It really doesn't matter whether a child learns to stack blocks at ten months or at three years. Childhood comes before the rat race. I was phenomenally uncoordinated at least through the age of ten, and it didn't have anything to do with electronic devices because we didn't have those. I'm now perfectly capable of numerous complex and precise physical tasks.
Really? When my kids were young (< 10, so a 12 year span), they were recognizably different cognitive functioning every month or so. Every month was a whole new game.
But yes, I do remember some of the early games, building block towers, as if they were yesterday.
"There has been no time to evolve specialized algorithms for things like chess, programming, riding a bike, etc., and yet we can easily learn these skills."
Not necessarily. We got a mix of innate head-start and training from parents/others for a really, really, long time before we could do that. The brains learning style and speed even changes over time going from rapid learning in intuitive way to learning slower and with more stability in a combo of self- and others-driven way. At some point, our mind is pretty well-formed where our own thoughts and explorations are driving much of our behavior. And somewhere between the kid and adult parts we start easily learning new skills.
There's probably a mix of general, specialized, and stuff in between algorithms. It changes over time, too, instead of being a static, pre-trained model.
What ever you were capable of in school as a child has almost no relevance to your adult self unless you have kept up those skills.
Kids also learn physical moves much faster. I only know a couple of adults that have learned how to handstand as adults and even then, they were already fit or had good strength to weight ratios. Still took a long time to get a good looking hold.
I’ve seen kids just pick it up and start walking and hopping with control in weeks.
What kids find easy or hard has substantially to do with past experience.
Watching my 2 small kids learn and grow, they can over the course of a few months go from not wanting to try something at all because it seems impossible or scary to performing competently, with the only thing in the middle being occasional short attempts (like 10 minutes at a time), spaced weeks apart. Then once they feel basic competence, they can continue to improve very rapidly, while having a better and better time.
Just before the pandemic we had gathered 4 3-year-olds together. Kid A was embarrassed at being a beginner riding a balance bike and refused to even try because kid B was already skilled at it (kid A is now also a pro 1 year later), neither of kids A and B wanted to try going across the monkey bars while kid C had no problem (because his dad had been encouraging him with candy placed further and further away along the monkey bars for a few months), kid C who didn't do much daily running compared to the others felt bad that he was much slower at running.
And the same can be seen for drawing, throwing a ball, reading, playing a musical instrument, speaking a second language, solving simple logic puzzles, building with construction toys ....
At this level, none of these differences are primarily due to "innate talent". There are multiple orders of magnitude difference in skill to gain in a very short time, with fast returns to small amount of spaced practice.
> Isn't 2 years old too young? There are ways to entertain creativity and abstract thinking at that age that involve more physical activity.
Perhaps, though I’m not sure if there is a specific or well-defined reasonable minimum age. I was typing code blocks from the Commodore 64 user manual into the machine itself while learning to read — literally while still young enough to enjoy the The Very Hungry Caterpillar picture book — and yet this did not exclude the desire to also play with the various physical toys my parents got me.
Programming, philosophizing, holding a conversation, playing a sport, applying concepts learned in one domain to another, and a common sense understanding of the world (Minsky's big one).
And it's not just 10-20 years of a blank slate being exposed to data. It's evolved brain structures that know how to learn those skills. That's why a young human child quickly surpasses the learning abilities of chimpanzee.
You obviously don't have kids. Even as 3/4 year olds they have great spatial skills when running, climbing, jumping. Better than most adults. They have less boundaries, that's for sure.
> Even a human brain has to train for ~4-5 months to become interested in shapes
Everyone who wonder how (on a superficial level) grown up humans are so good at learning new categories really should spend time around babies and toddlers and children for this reason...
You quickly realise how much training and brain development it actually takes before we're capable of doing much.
> As adults, we can't progress at the same speed as kids,
This is definitely not true. Adults have more trouble learning some kinds of new motor skills up to expert level, and if the physical skill requires e.g. extreme flexibility kids sometimes have a less fixed bone structure, but adults are a lot faster at getting to basic competence in new physical tasks by building from past experience, and for any other kind of skill adults can learn much faster than kids.
The real problem adults have vs. kids is available time to spend thinking about things (because they have other responsibilities), not raw learning speed.
I'm not saying that this research is rendered obvious by Piaget's work. Nor did I say that the age at which children make certain transitions is fixed in stone. Nor would I try to imply that Piaget discovered everything about the subject. Nor did I try to indicate that there are not gifted children.
However I stand by my claim that Piaget's work provides a framework to understand why a young child's ability at one task (sorting lines by length and objects by weight) is indicative of a much broader range of cognitive skills. Furthermore the fact that cognitive abilities go through periods of rapid advance over a broad range of areas makes it less surprising to me that you see fairly large shifts in where children stand relative to each other in ability.
Your statement is exactly the incarnation of Moravec's paradox. You don't see the amazing things that a 5yr old (even a 2yr old) can do, exactly because these things are completely obvious to us. They become much less obvious once you want your robot to be able to do these same things. At that point these things become horribly difficult.
It's almost certainly the case that learning precision dexterity early in life is far easier than later. There are neurophysiological reasons why it's easier to learn certain skills earlier in life.
That being said, this is just one guy's opinion, not a true motor behavioral study. The impulse to blame the "kids these days" seems like an ever-present force, so I wouldn't place too much emphasis on this without a proper study of precision dextrous manipulation across age cohorts.
The specific anecdote may have been fabricated, but the principle is sound. An example is the marshmallow problem[1], where a group is given some materials and is asked to build, under time pressure, the tallest tower they can with a marshmallow on top. Adults generally fare poorly because they don't experiment enough, building a tall tower and placing a marshmallow on the top as time is running out, only to have the tower collapse under the newly introduced weight. Children often do much better because they start with small, simple structures and iterate quickly.
Eh. Anyone who observes small children will see that they learn very slowly, but constantly. And they are extremely good at it - better than nearly all adults - at a minimum they pick up language, gross motor skills like walking, running, climbing, any number of fine motor skills, within 2-3 years.
They don't work quickly, they display no haste or concern for efficiency. In fact, they're quite inefficient.
Young children's brains aren't developed sufficiently to build these skills. Even a lot of high schoolers have difficulty with it. It's largely taught in post-secondary education because by then, the brain has matured enough to handle the cognitive load.
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