Crows are even smarter than we thought • Hacker News Board

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#201

Post by eru » Sat, Aug 31, 2024, 10:48 AM UTC

000ooo000 wrote: post #80

nullhole wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cheeky experiment was done to prove this back in the aughts: https://www.science.org/content/article/caveman-or-dick-chen... "In a creative experiment that relied on rubber masks of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other distinctive mugs, researchers have shown that American crows have an uncanny ability to pick a familiar human face out of a crowd."

I vaguely remember a doco (about a study?) where they established similar fear in crows using similar masks. They tracked these crows, waited for them to breed, and tested how the babies responded. Saw this over a decade ago now I'd guess, so my memory is fuzzy, but IIRC the takeaway was that the parent crows were able to communicate the knowledge to their offspring that these masks were bad news.

I remember that story from the documentary called 'A Murder of Crows'.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#202

Post by DFHippie » Sat, Aug 31, 2024, 10:56 AM UTC

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #149

hungie wrote: post #121

Earlier 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 feel that people who study animal intelligence started with the dictum "don't assume similarity to humans" and immediately interpreted it as "assume dissimilarity to humans".

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#203

Post by hypercube33 » Sat, Aug 31, 2024, 11:00 AM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #187

TeMPOraL wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd still be better than cheap drones at remote pick-pocketing - if you could train them to spot and snatch coins and bills. I was wondering about the opposite too. Could you train a crow to watch you throw a marker, say a pebble of specific color, and then fly to the location it landed to perform specific action? Say, if we go for personal mischief instead of warfare: - red marker = find whatever interesting obje…

I suspect they would be difficult to train, because of their attitude. We see this with many wild animals. Dogs train easily, but coyotes and wolves, who are even smarter, are much more difficult to train. One of my favorite nature vignettes, is a part of Planet Earth , by the BBC, about Cape Hunting Dogs[0]. It looks like a military assault. They are really clever, and work well, as a team. But if you could train cr…

Badgers are incredibly smart and we seem to not be able to train them at all. There's a pair on YouTube that figure out how to escape their sanctuary

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#204

Post by valbis » Sat, Aug 31, 2024, 11:15 AM UTC

evanmoran wrote: post #98

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…

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 agree. At birth a human is much less capable than most animals - but the learning algorithm is so much better that they'll surpass any other non-human organisms in 2 years. This is honestly amazing an one of the best thing to witness when you are a parent. It's baffling - not only seeing your child learn new things, but also witnessing the ever increasing pace at which they learn new things.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#205

Post by zvmaz » Sat, Aug 31, 2024, 11:30 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

Hopefully one day we will stop eating them, too.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#206

Post by gnz11 » Sat, Aug 31, 2024, 11:35 AM UTC

AlbertCory wrote: post #79

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…

Hear. I really believe that, when people ask if some organism is "intelligent" or "conscious" (answer is usually No), they're just asking how similar it is to a human. Intelligence or consciousness is not a Thing; it's just a set of behaviors that have proven adaptive to some species. Crows have somewhat more of those behaviors than we'd thought. By way of example, many animals have much better smell than we do becau…

> Intelligence or consciousness is not a Thing; it's just a set of behaviors that have proven adaptive to some species

This just reduces consciousness down to the "easy problem" and ignores the "hard problem" though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#207

Post by badbird33 » Sat, Aug 31, 2024, 11:44 AM UTC

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…

This reminds me of Dark City: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#208

Post by randallsquared » Sat, Aug 31, 2024, 11:46 AM UTC

wruza wrote: post #152

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…

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.

One can imagine being a thermostat, or a car. The question of what it is like to be a bat skips the hard problem.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#209

Post by jonplackett » Sat, Aug 31, 2024, 12:01 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #187

TeMPOraL wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd still be better than cheap drones at remote pick-pocketing - if you could train them to spot and snatch coins and bills. I was wondering about the opposite too. Could you train a crow to watch you throw a marker, say a pebble of specific color, and then fly to the location it landed to perform specific action? Say, if we go for personal mischief instead of warfare: - red marker = find whatever interesting obje…

I suspect they would be difficult to train, because of their attitude. We see this with many wild animals. Dogs train easily, but coyotes and wolves, who are even smarter, are much more difficult to train. One of my favorite nature vignettes, is a part of Planet Earth , by the BBC, about Cape Hunting Dogs[0]. It looks like a military assault. They are really clever, and work well, as a team. But if you could train cr…

It’s interesting how our view of animal intelligence is massively shaped by the animals we see every day - pets, farm animals, zoo animals. All animals that have had their natural intelligence degraded substantially.

Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought

#210

Post by jonplackett » Sat, Aug 31, 2024, 12:03 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #199

kibae wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Didn't they have wireless communication? What benefits did the pigeons have?

Harder to intercept?