And if you split their tongues, according to family lore, they can talk.
Crows are even smarter than we thought
231–240 of 304 posts
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#232Never piss off a crow for sure.
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#233Their intelligence was clear to me growing up around them, without knowing anything about crows specifically. They clearly have intelligent interactions with each other and the environment, and have a "theory of mind" of people approaching them/interacting with them. They could also figure out how to open/untie garbage bags, gang up to bully other birds and take their food, etc. In the mornings, right outside our house, they would congregate on a tall pine tree and it really looked like they were having a daily standup - one of them yells loudly, others listen silently, then start making noise together :)
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should establish that the crow would only 'attack' any human living in this flat (and neglect any other human walking by this back alley).
I’m surprised no one has attempted to train crows for use in asymmetrical warfare. At least before the advent of cheap drones.
ISTR a study where someone tried to train crows to collect litter in return for small food treats. It worked fine until the crows discovered some old pizza and decided it was better than the study's rewards.
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Honey badgers? I visited a place in Africa where a pair were housed in an old tile-sided swimming pool because they could get through anything else. Until someone left a long-handled garden tool in there and they used it to climb out. One of the two was never seen again. The other was caught in a lion enclosure - it had cornered of the lions who was trying to avoid a fight, allegedly.
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#236We'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…
> We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully.
If we can't define or measure intelligence meaningfully, how can you even claim we are 'intelligent' to begin with?
> Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart
The have levels of intelligence, but they are clearly not very smart. You couldn't even teach them the multiplication table or the basics of number theory.
> and more intelligent than a human child.
No species you listed is smarter 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.
At the very least, we know that mammals with brains have some level of intelligence. Nobody claims humans are the only 'intelligent' life on earth. The claim is we are the most intelligent. And probably the only creatures intelligent enough to ponder about death, mortality, identity and soul.
> Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.
Or maybe elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orangutans will better understand what other minds are like and they'll better understand how they are not alone or special? After all, they are 'very smart' according to you.
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#237We put a lot of effort and funding into trying to contact other intelligent lifeforms in this universe. Why should we believe we can understand each other if we can't even understand the intelligent lifeforms right next to us?
Because symbolic communication is vastly simpler to define and use and translate than non-symbolic communication.
If whale songs and crow language could be written down in discrete symbols, we could figure them out too.
And with higher intelligence we assume that the symbolic language of mathematics will be a universally shared starting point.
The kind of analog pattern-matching required to decipher animal language seems to be notoriously difficult to do if your brain doesn't already come with the right analog "circuits".
I definitely hope that we'll have an AI breakthrough at some point that can decipher animal language, however. One thing's for sure though -- it won't be LLM's since they operate at a symbolic level.
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which age of human child do you mean? I could argue even bugs are "more intelligent" than 1 week old baby - at least they can eat and run away from danger. If we re-define "intelligence" as "smarter than a human baby", then this word covers most animals (and probably some plants too) and becomes useless. When doing species comparison, I think it only makes sense to compare adults to each other, and perhaps even "aver…
My point is that we don't frame animal intelligence as something comparable with humans or somewhat close. I'm not trying to create a leaderboard of intelligence. I think we should consider other species as capable of intelligence, and treat it with the same dignity we give to children.
In (at least) one of Iain Banks’ Culture books, he says that technological progress is not a ladder, but a rock face. The tech which a species develops depends a lot on the conditions of their evolution, and encountering wildly different techs that seem miraculous or incomprehensible to one’s own species is fairly common.
I think of “intelligence” in a similar vein. We can recognize it when it’s close enough in proximity to the path we humans have taken. The further away another species is from that, the less we are able to recognize/judge their level of intelligence. I like this metaphor because it emphasizes the limits of our own abilities to understand vey foreign things. That’s not to say that we could never get better at it, but there will almost certainly always be more outside of our circle of understanding than inside it.
I’m also reminded of the drunk searching for his house key beneath a street light. It’s not where he dropped the key, but he’s searching there because “that’s where the light is.”
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#239There are tons of crows around my house. I feed them, I know them, they know me, but they are so hard to become friends with. They know I'm not a threat, but they are still so afraid of me. This to me is the opposite of intelligence. Otheriwse, they are probably the best parents among the birds. They little ones have such characters and the entire extended family takes care of them.
"They know I'm not a threat, but they are still so afraid of me. This to me is the opposite of intelligence."
Frankly, you don't have enough information for that conclusion.
First of all, from a bird's point of view, we are massive, clumsy and extremely powerful creatures the size of a 10-story building. If I had to live around such creatures, I would keep my distance just in case. Something that big can hurt you even without intending to do so.
Second, you don't really know if they can trust you. It is entirely possible that someone else in your neighbourhood / region fed them, gained their trust, then hurt them (or maybe "just" captured them for some time etc., an ornithologist would do). In that case, once bitten, twice shy. Most long-lived smart birds probably witnessed their kin being killed by humans; people would be expected to suffer from a bit of PTSD after that.
Third, there may be other factors at play. For example, you might smell bad to them. We generally underestimate olfactory impressions, but few of us would love to be close friends with someone who smelt strongly of, say, gasoline. Personally, I have the experience that ticks avoid me, I had just three in my entire life, approximately once in a decade, even though I go to nature fairly frequently and Czech woods are infested like hell. I must be repulsive to them.
If you have a cat or a dog, they might be smelling them off you.
Re: Crows are even smarter than we thought
#240Earlier 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.
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…
> They'd still be better than cheap drones at remote pick-pocketing
for that literal reason, they are illegal to keep as pets in srilanka