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Crows are even smarter than we thought

nautil.us

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Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#31

Post by pajeets »

manbitesdog wrote: post #30
pajeets wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I find most fascinating. That crows are capable of gossip, organization, planning and execution. "you know that dude that lives by the water? protect him he feeds us." "you know the big guy that walks his dog and barks at us? we found out where he lives." I've seen crows execute their own (seriously). They would crowd and walk him over the edge and when he fell they would just attack him. I've seen crows…

Some years ago I started leaving food in my patio for one crow that lived in an electric post nearby. Then he started leaving random shiny stuff in the outside table: pieces of metal, coins and once an SD card. The most suprising thing to me was that the stuff was always in the exact center of the round table.

same what is amazing is that they seem to know we are attracted to shiny stuff: constantly glancing at our phones, counting coins, jewelry

i dont know if this urban legend is true but apparently one guy was raking in a few hundred bucks a month by training crows to find coins and cash on the street

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#32

Post by sitkack »

thelastparadise wrote: post #25
sitkack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found Gary Larson's alt account. You should turn it into a short movie using AI. I have thought something similar but more along the lines that in the universe above us, we are 3 days into a science experiment and either a) they don't know we exist or b) the look in with their microscope and see patterns for cities or c) they have a statistical measure of how many have developed ecosystems and set off a nuclear weapo…

No, it most definitely is not.

Is a joke, it is very much in the theme of humans as test subjects, a common gag in his comics.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#33

Post by tetrisgm »

We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully. If we accept that human children are smart, then we must accept that species at equivalent levels of cognition are as well.

Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart, and more intelligent than a human child.

Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between humans and animals creates this weird divide where we constantly assume that we are the only intelligent life. It feels to me a bit like thinking the earth is the center of the universe. Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#34

Post by ethbr1 »

manbitesdog wrote: post #30
pajeets wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I find most fascinating. That crows are capable of gossip, organization, planning and execution. "you know that dude that lives by the water? protect him he feeds us." "you know the big guy that walks his dog and barks at us? we found out where he lives." I've seen crows execute their own (seriously). They would crowd and walk him over the edge and when he fell they would just attack him. I've seen crows…

Some years ago I started leaving food in my patio for one crow that lived in an electric post nearby. Then he started leaving random shiny stuff in the outside table: pieces of metal, coins and once an SD card. The most suprising thing to me was that the stuff was always in the exact center of the round table.

I had never considered the attack vector of USB stick, distributed by crow...

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#35

Post by t-3 »

Crows are definitely smart, but I've seen other birds outsmarting them before. It seems to me that social behavior is a bit overweighted when it comes to attempting to measure animal intelligence.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#37

Post by api »

tetrisgm wrote: post #33

We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully. If we accept that human children are smart, then we must accept that species at equivalent levels of cognition are as well. Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart, and more intelligent than a human child. Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between hum…

IMO all life is intelligent in some way or form. Evolution itself is even intelligent in that it’s a learning system that adapts and solves problems.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#38

Post by andewulfe »

tetrisgm wrote: post #33

We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully. If we accept that human children are smart, then we must accept that species at equivalent levels of cognition are as well. Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart, and more intelligent than a human child. Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between hum…

Ted Chiang has an excellent short story on this subject, regarding the construction of the Arecibo radio telescope as told from the perspective of a parrot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Silence_(short_story...

It's very short. Worth a quick read and a long thought.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#40

Post by dayjah »

sitkack wrote: post #19
lr4444lr wrote: post #7

Sometimes I wonder whether we're being watched by a super intelligent species beyond our current detection that occasionally places objects in certain configurations in front of the smarter of our species throughout history, and writes articles based on their observations titled things like, "homo sapiens smarter than previously known: demonstrates understanding of unified theory of electromagnetic waves through RF s…

Found Gary Larson's alt account. You should turn it into a short movie using AI. I have thought something similar but more along the lines that in the universe above us, we are 3 days into a science experiment and either a) they don't know we exist or b) the look in with their microscope and see patterns for cities or c) they have a statistical measure of how many have developed ecosystems and set off a nuclear weapo…

Honestly I envision this concept a lot; I was first inspired by Men in Black where a cat has a universe in a bauble attached to a collar around its neck. The bauble looks like a marble.
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