HOWARD GARDNER - Author of A Synthesizing Mind & Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences - Co-director of The Good Project

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How do we define intelligence? What is the point of creativity and intelligence if we are not creating good in the world? In this age of AI, what is the importance of a synthesizing mind?

Howard Gardner, Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, an author of over 30 books, translated into 32 languages, and several hundred articles, is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. He has twice been selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. In the last few years, Gardner has been studying the nature of human synthesizing, a topic introduced in his 2020 memoir, A Synthesizing Mind.

For 28 years, with David Perkins, he was Co-Director of Harvard Project Zero, and in more recent years has served in a variety of leadership positions. Since the middle 1990s, Gardner has directed The Good Project, a group of initiatives, founded in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon. The project promotes excellence, engagement, and ethics in education, preparing students to become good workers and good citizens who contribute to the overall well-being of society. Through research-based concepts, frameworks, and resources, The Good Project seeks to help students reflect upon the ethical dilemmas that arise in everyday life and give them the tools to make thoughtful decisions.

"And I became interested in synthesis and I wrote the memoir quite a while ago, but now with the advent of large language instruments or ChatGPT, the pressure to figure out what synthesis is, what these computing systems can or can't do that human beings are still the privileged cohort in carrying out those tasks, that's made the interest in synthesis more important than ever. If we're trying to decide what policy to cover, whether it's an economic policy about interest rates, or whether - we're talking now during the beginning of the war in the Middle East - what policies to follow militarily, economically, and ethically. For that matter, do we entrust that to some kind of a computational system, or is this something that human judgment needs to be brought to bear? And if so, how and at what point? And these are quintessential synthesizing questions. You can't just look up and say, 'Well, what should we do with the Gaza Strip? Or what should we do in Japan, which has had low interest rates, but the rest of the world has got very high inflation.' These are not things where we just want to press a button and get the answer. These are things we want to discuss and debate and review and maybe even pit one large language instrument against another and see do they come up with the same answers. They might well not."

www.howardgardner.com
http://thegoodproject.org
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262542838/a-synthesizing-mind

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