Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m surprised no one has attempted to train crows for use in asymmetrical warfare. At least before the advent of cheap drones.
This is a bit in a Chris Morris movie called Four Lions.
Barry says we come out blurry
Crows are even smarter than we thought
151–160 of 304 posts
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#152We'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…
That this “animals no conscious” is default feels like a sort of all-anthropic religion. I don’t get how one imagines being an animal and… it just exists as an automaton? And for some reason exactly humans are all conscious/intelligent, even brain damaged (in literal sense). I bet “those looking like me are very special” is somewhere in our genes, playing an obsolete role competing with other humanoid groups.
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#153Make sure you are kind to our crow friends, judging by the trajectory of these articles I fear their intelligence is growing as fast as ours is dropping. While that's definitely a joke, I wouldn't be that surprised by a human getting outwitted by a crow even today.
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Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corvids can recognise faces and they are territorial and know the humans in their territory.
My dad always told a story about a guy at work who spotted a crow nest not too far up a tree and decided he would steal the baby crow and raise it. The crows attacked him as he did it and in the end the baby crow died in his care. Sad. But at least after that my dad said every single day he would pull up to work and if any crows were there they would dive bomb him. Only him. My dad said this carried on for years.
Assuming that the crows attacking years later were not conveyed a detailed account of the original events, this is an interesting model also applies to many human group behaviors:
"this is the guy we hate, it gives a great feeling of community expressing that hate. Yeah, there's probably a reason why we hate him, but that's besides the point"
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#155We'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…
Fully agree in theory - especially that humans aren’t capable of defining a consistent agreed upon measure for - basically anything - let alone something as culturally amorphous as “intelligence” The problem with this line of reasoning though is that it proves too much, and has the same problem, clumping intelligence into too small of classes for the level of ethical differentiation that humans can manage. The implic…
Idk, for me one man vs one octopus is sort of not my business. But, in a pressure-less situation with a man vs thousands of octopuses, my trolley would probably go over a man, especially if the tracks already lead to him or he has valuable gear. Call me unethical, but I find most of “ethics” human-ist as in race-ist. It is a justification algorithm for the most part rather than true ethics.
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whales almost certainly do not feel the same way. They feel like whales about their young. That's not to discount whales: that feeling may be profound and emotional for them. But it's probably alien to the human experience.
Why probably?
I dunno, I've never spoken with a whale to compare notes.
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the sentiment, but human children who are 2 completely dominate all known animal intelligence. They can speak in sentences and use tools in complex ways. There may be studies that show a raven might use a stick to help it find food. Well, a two year old will carry a stool halfway across the house to reach the scissors that will open a bag of veggie straws :) At 3 they can recognize letters _easily_ and start l…
I have quite a bit of exposure to kids that age range. The behavior you described is FAR from normal.
Yeah, putting in effort for vegetables?
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all. It's a good thing people who accomplish great things don't think like that or we'd have no science at all, because for millions of years we didn't. If they did, they would have had to conclude it isn't possible to predict the future. Yet here we are, knowing why apples fall (or whatever.)
Some people searched for structure of the atom, and found great things. Other searched for perpetuum mobile, and found nothing. We know that they will never find anything, but it does not stop them, there are still youtube videos being made today. It's important to tell former from latter. Unexplored things are not the same as things that have been explored and found false.
People started searching for the structure of the atom in like 400 BC and didn't make any progress until they knew how. We know why perpetual motion isn't going to be found, so there's no reason to look for it in the first place. This isn't a relevant argument.
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but still got nothing useful. I think it's fair to assume there is nothing to find there at all. It's a good thing people who accomplish great things don't think like that or we'd have no science at all, because for millions of years we didn't. If they did, they would have had to conclude it isn't possible to predict the future. Yet here we are, knowing why apples fall (or whatever.)
Some people searched for structure of the atom, and found great things. Other searched for perpetuum mobile, and found nothing. We know that they will never find anything, but it does not stop them, there are still youtube videos being made today. It's important to tell former from latter. Unexplored things are not the same as things that have been explored and found false.
Though perpetual motion is reasoned to be false, rather than declared false because statistically we never had any luck trying, or by an exhaustive search of all possible perpetual motion machines.
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m surprised no one has attempted to train crows for use in asymmetrical warfare. At least before the advent of cheap drones.
Pigeons were used in WW1 and WW2 for communication. Paddy the pigeon [0] flew 230 miles across the English channel to relay the success of the D-Day invasion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddy_(pigeon)
I find it fascinating how scientists still haven't definitively figured out how magnetoreception in birds works. Humans have utilized homing pigeons for thousands of years [1], but it is still a mystery as to how it works. To quote a paper from 2019 [2]:
> Yet in spite of considerable progress in recent years, many details are still unclear, among them details of the radical pair processes and their transformation into a nervous signal, the precise location of the magnetite-based receptors and the centres in the brain where magnetic information is combined with other navigational information for the navigational processes.
1. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-egypt-pigeon-p...