Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

sciencemag.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 98 posts

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#41

Post by toomanybeersies »

gdfasfklshg4 wrote: post #25
fredley wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a great ad, and that it's an issue that will benefit from wider awareness (although it's got that anyway in spades during this whole thing), but I'm 100% with the decision to disallow this ad from being broadcast on TV. It is a Greenpeace ad, and Greenpeace is a political organisation.

I agree with you 100%. I also think that we should just ban palm oil in general. I'm not sure that it has any applications worth the damage to rainforests.

An article came across my feeds today suggesting that banning palm oil might have unintended side effects [1]

Basically, a reduction in consumption of palm oil would result in manufacturers switching to soybean oil instead. A lot of soybean oil is grown in South America and contributes to deforestation over there. Banning palm oil simply shifts the environmental damage. Palm oil is also apparently one of the least land intensive oils to grow. Instead of banning specific products, we should work towards sustainable growing instead.

I haven't done any additional research on those claims, but it is food for thought.

[1] https://theconversation.com/palm-oil-boycott-could-actually-...

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#42

Post by VBprogrammer »

gdfasfklshg4 wrote: post #25
fredley wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a great ad, and that it's an issue that will benefit from wider awareness (although it's got that anyway in spades during this whole thing), but I'm 100% with the decision to disallow this ad from being broadcast on TV. It is a Greenpeace ad, and Greenpeace is a political organisation.

I agree with you 100%. I also think that we should just ban palm oil in general. I'm not sure that it has any applications worth the damage to rainforests.

> I also think that we should just ban palm oil in general. I'm not sure that it has any applications worth the damage to rainforests.

That would be totally misguided.

> While only 5 percent of the world's vegetable oil farmland is used for palm plantations, palm cultivation produces 38 percent of the world's total vegetable oil supply.[82] In terms of oil yield, a palm plantation is 10 times more productive than soya bean and rapeseed cultivation because the palm fruit and kernel both provide usable oil.[82]

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_oil

Banning palm oil would increase demand for oils which have lower yields leading to an increase in the cleared areas.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#43

Post by mannykannot »

twimbley wrote: post #32
subroutine wrote: post #20

Puts on critic hat The article is making a claim that can be summarized as... the cognitive capacity to share with conspecifics something learned more than 120 seconds ago, is unique to humans and orangutans They also inform you that bees have this capacity. That should be enough to make anyone skeptical. It seems like they identified a particular behavior unique among apes to Orangutans - suppressing vocalization in…

So you're idea is that lots of living things innately perform this sort of skill, and that choosing to look at from a certain perspective lends the impression that it's a hallmark of intellectual distinction, simply because they're choosing to look at things the wrong way? I think the idea is that it takes a bit more abstract symbolic thought to look at rival predators, then look at peers of the same species, and mak…

This is the problem with regarding intelligence as just a collection of externally-observable behaviors. We simply don't know, at this point, the extent to which the orangutans are choosing this pattern of behavior as a result of considering the possible outcomes of the alternatives.

As someone who spends a fair amount of time hiking in woodlands, I am familiar with the squeak of a chipmunk dashing for its burrow after spotting me, and I get the impression that they are silent if I have come close to them before they notice me. It is not difficult to posit how this pattern of behavior could arise from the interplay of a couple of related instinctive responses, and the same can be said for this orangutan behavior (though it does require the ability to remember a recent threat.) Whether there is more to it than that cannot be deduced from these observations.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#44

Post by mannykannot »

yorwba wrote: post #13
dmos62 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures. I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature. There are so many prejudices and world views embded in our languages. We call ourselves hackers, but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?

What would one do at such an event? Maybe something like that already exists, just without "hack" in the name.

It is ubiquitous: jokes, puns, banter, poetry, the constant reinvention of slang...

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#46

Post by nicoburns »

mannykannot wrote: post #43
twimbley wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're idea is that lots of living things innately perform this sort of skill, and that choosing to look at from a certain perspective lends the impression that it's a hallmark of intellectual distinction, simply because they're choosing to look at things the wrong way? I think the idea is that it takes a bit more abstract symbolic thought to look at rival predators, then look at peers of the same species, and mak…

This is the problem with regarding intelligence as just a collection of externally-observable behaviors. We simply don't know, at this point, the extent to which the orangutans are choosing this pattern of behavior as a result of considering the possible outcomes of the alternatives. As someone who spends a fair amount of time hiking in woodlands, I am familiar with the squeak of a chipmunk dashing for its burrow aft…

True, but note that this is also true of observations about other humans. How do I know that the behaviour of other humans isn't just instinctive?

I'd argue only assuming that mt experience is similar to theirs. I think it is far more reasonable to extend this line of thinking to orangutans, than it is to jave different standards for humans and other apes...

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#47

Post by always_good »

dmos62 wrote: post #35
yorwba wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would one do at such an event? Maybe something like that already exists, just without "hack" in the name.

I think that we, as a civilization, don't really have the infrastructure (habit?) to talk about language i.e. look at it as technology, much less modify it. There's people creating artificial languages, which is really cool, but there's no obvious way to apply that in a mainstream way. Then again, if someone were to start using English in a different way, it might catch on. He would just have to optimize his changes…

We easily treat language as a malleable device. Just look in literature or internet subcultures, but you can see it in day-to-day life if you think about it. You probably do it, too.

The idea and exercise of this is so ubiquitous that I think you're blind to it, like when people suggest there is no American culture.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#48

Post by nicoburns »

johnchristopher wrote: post #34
pluma wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? What changed, exactly? Singular "they" has been around for decades or more. "People of color" as a general shorthand for non-whites is also not exactly new (though fairly recent). The only thing I can think of that evolved rapidly over the past years is "transgender" and "nonbinary", mostly because our shared cultural understanding of those attributes has significantly improved. If you think of these as "polit…

> Singular "they" has been around for decades or more. Funny you mention it, I only learned about it yesterday on the dead cells subreddit.

Really? What word would you use to describe a baby (or androgynous looking person) whose gender you weren't sure of?

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#49

Post by always_good »

johnchristopher wrote: post #34
pluma wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? What changed, exactly? Singular "they" has been around for decades or more. "People of color" as a general shorthand for non-whites is also not exactly new (though fairly recent). The only thing I can think of that evolved rapidly over the past years is "transgender" and "nonbinary", mostly because our shared cultural understanding of those attributes has significantly improved. If you think of these as "polit…

> Singular "they" has been around for decades or more. Funny you mention it, I only learned about it yesterday on the dead cells subreddit.

I have a hard time believing that you never used or heard of English's ubiquitous gender-neutral pronoun.

You certainly weren't using "it" to refer to humans.

I'm actually dumbfounded that someone would make this claim. It's almost as unbelievable as someone saying they've heard "ze" more than they've heard "they" in real life.

I don't believe it for a second and think it's more like when my girlfriend recently admitted she's never seen the metric system in recipes. I found this hard to believe and, sure enough, when I made her scroll through the recipes she'd saved in just the last month, "g" and "ml" are at least half the measurements. "Oh, haha, nevermind," she says.

Edit: You use "they" all the time in your comment history for genderless entities like Apple and TechCrunch (didn't want to scroll further). Some could say this is the plural pronoun, like when people pluralize "Radiohead {is->are} a good band", but since you do use "is" in these contexts, you are indeed quite familiar with the singular "they". And if you consume any English at all (as you certainly do on HN and Reddit), you see it daily.

It might seem like I'm making a big deal about nothing, but more and more often I'm starting to see a certain reality revisionism that makes me feel like I'm being gaslit by the people around me.

Re: Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past

#50

Post by [deleted] »

marsrover wrote: post #36
toomanybeersies wrote: post #26

Can we load them up with magic mushrooms and see if they become capable of abstract thought? [1]. For those that don't want to click on my link, there's a (not very scientific) hypothesis that human consciousness evolved from our ancestors eating magic mushrooms. [1] https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis

I really don’t understand why we don’t just do this.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN