Conversations with Tyler17 Dec 2025

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

Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today.

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.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded October 30th, 2025.

Other ways to connect

Follow us on X and Instagram
Follow Tyler on X
Follow Alison on X
Sign up for our newsletter
Join our Discord
Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.

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

Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(302)

Gita Gopinath on Trade, Currencies, and Economic Transformation

Gita Gopinath has spent the last several years inside the room where the world's monetary plumbing gets fixed — or doesn't. As first deputy managing director of the IMF and, before that, the Fund's ch...

23 Sep 55min

Annie Lowrey on the Time Tax, Fraud, and Rationing by Paperwork

Annie Lowrey's new book, The Time Tax, argues that the most regressive levy in American life is the hours each of us must spend on hold, in waiting rooms, and filling out forms a competent state would...

16 Sep 56min

Jared Diamond on Leaders, Luck, and Irreplaceability

Is leadership overrated? That's one simple reading of what Jared Diamond argues in his new book. Asked by Tyler to name the least replaceable leader in human history, Jared declines to name one — not ...

9 Sep 52min

Michael Moritz on Origin Stories, Exile, and Obsessive Curiosity

Michael Moritz has written books through every phase of his life: the first history of Apple and an account of Chrysler's near-death while he was a journalist at Time, a study of Alex Ferguson's Manch...

2 Sep 41min

Luke Burgis on Mimetic Desire, Catholicism, and the Age of Social Contagion

Luke Burgis left Wall Street after two years, founded a few successful companies in his twenties, then walked away to spend three years in a Roman seminary on the path to the priesthood. He now runs t...

19 Aug 52min

Daron Acemoglu on Liberalism, Automation, and the Educated Elite

Daron Acemoglu returns for his second appearance with a new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, which Tyler reads as an attempt to redefine and revitalize liberalism for our times. Where Daron'...

12 Aug 55min

Julia Ioffe on Russian Women, Missing Men, and the Roots of Autocracy

Julia Ioffe left the USSR as a child and came back as an adult journalist to find that the confident, credentialed women she remembered from her Soviet childhood had largely been supplanted by those c...

5 Aug 55min

Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists

Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, rests on the conviction that you cannot understand what's in a painting without knowing what its maker was thinking about. In Vermeer's ...

22 Juli 56min