Sublime

Vygotsky noticed, for example, how adults, quite unconsciously, adjusted their behavior to give children just the information they needed to solve the problems that were most important to them. Children used adults to discover the particularities of their culture and society.

Young children also appear to have a special sense that it is other humans that “make stuff happen”;

everyone’s preferences, and feed all this data into a “single mind”—a giant economic optimization algorithm that would run continuously to “work out the implications”? Because, Hayek explained, that algorithm would never get all the data it actually needed; it could never “secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for

Just as children ignore or reinterpret the facts that don’t fit their representations, scientists, at least initially, often ignore or reinterpret facts that don’t fit their theories. Nor is this necessarily a bad thing. We wouldn’t want to rewrite the laws of physics every time an undergraduate screws up in his lab section and gets a weird result.

Sophia

The ancient problems of knowledge are all fascinating, but only the problem of Other Minds is gut-wrenching. We dedicate most of our waking life to deciphering the minds of others.

“The algorithms know you better than you know yourself,”

The blank-slate assumption is clearly wrong: babies are born with considerable core knowledge, a rich set of universal assumptions about the environment that they will later encounter. Their brain circuits are well organized at birth and give them strong intuitions in all sorts of domains: objects, people, time, space, numbers. . . . Their statisti