Preschoolers learning to guess the teacher's password [link]

This isn't guessing a teacher's password. This is children making the reasonable (and in most circumstances accurate) assumption that adults know more about the world then they do especially when adults say so. And for the vast majority of little children, they won't be as smart as their teachers.

Sure there are stupid adults. And there are stupid teachers. (I remember the precise moment in time when I first realized that their were stupid adults. I was about 6 years old and I couldn't explain to a certain relative how War was a really dumb card game because one had no control over anything. It was a traumatic realization.)

But even for smart kids, they can benefit a lot from school, especially at an early age.

We like to complain about education. And there's no question that there are serious problems with how children learn and how our educational system functions. But for the vast majority of children, even for a lot of the smart ones, a traditional education system when it is functioning as intended works fine.

My daughter is ridiculously charming. She has learnt (I don't know where) to answer questions with slightly widened eyes, saying "I don't know!" as if she is genuinely surprised not to know whatever it is. It is SO CUTE that even I fell for it for a while, until I realised she was just being lazy. I have now told her she's not allowed to say that when I ask her something. Good social engineering for password elicitation, though.

I think I formed the idea pretty early on that my teachers were idiots, like age five or thereabouts. Never realized before how important that could've been in preventing this particular bit of early brain damage!

Note that there's a link to Joshua Tenenbaum's "How to Grow a Mind" which EVERYONE SHOULD READ.

It's an accessibly written framework for how learning happens, from a very interesting cognitive scientist at MIT. And it gives one of the best explanations for Bayesian inference I've seen:

Why, given three examples of different kinds of horses, would a child generalize the word “horse” to all and only horses (h1)? Why not h2, “all horses except Clydesdales”; h3, “all animals”; or any other rule consistent with the data? Likelihoods favor the more specific patterns, h1 and h2; it would be a highly suspicious coincidence to draw three random examples that all fall within the smaller sets h1 or h2 if they were actually drawn from the much larger h3 (18). The prior favors h1 and h3, because as more coherent and distinctive categories, they are more likely to be the referents of common words in language (1). Only h1 scores highly on both terms.