The common metaphor of AI as an artificial being is wrong. It's better understood as a 'cultural technology,' like print or libraries. Its function is to aggregate, summarize, and transmit existing human knowledge at scale, not to create new, independent understanding of the world.
The effect of a good caregiving environment is not to make siblings more similar, but to increase their variability by allowing diverse traits to flourish. This challenges the foundation of twin studies, where a lack of correlation between siblings is often interpreted as a lack of environmental influence.
Caregiving is central to human meaning and morality but remains invisible in economic metrics like GDP. Its fundamental structure—transferring resources to others to achieve their goals—is a social relation entirely different from typical power or contract-based interactions studied in social sciences.
A diagnosis like autism may function like the 19th-century term 'dropsy' (swelling). It accurately describes a collection of symptoms but doesn't necessarily identify a single, unified underlying cause. The label captures a surface-level phenomenon, not a fundamental 'thing' in the world.
The idea of a single 'general intelligence' or IQ is misleading because key cognitive abilities exist in a trade-off. For instance, the capacity for broad exploration (finding new solutions) is in tension with the capacity for exploitation (efficiently executing known tasks), which schools and IQ tests primarily measure.
Babies experience a more expansive form of consciousness than adults. While adults have focused, problem-solving consciousness, babies have a 'lantern' awareness, absorbing vast, unfiltered information from their surroundings. This state is similar to an adult's experience when traveling to a new, stimulating place.
Children are more rational Bayesians than scientists because they lack strong pre-existing beliefs (priors). This makes them more open to updating their views based on new, even unusual, evidence. Scientists' extensive experience makes them rationally stubborn, requiring more evidence to change their minds.
Schooling has become a victim of Goodhart's Law. When a measure (grades, test scores) becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Students become experts at 'doing school' — maximizing the signal — which is a separate skill from the actual creative and intellectual capabilities the system is supposed to foster.
A child's seemingly chaotic learning process is analogous to the 'simulated annealing' algorithm from computer science. They perform a 'high-temperature search,' randomly exploring a wide range of possibilities. This contrasts with adults' more methodical 'low-temperature search,' which involves making small, incremental changes to existing beliefs.