Episode 136

I spoke with Judy Fan about:

* Our use of physical artifacts for sensemaking

* Why cognitive tools can be a double-edged sword

* Her approach to scientific inquiry and how that approach has developed

Enjoy—and let me know what you think!

Judy is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford and director of the Cognitive Tools Lab. Her lab employs converging approaches from cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to reverse engineer the human cognitive toolkit, especially how people use physical representations of thought — such as sketches and prototypes — to learn, communicate, and solve problems.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (00:49) Throughlines and discontinuities in Judy’s research

* (06:26) “Meaning” in Judy’s research

* (08:05) Production and consumption of artifacts

* (13:03) Explanatory questions, why we develop visual artifacts, science as a social enterprise

* (15:46) Unifying principles

* (17:45) “Hard limits” to knowledge and optimism

* (21:47) Tensions in different fields’ forms of sensemaking and establishing truth claims

* (30:55) Dichotomies and carving up the space of possible hypotheses, conceptual tools

* (33:22) Cognitive tools and projectivism, simplified models vs. nature

Judy Fan: Reverse Engineering the Human Cognitive Toolkit