>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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I agree with this idea in general, but I think it’s prudent sometimes to ask if one has the best strategy or just a good enough strategy.
Folks who rarely or never reflect on this often end up at a (relatively low) local maximum.
In this experiment, it would probably be reflected in the results if they had a larger sample and made a combo with the black dots block award more stars. Many adults probably would not discover this, while many/most kids probably would.
> The people who try to figure out the exact rules of everything... [emphasis added]
Lucky for you, this set is empty.
> ... tend to be less effective than...
At what? If you're an AI, then you might be overfitting on your training data.
Snide jabs aside. I usually find that "good enough, just execute" has its own failure modes, different than those of "keep digging, understand deeply". Better yet, there are no "failure modes" or "successes" at all unless you have a goal to evaluate against.
Accumulating government issued currencies? I do have an impression that technical literacy rarely pays off. It is not like human history is full of trillionaire theoretical physicists and practical machinists.
I mean, not just in terms of making money, but inventing new technologies, saving lives or any tangible measure of success. At some point, you need to play the game.
Most big inventions were made by people in their 20's. If what you say is true those people would then go on to make even more big things in their 30's, 40's, 50's etc, but that doesn't seem to happen. Rather it seems like they explored the topic early in life and then stopped exploring and just continued looked at the world from the same lens as they got older.
Edit: Also all of Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon were started by people in their 20's. That is a pretty big coincidence, especially given that younger people have fewer connections and less money than older ones and therefore should in theory have a harder time starting a company.
It could also just be that people generally have fewer responsibilities and probably a higher risk tolerance earlier in life. Once you get into your thirties you might have a family, be more established in a given career path, be thinking more seriously about saving for retirement, etc. For all of the big inventions or successful companies you're thinking of, there are likely many more that turned out to be failures, and that's less of a setback to someone in their twenties.
In many of the arts, a typical famous biography will involve study and development of a great amount of technical ability through their 20's, and then to branch off from that some time in the 30's into a more streamlined and conceptual approach. They favor different things: a twenty-something will "take to the grind" because they are hungry to do so, and this often sends them on the path to a totally incoherent result - but is great if it's just a really hard puzzle and all the pieces and prerequisites are there(which is often the case in industry). Someone older may have less sheer energy, but is placing much more calculated bets and using more abstract thought processes, which is good for problems with long timelines and large scale.
I think early mover advantage tends to help younger people, because they try/learn new things more often. As you get older, there's a tendency to just repeat the same things you always did before, and served well. The odds of being a early mover at anything decrease. People only jump in when everybody else and his dog already did. Good tactic to avoid losing time with fads, but also ensures you won't spearhead the next big thing.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
I have kids. Small kids make eggregious logical mistakes. They have trouble to remember if they also have to focus on something else. They have super strong bias toward "immediate reward" over "reward in 3 rounds" - even if they logically understand, emotional appeal of immediate is too strong.
And I am not even talking about "mastered" game. Most kids are not playing chess. It is not just difference in experience of board games.
Small kids don't figure out completely new situation faster then adults. They just dont. The quickness of understanding comes in much much later.
The first task of a small kid is to learn the structure of the modern world. That isn't in their genes, they have to learn it all, just realizing what "board game" means and why they should care about doing well in it is a monumental task, not to mention their lack of math skills makes most rational arguments impossible to follow. Adults have all of that for free and can focus on the rules, they have spent decades learning about society, games, standard board game idioms like turns and points, mathematics etc, no board game is completely novel to them.
I really don't think the difference between kids and adults performance is just in experience. Kids brains are not fully developed yet, in stages we are talking about. And when you interact with them, it becomes quite apparent. There are also psychological studies and experiments, plenty doable at home if you want to have fun, pointing toward the same.
Kids older then toddlers care great deal about winning. It is not true that they don't understand why they should care. If you play boardgames with kids, they understand concept of board games in general. Babies don't, toddlers don't, but it is also impossible to play with them.
Framing difference between kids and adults as just lack of experience and pre-existing knowledge is, imo, more of wishful thinking or theory then anything actually observable.
Have you tried to teach an old adult to use a computer for the first time? It is often really hard and very little sticks. Compare that to teaching a kid to use a computer, they learn how to run programs and navigate the UI super quick. Of course the kid wont be at software engineer level quickly, but the adult likely wont ever get to the same level as the kid.
So to me it is obvious that at least some of the difference is that adults have a lot of knowledge to apply while kids don't. In scenarios where the adult lacks a lot of relevant knowledge the kid performs way better.
Old people, like 60 or 70, do have issue to learn something new. That with us sucking at explaining is deadly.
Small kids, surprisingly, completely sux at understanding computers too. Not software engineer level. They sux at basic user stuff. Small kids don't learn UI fast, it takes them a lot of time. Once they get it, they think how fast they were getting it. But in reality, they sucked for a long time.
Small kids don't navigate UI fast, unless someone in their life patiently shown them and made them feel that way.
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And also, adulthood starts somewhere between 18-21. Those people in fact learn computers, UI and anything new quite fast. You have to go to retirement age to get that "super difficult to learn" thing.
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.
> 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).
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).
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
> 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.
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.
I wonder if changing the overt objective to ‘learn the rule’ would result in the adults outperforming the children?
If you’re told to maximize the number of points, then learning the point value distribution of the blocks is a secondary objective, and we could also wave the conclusion of this experiment as “children don’t follow arbitrarily-valued objectives as well as adults.” Or we can understand this result as an expression of an adult’s developed executive function suppressing the desire to learn for the sake of reaching an objective.
I’m reading the researchers’ interpretation of this experiment as “children have a higher desire to learn” when executive function could explain that while also not diminishing the desire of adults to learn.
You may be onto something. Nevertheless the finding still has real world application.
I am reminded of a/b testing in websites or emails, for example.
If the goal is to maximize clicks, you may never "learn the rule," as it were, and instead lean on familiar and previously-tested concepts, getting stuck in a local maximum.
On the other hand, if in an explicit mind shift you say "let's try everything to see what happens," you may "lose" far more often, but gain a comprehensive map of the landscape in return, which can help you in future efforts to break into new heights of engagement.
You can trigger this difference in groups of adults too, by adjusting the external incentives involved.
Adults trained with external reinforcements (performance bonuses such as monetary rewards, gold stars, grades, rankings, etc.) will perform better during training compared to ones that receive no performance bonuses.
However, after the training is finished, the ones that received no bonuses will generally be more skilled than the ones that did, because without the allure of the bonus they went for internal motivation instead, and challenged themselves with tough cases which allowed them to get better.
So the next time you're in an environment with a performance bonus component, ask yourself whether you really want to optimise for the short term over the longer term. If you prefer long term learning, maybe change your environment.
I could see the benefit from both approaches. My guess is jumping to conclusions has probably saved many a human ( and animal) energy and lives throughout history.
I also remember reading a research group managed to train adults to learn like kids again. Can't seem to find it now, but maybe it's not set in stone and we could benefit from both approaches where needed in life.
"If there was one thing life had taught her it was that there are times when you do not go back for your bag and other times when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the two types of occasion." - DNA
"My guess is jumping to conclusions has probably saved many a human ( and animal) energy and lives throughout history."
Exactly. EG: In 10,000BC you hear a cat hissing in a cave. You figure you shouldn't go into the cave. You wouldn't try to second guess yourself and "explore".
The conundrum is introduced by this: "The point of the game is to figure out which blocks make the machine light up and earn as many stars as you can."
Figuring out "which blocks make the machine light up" is not the same as "earning as many stars as you can", apparently.
If the original research introduced this ambiguity, then I don't think the conclusions of a "learning trap" are supported. Compare adults' and children's performances given a single goal, either "figure out the rule" or "earn more stars", but not both.
The children are likely to have misunderstood the directive to mean that the way to earn the most stars is by figuring out the rule, while adults properly understood the tradeoffs to earn the most stars
In nature, it's advantageous for children and adults to have distinct capabilities in this regard, since children don't normally compete with adults - rather, the two work together to gather as many high quality stars as possible, to share with the whole family.
Adults usually having more and varied responsibilities makes it better for them to jump to conclusions, thereby leaving time and energy for the other stuff. Children have less responsibility, so they can afford the curiosity that may find them stars the adults missed.
Indeed, one major adult responsibility is keeping children safe, which often means curtailing their excessive curiosity.
I also think this. Children surely were like small probes for their communities, specially in the past. Just think the amazing variety of foodstuff traditional cultures were able to tell apart from the poisonous stuff. How did they learn that? My guess is, countless children puting unknown things in their mouths, and either surviving while discovering a new delicacy, or dying, but teaching their elders about a new poison in the process.
I think of it in terms of the brain's pattern-recognition capacity:
As we experience more of the world over time, the model of the world we build internally gets more and more elaborate. Eventually, we experience enough we can start noticing metapatterns. Something like, "if something is bad, it usually doesn't get better" is an example of a metapattern which seems like it could be in play in this study.
Of course, we lose out on some experiences, because that heuristic is quite prone to false negatives. I think that's basically what the experiment in the article illustrates, this "lossy filter" in our brain's future-planner.
(I am making no claims about the physical structure of the brain.)
Makes sense but I suspect (not an expert) that there are sort of fundamental/physical ways that children's brains differ. Somehow different chemistry or structures involved.
“Indeed, [due to an immature prefrontal cortex] adolescents are risk-taking and novelty-seeking individuals and they are more likely to weigh positive experiences more heavily and negative experiences less so than adults. This behavioral bias can lead to engagement in risky activities like reckless driving, unprotected sex, and drug abuse.”
There is a great deal of research on this. Its implications for society are profound. Robert Sapolsky is a prominent public face of the latest science on the development of the human brain and the implications for society. He can be found all over YouTube, and I can personally attest his latest book, “Behave,” is illuminating.
The puzzle mechanism and trap reminds me of how puzzles are laid out in parts of The Witness. The rules are sometimes subtle, and solving puzzles is a matter of learning what they are, and questioning your assumptions. The treehouse area is an especially good example.
Does this natural tendency to “explore” explain why children will try doing again the thing you just asked them not to do? And then follow that up with different variations of said thing to see how you react?
You don't have to tell a kid to their face they're an asshole. Do you not have a filter at all?
Kids in general can't be expected to act like adults because their brains are still developing. They also lack experience to inform their actions. Some seem like assholes because of these factors.
It's just important however to realize that some kids are assholes. No matter how you humor them or mollify them, they'll still be assholes. After trying to humor them and understand them if they turn out to be assholes you can just deal with them (or don't) like you would any other adult asshole.
While people can learn to program at any age I wonder what kind of psychological experiments could tell us about old programmers vs young/kid programmers and how a developer’s mind changes over time.
I think it's worth demonstrating this in this kind of context to characterize how children adults might be different. There's a lot of interest in aging and what that means, broadly speaking.
However, I agree this involves some fairly broad principles. I think you could even say this is kinda how Bayesian inference works too. If you use a [strongly informative] prior, on average you get a better estimate, but you're taking the gamble that your prior applies.
This game is so dumb, and there is no reward in exploring. Basically they said that the maximum reward you could get is a star. And now adult founds that there is a way to get those. The optimal way now is to repeat the same step because it is guaranteed that exploring can't be better.
The better thing could be the maximum number of stars aren't revealed and then it could be explore vs exploit scenario.
I don't think you get to choose which block you use -- from the article, it seems that you're given a sequence of blocks, and you have a binary choice of use/don't use for each block in the sequence.
Very interesting! This reminds me of a Veritasium video I watched years ago, called “The most common cognitive bias” [1]. People don’t explore solution spaces as effectively as they think they do.
