Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture

Описание: Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today: https://mercatus.donorsupport.co/page...

Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at Berkeley, studying how children construct theories of the world from limited data. Her central insight is that babies learn like scientists, running experiments and updating beliefs based on evidence. But Tyler wonders: are scientists actually good learners? It's a question that leads them into a wide-ranging conversation about what we've been systematically underestimating in young minds, what’s wrong with simple nature-versus-nurture frameworks, and whether AI represents genuine intelligence or just a very sophisticated library.

Tyler and Alison cover how children systematically experiment on the world and what study she’d run with $100 million, why babies are more conscious than adults and what consciousness even means, episodic memory and aphantasia, whether Freud got anything right about childhood and what's held up best from Piaget, how we should teach young children versus school-age kids, how AI should change K-12 education and Gopnik's case that it's a cultural technology rather than intelligence, whether the enterprise of twin studies makes sense and why she sees nature versus nurture as the wrong framework entirely, autism and ADHD as diagnostic categories, whether the success of her siblings belies her skepticism about genetic inheritance, her new project on the economics and philosophy of caregiving, and more.

Recorded October 30th, 2025

Transcript and links: https://conversationswithtyler.com/ep...

This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

Stay connected:
Follow us on X, IG, and Facebook: @cowenconvos
  / cowenconvos  
  / cowenconvos  
  / cowenconvos  

Sign up for our newsletter: https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931

Join us on Discord:   / discord  

https://conversationswithtyler.com

https://mercatus.org

Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

Timestamps:
00:00:00 - How children—and scientists—learn
00:14:35 - Consciousness, episodic memories, and aphantasia
00:23:06 - Freud’s and Piaget’s theories about childhood
00:27:49 - Twin studies and nature vs. nurture
00:39:33 - Teaching strategies for younger vs. older children
00:44:07 - AI's ability to generate novel insights
00:53:57 - What Autism and ADHD diagnoses do and don’t reveal
00:58:02 - The success of the Gopnik siblings