ChrisHallquist comments on Academic Cliques - Less Wrong

21 Post author: ChrisHallquist 08 November 2013 04:27AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 08 November 2013 07:45:22PM 9 points [-]

humans manage to learn language so readily in early childhood, when compared with how bad we are at objectively simpler tasks like arithmetic

Children hear adults speaking all the time, but they don't usually hear adults doing maths very often.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 08 November 2013 08:15:44PM 3 points [-]

I've wondered about that. Someone should try writing an iPad app that a toddler can play with to have their brain bombarded by math, and see if that leads to math coming as naturally to them as language. I doubt it would work but it might be worth trying.

Comment author: Vej_Kse 09 November 2013 03:23:45PM *  3 points [-]

It seems that simply bombarding the brain isn't sufficient, even for language, and that social interaction is required (see this study), so that playing math games with the child would be a better idea.

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 10 November 2013 12:10:04AM 2 points [-]

How does the brain decide whether it thinks of something as a social interaction? I would assume that computer/video games with significant social components hack into that, so hacking into it to teach math should be doable.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 November 2013 07:36:23PM -1 points [-]

I believe the way it works for language is that one can learn it from television, but not radio.

Comment author: erratio 12 November 2013 05:34:54PM 2 points [-]

Nope. It needs to be something with feedback.

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 11 November 2013 01:09:05AM 0 points [-]

That makes intuitive sense, at least in hindsight, since TV provides ample non-linguistic information that you can learn to associate with the linguistic information.

Comment author: Laoch 13 December 2013 09:14:25AM 0 points [-]

I think this book maybe of some interest to you Chris. It was the text book recommend for a CogSci class I did, dealing with how cognitive systems develop in response to their environment.