In light of my reply here (“so I guess even children don’t know how to ask good questions”), I wonder if they’re reaching for something more than answers, maybe my impulse to tell them they shouldn’t ask questions they don’t really care about the answers to, is actually well placed. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe they want to learn about asking questions, and the process can’t start to mature until you let them know that they’re kind of doing it wrong.
(I’m aware that there’s a real risk, if this theory is wrong, of making the child explore less freely than they’re supposed to, which I will try to hold in regard.)
If we assume it has a purpose.. how does learning work? What needs learning?
1) Theories of how people learn: Repetition.
2) A good way to acquire information in theory: get information from multiple sources, and see what matches up.
3) Some knowledge we might take for granted. Perhaps: what topics are taboo, words, sounds, grammatical structure—we might suppose that knowing how to ask questions (Like where the word why goes in the sentence,) will fall out of this (if they get it wrong, it’s an opportunity to find out/be corrected).
The process in question doesn’t sound super effective (to us):
I have a kiddo whose “why phase” is in full swing and I am not actually confident that it’s motivated by curiosity. It’s also not the most efficient way to learn things, or even the most efficient simple way (that’d probably be something like “tell me stuff about $TOPIC”), nor is it obviously geared at that goal.
1) Unless it’s optimizing for repetition.
2) Unless it’s optimizing for multiple sources of knowledge.
3) Unless it’s a way of finding out basic things we take for granted, or what’s taboo.
Why would any working cognitive process require repetition? The feeling I get when I see that is that the process doesn’t know enough about what its pursuing to get there efficiently, and it might never.
Sometimes a cognition doesnt know much about what it’s pursuing due to low conscious integration.. sometimes I guess I have to accept it’s just because of whatever ignorance puts it in the position of pursuing a thing. We could hardly expect, for instance, a person looking for the key to a box in an object archive, to ask for a list of keys of a particular length, because they wouldn’t know how long the key is, nor would they ask for keys with a particular number of peaks, for they could not know how many points it has, they can maybe give us an estimate of its diameter, or its age, but their position as a key-seeker means that there are certain Good Questions that they necessarily cannot know to ask.
Their search may seem repetitive, but repetition is not the point. Our job as the archivist is to help them to narrow the list of candidates to the fewest possible.
Why would any working cognitive process require repetition?
I should have been more specific: Memorization. (Part of speaking any language fluently is knowing words, how to say them, and what they mean—and knowing it fast.)
Aye, I suppose the answer is; many cognitive processes in humans need repetition because they seem to be a bit broken? (Are there theories about why human memory (heck, higher animal memory in general) is so… rough?)
Since hypermnesics do exist, my theory is that that used to be a common phenotype, but our consciousness was flawed, it was too much power, we became neurotic, or something, and all evolution could do to sort it out was to cripple it.
In light of my reply here (“so I guess even children don’t know how to ask good questions”), I wonder if they’re reaching for something more than answers, maybe my impulse to tell them they shouldn’t ask questions they don’t really care about the answers to, is actually well placed. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe they want to learn about asking questions, and the process can’t start to mature until you let them know that they’re kind of doing it wrong.
(I’m aware that there’s a real risk, if this theory is wrong, of making the child explore less freely than they’re supposed to, which I will try to hold in regard.)
If we assume it has a purpose.. how does learning work? What needs learning?
1) Theories of how people learn: Repetition.
2) A good way to acquire information in theory: get information from multiple sources, and see what matches up.
3) Some knowledge we might take for granted. Perhaps: what topics are taboo, words, sounds, grammatical structure—we might suppose that knowing how to ask questions (Like where the word why goes in the sentence,) will fall out of this (if they get it wrong, it’s an opportunity to find out/be corrected).
The process in question doesn’t sound super effective (to us):
1) Unless it’s optimizing for repetition.
2) Unless it’s optimizing for multiple sources of knowledge.
3) Unless it’s a way of finding out basic things we take for granted, or what’s taboo.
Why would any working cognitive process require repetition? The feeling I get when I see that is that the process doesn’t know enough about what its pursuing to get there efficiently, and it might never.
Sometimes a cognition doesnt know much about what it’s pursuing due to low conscious integration.. sometimes I guess I have to accept it’s just because of whatever ignorance puts it in the position of pursuing a thing. We could hardly expect, for instance, a person looking for the key to a box in an object archive, to ask for a list of keys of a particular length, because they wouldn’t know how long the key is, nor would they ask for keys with a particular number of peaks, for they could not know how many points it has, they can maybe give us an estimate of its diameter, or its age, but their position as a key-seeker means that there are certain Good Questions that they necessarily cannot know to ask.
Their search may seem repetitive, but repetition is not the point. Our job as the archivist is to help them to narrow the list of candidates to the fewest possible.
I should have been more specific: Memorization. (Part of speaking any language fluently is knowing words, how to say them, and what they mean—and knowing it fast.)
Aye, I suppose the answer is; many cognitive processes in humans need repetition because they seem to be a bit broken? (Are there theories about why human memory (heck, higher animal memory in general) is so… rough?)
Since hypermnesics do exist, my theory is that that used to be a common phenotype, but our consciousness was flawed, it was too much power, we became neurotic, or something, and all evolution could do to sort it out was to cripple it.