning method, I couldn't find it in the paper, could you also say more about it?

[cytwill]

Thanks for this innovative work. I have heard the word exploration-exploitation on many different occasions. I think your explanation of the computer algorithms is really comprehensive and vivid. My questions include two perspectives:

1) The exploration-then-exploitation approach seems quite natural in our life, but at the same time, we do see some evidence suggesting that some successful people switch from their proficient career to another new and also yield success. Do you think this kind of pattern might show some differences between the exploration of children and the exploration of adults? Or does it verify the value of an exploitation-first pathway?

2) As some of your arguments suggest, it is almost an evolutionary tendency for humans to get rigid (less likely to explore) as they are getting more and more experience or knowledge. But I think that might be an outcome of exploration that we iteratively exclude some false ideas or behaviors from our sets of candidates. At the same time, we might have developed a more sophisticated pattern of exploring- exploring things that are more abstract or seemingly unrelated, which I think children can hardly do. In this case, maybe adults are more competitive in exploration (I think this is a task-specific issue in general).

[lyl010]

Thanks for coming! I agree with @ziwnchen that the topic of exploration and exploitation is really interesting, and I would like to know if this also works for scientific research activity? Children build their mind as they explore and the advance of science seems to fit into the intersection between exploration and exploitation, and scientists often also reframe a field or build a new field in their early careers. How would you make a conceptual difference between exploration and exploitation in your field? Thank you!

[minminfly68]

Thanks for coming to here and make the presentation. I feel it would be interesting to make a comparison on educational strategies in the childhood and are there some differences in the explore-exploit paradigm in different environments? Thanks!

[hihowme]

Thanks for your presentation! It's a truly interesting research and I am wondering what takeaway of this into other social science research? Thanks a lot!

[PAHADRIANUS]

Thank you for sharing your work. You have effectively demonstrated that childhood possess some massive advantages over adulthood in resolving the explore-exploit dilemma, including the children's eagerness to explore, acuteness in observing as well as broadness of view. Some of the implications are coherent with what we are accustomed to in real life, that childhood is the best period to learn a second language or specialties such as musical instruments. But more importantly, you point out that these advantages have even greater uses in logical deduction, classification and hypothesis testing. It seems that children might have an edge over the adults in these fields which we tend to believe to be exceled more by the adults. What would this discovery suggest to the modern educators and education system? Would it be possible to capitalize on this childhood solution to explore-exploit tensions and facilitate children's academic training?

[zixu12]

Thanks for sharing! I am very interested in the point about explore-exploit dilemma. I am wondering whether explore-exploit changes with a person's personality, growing environment, or any other features that could distinguish a group of people? Thanks!

[boyafu]

Thanks for sharing! Since the group of children might be diversified, I was wondering how much the learning pattern through experiments can be generalized to a larger population.

[jamesallenevans]