Event overview
Tom will demonstrate the challenges that human inductive biases pose for cumulative cultural evolution and describe a situation in which those biases can be overcome.
Abstract: The accumulation of knowledge over successive generations is one of the ways that humans overcome their individual limitations — being able to achieve more than would otherwise be possible with a single brain or a single lifetime. However, we still don’t fully understand the factors that make this process of cumulative cultural evolution possible. Individual humans have inductive biases that help them learn from the limited data they experience. Theoretical and empirical studies of the cultural transmission of information have demonstrated that these inductive biases have a significant impact on the information being transmitted. So how can you build a system that accumulates knowledge out of these noisy and biased components? I will summarize recent work demonstrating the challenges that human inductive biases pose for cumulative cultural evolution and describe one situation in which it is possible to overcome those biases.
Bio: Tom Griffiths is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness and Culture in the Departments of Psychology and Computer Science at Princeton University, where he is also the Director of the new AI Lab. His research explores connections between human and machine learning, using ideas from statistics and artificial intelligence to understand how people solve the challenging computational problems they encounter in everyday life. He has made contributions to the development of Bayesian models of cognition, probabilistic machine learning, nonparametric Bayesian statistics, and models of cultural evolution, and his recent work has demonstrated how methods from cognitive science can shed light on modern artificial intelligence systems. Tom completed his PhD in Psychology at Stanford University in 2005, and taught at Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley before moving to Princeton. He has received awards for his research from organizations ranging from the American Psychological Association to the National Academy of Sciences and is a co-author of the book Algorithms to Live By, introducing ideas from computer science and cognitive science to a general audience. His new book The Laws of Thought tells the story of the quest to find a mathematical theory of the mind and comes out in February 2026.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 26 Nov 2025 | 4:00pm - 5:30pm |
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