Email exchange discussing cognitive development theories and personal dynamics

symbolic messages that everybody can fill with their own content in a way that resonates with them. The non- controversial parts will still be insightful. He manages to come across as very subversive, while rarely offending anyone (except the hard scientists, that miss hard substance). He also asks influential people and smart students or faculty to write parts of his essays and speeches for him. This invests them in his success, especially because he is going to reward and acknowledge them. Very few of his ideas are original, instead he is good at identifying and testing thoughts he reads or hears from others. I am still beset by the ruinous instinct that the goal of communication ought to be mutual understanding. Joi is right. Public communication is about reaching one's goals. Bests, Joscha On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 12:42 AM, Joscha Bach <q wrote: Dear Jeffrey, thank you for your support and encouragement, even where I fail. Sorry for being such an embarrassment today. I will spell out today's argument a bit better and cohesive when I get to it. Also, I should have recognized that the main point I tried to make would trigger Noam (who was as always very generous, patient, kind and humble on the personal level, even though he did not feel like conceding anything on the conceptual one). Almost all of Noam's work focused on the idea that humans have very specific circuits or modules (even when most people in his field began to have other ideas), and his frustration is that it is so hard to find or explain them. I found Noam's hypothesis very compelling in the past. I still think that the idea that language is somehow a cultural or social invention of our species is wrong. But I think that there is a chance (we don't know that, but it seems to most promising hypothesis IMHO) that the difference between humans and apes is not a very intricate special circuit, but genetically simple developmental switches. The bootstrapping of cognition works layer by layer during the first 20 years of our life. Each layer takes between a few months and a few years to train in humans. While a layer is learned, there is not much going on in the higher layers yet, and after the low level learning is finished, it does not change very much. This leads to the characteristic bursts in child development, that have famously been described by Piaget. The first few layers are simple perceptual stuff, the last ones learn social structure and self-in-society. The switching works with something like a genetic clock, very slowly in humans, but much more quickly in other apes, and very fast in small mammals. As a result, human children take nine months before their brains are mature enough to crawl, and more than a year before they can walk. Many African populations are quite a bit faster. In the US, black children outperform white children in motor development, even in very poor and socially disadvantaged households, but they lag behind (and never catch up) in cognitive development even after controlling for family income. Gorillas can crawl after 2 months, and build their own nests after 2.5 years. They leave their mothers at 3-4 years. Human children are pretty much useless during the first 10-12 years, but during each phase, their brains have the opportunity to encounter many times as much training data as a gorilla brain. Humans are HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_025963