Understanding Populations As Groups of Explorers and Exploiters

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Populations can be understood through the lens of explorers and exploiters, where some individuals or groups are dedicated to exploring new opportunities while others focus on exploiting existing resources. This division of labor is observed in various species, such as honeybees, where scouts explore and are supported by other bees. Similarly, in human societies, scientists can be compared to the explorers, playing a crucial role in uncovering new knowledge and opportunities for the community. This developmental strategy offers an advantage by minimizing free rider problems and promoting the survival of the organism. It also alleviates some of the group selection issues faced by entire societies when considering the balance between exploration and exploitation.

Humans have an unusually long childhood — and an unusually long elderhood past the age of reproductive activity. Why do we spend so much time playing and exploring, caregiving and reflecting, learning and transmitting? What were the evolutionary circumstances that led to our unique life history among the primates? What use is the undisciplined child brain with its tendencies to drift, scatter, and explore in a world that adults understand in such very different terms? And what can we transpose from the study of human cognition as a developmental, stage- wise process to the refinement and application of machine learning technologies?

Welcome to COMPLEXITY, the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute. I’m your host, Michael Garfield, and every other week we’ll bring you with us for far-ranging conversations with our worldwide network of rigorous researchers developing new frameworks to explain the deepest mysteries of the universe.

This week we talk to SFI External Professor Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley, author of numerous books on psych, cognitive science, childhood development. She writes a column at The Wall Street Journal, alternating with Robert Sapolsky. Slate said that Gopnik is “where to go if you want to get into the head of a baby.” In our conversation we discuss the tension between exploration and exploitation, the curious evolutionary origins of human cognition, the value of old age, and she provides a sober counterpoint about life in the age of large language machine learning models.

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Mentioned & Related Links:

Alison Gopnik at Wikipedia

Alison Gopnik’s Google Scholar page

Explanation as Orgasm
by Alison Gopnik

Twitter thread for Gopnik’s latest SFI Seminar on machine learning and child development

Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood
by Gopnik et al.

Pretense, Counterfactuals, and Bayesian Causal Models: Why What Is Not Real Really Matters
by Deena Weisberg & Alison Gopnik

Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions
by Alison Gopnik

The Origins of Common Sense in Humans and Machines
by Kevin A Smith, Eliza Kosoy, Alison Gopnik, Deepak Pathak, Alan Fern, Joshua B Tenenbaum, & Tomer Ullman

What Does “Mind-Wandering” Mean to the Folk? An Empirical Investigation
by Zachary C. Irving, Aaron Glasser, Alison Gopnik, Verity Pinter, Chandra Sripada

Models of Human Scientific Discovery
by Robert Goldstone, Alison Gopnik, Paul Thagard, Tomer Ullman

Love Lets Us Learn: Psychological Science Makes the Case for Policies That Help Children
by Alison Gopnik at APS

Our Favorite New Things Are the Old Ones
by Alison Gopnik at The Wall Street Journal

An exchange of letters on the role of noise in collective intelligence
by Daniel Kahneman, David Krakauer, Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein, & David Wolpert#DEVOBIAS2018 on SFI Twitter

Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism
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Complexity 90: Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome

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The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative
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