Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute • Hacker News Board

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#361

Post by kyuudou » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 9:53 PM UTC

withinboredom wrote: post #66

missedthecue wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so how about the fact that they haven't figured out how to heal broken bones? Is that my arrogance again, or is it that they would just prefer to flop on the ground until nightfall and then be eaten alive by coyotes?

Can you heal a shattered leg all by yourself with no one around? I guarantee you’ll lay on the ground until nightfall and probably be eaten by coyotes (since you’re a human, they /might/ leave you alone). If you have someone with you, maybe they can carry you. Crows can’t carry other crows. If they wanted to fix the other crow, they’d have to do it where the crow fell. It would still get eaten by coyotes. They can’t…

I think what's really at the core of this is whether crows would figure out such advances given sufficient evolutionary pressure to do so. One could reason that crows are smart enough to avoid most situations that would cause broken bones but if something forced them to adapt, would they for example evolve thicker, stronger bones. Or if their common predators disappeared, would that allow them to build more permanent communities where they had the spare time to learn about their environment enough to manipulate it?

Humans by and large, especially in less forgiving environments with harsh winters, are helpless without the ability to manipulate their environment seeing as they are hairless apes who without modern medicine could die from an infection from a mere scratch.

Basically, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#362

Post by kyuudou » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

V-2 wrote: post #152

cassalian wrote: post #7

> crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals. I've always found the common thought that only humans and a select few of other animals are the only ones that posses higher intelligence to be incredibly arrogant of our species. Why wouldn't they have higher…

High intelligence isn't just a blessing. There are serious evolutionary costs associated (such as, for one, longer childhood). Evolution patterns follow the adage "use it or lose it", so if a species doesn't show signs of benefiting from higher intelligence, why should we assume that it's there? Why would natural selection maintain this trait if there was no obvious payback?

> High intelligence isn't just a blessing.

Not only that, mental illness correlates strongly with higher IQ: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human...

Perhaps that's why I frequently see links about depression, bipolar etc on HN... I read so many comments about "I got burned out coding 15 hour days and then I got diagnosed with major depression and my life's been a wreck since and no one will hire me" sort of themes!

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#363

Post by kyuudou » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #168

ekianjo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why wouldn't they have higher intelligence? Because almost no other animal appears to think ahead of time , master fire, build tools that did not exist before? You can come up with numerous explanations as to why it's that, but what one's species' brain can come up with will be a serious constraint as well.

> think ahead of time The angry, injured tiger that killed its hunter by stalking his house and planning an ambush comes to mind https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129551... > master fire, Nothing comes to mind but I would not rule out some kind of animal using fire for some purpose > build tools that did not exist before A number of species have been shown to construct tools to make their labor ea…

> master fire

To be fair, I don't think tigers were visited by Prometheus nor did they benefit from his sacrifice to humans!

Sorry, I'll see my way out...

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#364

Post by loco5niner » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 10:44 PM UTC

puranjay wrote: post #278

renjimen wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Douglas Hofstadter writes about intelligence being the reason behind his (almost) vegetarianism. If I recall correctly, he doesn't have any qualms about swatting a mosquito because on the sliding scale of intelligence they're somewhere near the bottom, being about as sophisticated as some software he could write himself. He doesn't think twice about deleting software, so why hold reservations about killing an insect?…

To take your point further, I wonder as we move closer and closer to artificial general intelligence, would deleting software or even a piece of code be truly 'ethical'? You are destroying intelligence, after all. I have zero doubt that we will have AI that's at least as smart as a dog within our lifetimes, if not true AGI

Even further, once AI is sufficiently smart enough, we can start eliminating ourselves.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#365

Post by barbs » Fri, Sep 25, 2020, 11:26 PM UTC

hnick wrote: post #336

phillc73 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother feeds the local magpies, who turn up every morning for their free feed. One can argue about whether this is environmentally sound, but my mother lives alone and she enjoys the connection. She has them literally eating out of her hand. This week she sent me a photo of a young juvenile magpie which had arrived for the first time, clearly brought along by the parents to learn the ropes.

I know an older lady who does this too, she just grabs beef mince from the fridge and feeds them every day. That probably isn't too harmful for them, at least it's not bread.

My grandma does the same thing. She'll come out and withold the food until it sings

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#366

Post by orestarod » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 1:45 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #324

hexbinencoded wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. You can make friends with crows, and they will remember you for a very long time. If you get shiny things, then you're the crow's meow. Bones maybe just "meh." https://youtu.be/dg3ApNJct6Q https://youtu.be/0fiAoqwsc9g https://youtu.be/HWXe7Js6GnI https://youtu.be/VOmRNeYZVfE Furthermore, crows can be sneaky. A murder of them hanging out behind my mechanic's goaded the dork of the group into stealing a bag sunflo…

Not only will those crows remember you, but so will other crows that have never seen you before. There's growing evidence that crows are capable of social learning, teaching things to other crows in the murder (including subsequent generations). I strongly suspect that one of these days we're going to discover that crows and their relatives are not only capable of using language, but already are speaking languages th…

Instead of a full fledged language, they may have a more restricted language to communicate that "that" human is friendly - so the friendly crows you have never seen before may have seen you first, together with your buddy, and been informed of your friendliness. To recognise you as friend without ever meeting you before needs a lot more complex language.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#367

Post by renjimen » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 3:27 AM UTC

kyuudou wrote: post #356

renjimen wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Douglas Hofstadter writes about intelligence being the reason behind his (almost) vegetarianism. If I recall correctly, he doesn't have any qualms about swatting a mosquito because on the sliding scale of intelligence they're somewhere near the bottom, being about as sophisticated as some software he could write himself. He doesn't think twice about deleting software, so why hold reservations about killing an insect?…

Perhaps in the future there will be death penalty arguments for bad AI? Or insanity arguments "judge I had some faulty RAM which caused the malfunction of the policing robots - if proper maintenance had been done this tragedy could've been avoided"

How about the ol' nature or nurture debate? "Judge, I was trained on a biased dataset!"

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#368

Post by renjimen » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 3:31 AM UTC

puranjay wrote: post #278

renjimen wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Douglas Hofstadter writes about intelligence being the reason behind his (almost) vegetarianism. If I recall correctly, he doesn't have any qualms about swatting a mosquito because on the sliding scale of intelligence they're somewhere near the bottom, being about as sophisticated as some software he could write himself. He doesn't think twice about deleting software, so why hold reservations about killing an insect?…

To take your point further, I wonder as we move closer and closer to artificial general intelligence, would deleting software or even a piece of code be truly 'ethical'? You are destroying intelligence, after all. I have zero doubt that we will have AI that's at least as smart as a dog within our lifetimes, if not true AGI

Deletion is one thing, but what about even turning off an AI? GPT3 cost 12 million dollars to train - I'm not sure how much it costs to run, but certainly more than your average human being. Who pays for that?

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#369

Post by guerrilla » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 3:31 AM UTC

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #293

guerrilla wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're begging the question. You've defined what humans do as success. It's not even clear that what we do isn't complete failure (see climate change, nuclear war, etc.) Let's see if our actions keep us alive for some 160 million years.

So let’s say human behavior is failure, and animals are at least reasonably smart. We’re implying the reason why animals don’t engage in human-like behavior is that they recognize it will lead to things like climate change and nuclear war. Why are they not stopping us from destroying them along with ourselves?

No, that's not the claim, only that our "success" is not a good measure of intelligence.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#370

Post by Naracion » Sat, Sep 26, 2020, 6:12 AM UTC

axaxs wrote: post #243

warent wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so blown away by the clarity of speech! After hearing him talk like that, hearing the normal bird noises almost sounds strange, like a human mimicking a bird, or like he's gotten impatient and wants us to understand his native language.

If you haven't watched it already, you should check out 'Dancing With The Birds' on Netflix. Maybe I'm biased being a huge bird lover, but man that movie left me in awe. This scene in particular... https://youtu.be/Eg0iSIHIK34

You might enjoy the superb lyre bird imitating sounds as mind boggling as a chainsaw--and when I say imitate, I mean I couldn't have distinguished the lyre bird sound from a real chainsaw. It's really mind-boggling to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq-yQ