>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?

(Referenced study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002772...)

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 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.

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 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.)

Alison Gopnik is a huge name in the psychology of child development. If you find this area interesting, I recommend her interview with Ezra Klein: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...

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?

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.

Someone needs to explain to these children that they'll never ship if they don't put limits on their exploration.

> more than 70% of the adults never did figure out the right rule.

Wish they said how many children figured out the rule.

Seems the grown-ups strategy is consistent with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion So why is this an article?

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.

This reminds of Steve Jobs' speech, "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." "... following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on."

https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/

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.

[1] https://youtu.be/vKA4w2O61Xo

Kids don't need their stars to pay the bills and make it to the next paycheck. (Replace stars with dollars and cents) grown-ups do!

Complex proof of Zen Buddhism's Beginners Mind concept.