The Scientist in the Crib

What Hacker News says

1. 5F7bGnd6fWJ66xNDec 2021
   Read 'The Scientist in the Crib' by Alison Gopnik. Not feasible to explain all complexities in a HN post but the above will be well worth your time.
   thread
2. woodandsteelAug 2016
   Great article. The author, Alison Gopnik, also has two very interesting books, The Scientist in the Crib and The Philosopher in the Crib.

   She's right about our education system. As John Taylor Gotti explains, it was designed in the nineteenth century to produce factory workers who would not think for themselves, but just take orders. But what we need today and tomorrow is people who will learn on their own initiative and figure out intelligent solutions (like open source software developers), and so we need an educational system that will encourage that sort of behavior. What Gopnik is saying that this is something natural for children, if we put them in the right circumstances.

   Show morethread
3. woodandsteelJan 2017
   A key reason Freud has gone out of style is that science has found that his psychology is mistaken in key ways.

   Freud believed that everything in adult psychology is an elaboration of something already there in the infant mind. That is dubious, but even if you accept it, there is the problem that Freud did not investigate infant psychology directly, but instead assumed it is basically irrational, asocial and radically out of touch with reality.

   In recent decades infant psychology has been the subject of extensive empirical study, and it turns out to be much different from what Freud thought. See, for instance , <i>The Scientist in the Crib</i> by Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl.

   Show morethread