How do infants treat information they come across?

I sit down with Velisar Manea to chat about how the infant mind develops, the types of biases evolution might have built in, and how they manage to be so adaptive.

We also chat a good bit of theory, particularly about whether we need to attribute mental states to others or whether statistical prediction is enough. We chat about the evolutionary usefulness of biological constraints, the caloric demands of cognition versus the energy demands of AI, and whether something like an LLM can ever actually reach cognition or just mimic it.

Guest: Velisar Manea

Really excited to bring you this chat, but again still having some microphone issues. Still some trial an error!