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Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

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Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#41

Post by gregfjohnson »

nicklecompte wrote: post #15
tocs3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously I think this is correct but not obvious. It could be we (I am assuming you are also human :) are just the most ambitious.

Orcas are smart enough to give each other distinct names and seem to understand the concept of verbs/nouns when identifying human words[1]. They could very well be smarter than us, but they'd never dominate the planet technologically: their flippers have no evolutionary path to developing fingers and thumbs. [1] Some people point out that we've never learned orca language but they've learned ours. This is true, but i…

Heard the following joke a while back, seems pertinent:

Gaia making a mental note: "Hmm. The jury is definitely out on whether it's a good idea to combine large fore-brains with opposable thumbs.."

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#42

Post by Culonavirus »

Loughla wrote: post #25
numbers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, so impressive that the parrots knows how to minimize the video and browse for other stuff.

I don't know if that is sarcastic, but it is legitimately impressive to me. That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using youtube. It's sort of astonishing to think about. From both the fact that the parrot can figure it out, and that the function and use of youtube is so intuitive to users that a parrot can learn it.

> That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using youtube.

I've heard people describing parrots like hyperactive 4-5 year olds so many times... it's nice to see that in practice lol. It must be a great pet, I could never deal with the constant pooping though. Imagine having to deal with them making a mess every 30 minutes for 70 years. How many poops even is that? Yikes.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#43

Post by Veserv »

tombert wrote: post #38
Veserv wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a pretty profound communication gap that you seem to be discounting. A closer analogy might be trying to teach a 7 year old who speaks a different language. Or even deeper, a 7 year old child who only knows sign language and you do not. The communication gap makes it very hard to figure out how much is a “intelligence” difference versus just being unable to even communicate the contents of the test.

Sure, but even then isn't that making an assumption that animals have the same capacity for communication that we do? Let me try and explain; I don't speak Spanish, but if I had teach a 7 year old who only knew Spanish, presumably I, as a human, could learn Spanish and then teach the 7 year old whatever I needed to. I'm not sure there's an equivalent "crow" language that is even possible for anyone to learn, at least…

No. I am pointing out how being unable to communicate makes it very hard to determine intelligence. It is hard to determine if another human is smart without being able to speak the same language or explain the procedure and contents of the test.

Given that there is no known means to effectively communicate with animals, we are restricted to tests that do not demand shared communication to identify intelligence. These tests must be benchmarked on mutually unintelligible humans.

For instance, a grade school Chinese exam might be a good way of gauging the intelligence of Chinese children, but is a terrible way of gauging the intelligence of French children. Such a test is lousy in certain domains. We must be cognizant of such testing methodology limits in the design of animal intelligence tests.

tl;dr A test that would fail animals and speakers of a different language are not good tests. An animal intelligence test needs to at least pass all humans of comparable intelligence regardless of language to reach the bare minimum of acceptability.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#44

Post by ethbr1 »

kibwen wrote: post #30
ethbr1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube UX: "We have this one weird cohort that's responding abnormally to all our UI A/B testing..."

Only until enough parrot owners find out about this, at which point parrots overtake the human population of Youtube and the metrics start catering to them.

YouTube optimizing for toddlers and parrots makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it...

And that's to say nothing of the parrot ad click farms.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#45

Post by riwsky »

ethbr1 wrote: post #28
INTPenis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they make a sudden and illogical change to their design.

YouTube UX: "We have this one weird cohort that's responding abnormally to all our UI A/B testing..."

Parrots are the original stochastic parrot

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#46

Post by ethbr1 »

Culonavirus wrote: post #42
Loughla wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that is sarcastic, but it is legitimately impressive to me. That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using youtube. It's sort of astonishing to think about. From both the fact that the parrot can figure it out, and that the function and use of youtube is so intuitive to users that a parrot can learn it.

> That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using youtube. I've heard people describing parrots like hyperactive 4-5 year olds so many times... it's nice to see that in practice lol. It must be a great pet, I could never deal with the constant pooping though. Imagine having to deal with them making a mess every 30 minutes for 70 years. How many poops even is that? Yikes.

> Imagine having to deal with them making a mess every 30 minutes for 70 years. How many poops even is that? Yikes.

If my math is right, over 70 years a parrot would give 1,227,240 shits about you.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#47

Post by riwsky »

Veserv wrote: post #43
tombert wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but even then isn't that making an assumption that animals have the same capacity for communication that we do? Let me try and explain; I don't speak Spanish, but if I had teach a 7 year old who only knew Spanish, presumably I, as a human, could learn Spanish and then teach the 7 year old whatever I needed to. I'm not sure there's an equivalent "crow" language that is even possible for anyone to learn, at least…

No. I am pointing out how being unable to communicate makes it very hard to determine intelligence. It is hard to determine if another human is smart without being able to speak the same language or explain the procedure and contents of the test. Given that there is no known means to effectively communicate with animals, we are restricted to tests that do not demand shared communication to identify intelligence. Thes…

Raven’s progressive matrices, obviously intended to test the intelligence of birds.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#48

Post by the_cat_kittles »

tocs3 wrote: post #12
tombert wrote: post #7

It feels like increasingly, we're finding that humans are not quite as "uniquely intelligent" as we thought. Don't get me wrong, humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously, but it does seem like we greatly underestimated the intelligence of a lot of others. Birds like parrots and crows in particular continue to impress me when I see them solving increasingly elaborate puzzles, and figuring out how to ope…

> humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously I think this is correct but not obvious. It could be we (I am assuming you are also human :) are just the most ambitious.

i think it depends how you quantify it. seems like there are many other species that might have things worked out better than we do

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#49

Post by timc3 »

tombert wrote: post #27
tocs3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> humans are still the smartest animal on earth obviously I think this is correct but not obvious. It could be we (I am assuming you are also human :) are just the most ambitious.

I am human (at least as far as I am aware), though I guess with the advent of LLMs that's becoming less evident. It seems obvious to me, though I might be redefining "smartness" in a very human-centric way. It seems pretty clear to me that humans are the smartest in terms of analytical ability; you hear things in the media all the time like "crows are smarter than 7 year old humans", but I think that really depends o…

“four quarters, ten dimes, twenty nickels, one hundred pennies, five dimes and ten nickels are all equal to the same amount” - only a human could come up with something so unintuitive.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#50

Post by Swizec »

Culonavirus wrote: post #42
Loughla wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that is sarcastic, but it is legitimately impressive to me. That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using youtube. It's sort of astonishing to think about. From both the fact that the parrot can figure it out, and that the function and use of youtube is so intuitive to users that a parrot can learn it.

> That parrot looks almost exactly like a 4 year old using youtube. I've heard people describing parrots like hyperactive 4-5 year olds so many times... it's nice to see that in practice lol. It must be a great pet, I could never deal with the constant pooping though. Imagine having to deal with them making a mess every 30 minutes for 70 years. How many poops even is that? Yikes.

> making a mess every 30 minutes for 70 years

Oh that's adorable. I have a parrot and poops aren't even the biggest mess he makes.

They love to fling food. And shredding. And throwing everything you hold dear. And even a tiny 120g parrot like mine is strong enough to open cupboards and drawers.

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