> Calling someone a "bird brain" is honestly more of a compliment. Well no. Some birds are flat-out dumb. Chickens for example.
chickens were domesticated to be easy to handle and eat. we bred them to be not particularly intelligent.
Bird brains (2023)
211–220 of 230 posts
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moving a complex system of muscles so that they can just stand upright is already very very complex, let alone intercepting a prey's movement mid-flight by just controlling all those muscles. People way overestimate the actually intelligent part of LLMs vs simply being good at recalling context-related stuff from the training data.
Complexity does not require intelligence. Modern computers (even without AI) and technological systems do incredibly complex things and I'm quite sure you would not call those systems (again, without AI) intelligent.
There is a difference between a problem being complex and you try to find a solution to it (hard), vs a program being complex. The latter is trivial to execute, but that is entirely different from analysing it.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends. My indoor-outdoor cat only catches small animals if they run between her paws. But she did chase a rather large raccoon around the house once, as I did. In my suburban neighborhood, we occasionally have coyotes. They are known to prey on fat cats (the feline kind). My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown. I also feel that small wild cats were likely native everywhere. Birds…
> My feeling is that predation by domesticated outdoor cats is overblown. It’s just something we’ve all been told all our lives, with the people doing the telling never point to any evidence to back it up. Even when cats are wild and native, their hunts aren’t particularly successful, except the desert sand cat[1] which is so small it would perish if its hunts were low rate success. And if you watch videos of collar…
I had a neighbor once that had 2 cats. The only thing they seemed to care about was catching birds and chasing squirrels. They only caught birds but they did catch them often. Many cats are exceptionally good at catching mice and bringing them back home. Some seem to enjoy torturing them. Also in some countries like Australia they absolutely decimate the native population if left unchecked, and that’s according to actual data about the presence of cats and the level of wild animals.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#214> A macaw's brain weighs 20 grams and has roughly the same number of forebrain neurons as a macaque monkey's brain at 70 grams. Ounce for ounce, bird brains are some of the most computationally dense organs in the animal kingdom.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
One fact that I find very curious is that I see all sorts of animals killed on the road, but never chickens. And I see plenty of them by the road. Maybe they never try to cross roads?
"Chicken" is also an idiomatic synonym for "frightens easily." They do have some instinct for avoiding danger.
Roosters can be very aggresive.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s for the best, house cats torture the birds and frogs around here and I hate it. I never knew frogs could scream.
Cats have completely deleted the rabbit populations in a lot of suburbia. I feel like it got worse around 2020 for some reason. I had to move to the middle of the woods to start seeing them again.
Got lots of rabbits in my town, on a tiny nature reserve beside a footpath that goes from some office complexes to an industrial estate. It's ten minutes walk from the houses where people keep cats. I guess all those fluffy neutered cats have dedicated their attention to actual cat food and to the sport of infringing on the territories of other cats, and just aren't very rabbit-centric. If the cats were feral and breeding the rabbits might be in trouble.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Domestication ≠ habitat classification. Alpine refers to habitat. Kea live, feed, and breed in alpine environments and are behaviourally adapted to it. By your logic, because my ancestors ~300 years ago aren’t from New Zealand, I’m not a New Zealander.
Sure man, ask the Keas, I am sure they like their new name and wouldn't prefer to live in lowland if human were to disappear in NZ.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Complexity does not require intelligence. Modern computers (even without AI) and technological systems do incredibly complex things and I'm quite sure you would not call those systems (again, without AI) intelligent.
There is a difference between a problem being complex and you try to find a solution to it (hard), vs a program being complex. The latter is trivial to execute , but that is entirely different from analysing it.
So are animals trivially executing a complex program or are they 'analyzing' a complex problem?
LLMs can (more often) successfully find solutions for far more complex problems than animals can. So where does that leave us?
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#219If you're in tune with animals and spend time around a parrot, it's obvious there is a lot going on in their minds. They have incredible memories and their own understanding of their world. It looks simple to us but they are not simple creatures. That being said, I don't know how a bird lover can keep a bird in a cage.
> If you're in tune with animals and spend time around a parrot, it's obvious there is a lot going on in their minds. Not saying there isn't and somewhat offtopic, but if you apply this to LLMs those are much , much 'smarter' than all the animals people like to call intelligent (or something similar). If you disagree, please tell me for which task requiring intelligence you'd rather have an animal's wit than that of…
Dogs can be trained for a variety of tasks that require wit. Such as helping the blind navigate. And sniffing for illegal drugs.
Re: Bird brains (2023)
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you're in tune with animals and spend time around a parrot, it's obvious there is a lot going on in their minds. Not saying there isn't and somewhat offtopic, but if you apply this to LLMs those are much , much 'smarter' than all the animals people like to call intelligent (or something similar). If you disagree, please tell me for which task requiring intelligence you'd rather have an animal's wit than that of…
Dogs can be trained for a variety of tasks that require wit. Such as helping the blind navigate. And sniffing for illegal drugs.
Sniffing for illegal drugs requires wit? Right.
And 'trained' clearly means it is not something based in intelligence, but in repetition and conditioning.
Answer the actual question.