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A girl who gets gifts from birds

bbc.com

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Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#21

Post by Lewton »

dragontamer wrote: post #15
Lewton wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crow flies with thing in its beak. Sees food, drops thing, grabs food. Comes back later, sees more food! Assumes food came from dropping thing (See "Superstition in the pigeon" [0]). Meme spreads among the crows. No ethics or deep reasoning required. Random rewards lead to irrational behavior. [0] http://psychclassics.asu.edu/Skinner/Pigeon/

The final example though, where a Crow returns the camera-lens cap to the family requires some pretty advanced thinking. We know that Crows recognize human faces and expressions, and communicate these facts amongst each other. Crows / Ravens are the only creature aside from Humans who perform meta-tool use. They can use tools to grab tools to accomplish a goal. In many ways, they're smarter than (non-human) primates,…

It sounds like there's a pretty big amount of crows that got in on the "drop gifts for food" program. And a camera lens is well within the range of what a crow would usually be interested in. It doesn't sound unlikely to me that it would just pick it up as any other thing and gift it.

Crows are awesome though, I'm not trying to put down their intelligence, haha. I just wanted to point out that neither deeper reasoning nor ethics is required to explain this phenomenon. One of the researchers in the article said that he had never experienced the gift giving, even though he also fed crows often. That to me makes it more sensible to believe that it's just a meme that developed by chance

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#22

Post by pavel_lishin »

Lewton wrote: post #9
canjobear wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is very surprising even given findings about corvid intelligence. I know of studies showing crows can count, but that kind of intelligence does not at all imply that a creature will spontaneously give gifts in exchange for food. This requires either some kind of ethics including reciprocity, or it requires that the crows reason that giving gifts will make someone more likely to give more food. The latter r…

Crow flies with thing in its beak. Sees food, drops thing, grabs food. Comes back later, sees more food! Assumes food came from dropping thing (See "Superstition in the pigeon" [0]). Meme spreads among the crows. No ethics or deep reasoning required. Random rewards lead to irrational behavior. [0] http://psychclassics.asu.edu/Skinner/Pigeon/

But weren't the crows being fed even before they started giving the gifts?

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#23

Post by pavel_lishin »

dragontamer wrote: post #15
Lewton wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crow flies with thing in its beak. Sees food, drops thing, grabs food. Comes back later, sees more food! Assumes food came from dropping thing (See "Superstition in the pigeon" [0]). Meme spreads among the crows. No ethics or deep reasoning required. Random rewards lead to irrational behavior. [0] http://psychclassics.asu.edu/Skinner/Pigeon/

The final example though, where a Crow returns the camera-lens cap to the family requires some pretty advanced thinking. We know that Crows recognize human faces and expressions, and communicate these facts amongst each other. Crows / Ravens are the only creature aside from Humans who perform meta-tool use. They can use tools to grab tools to accomplish a goal. In many ways, they're smarter than (non-human) primates,…

> The final example though, where a Crow returns the camera-lens cap to the family requires some pretty advanced thinking.

I think the article (and probably the podcast? haven't listened yet) make too big a deal of this. We don't know that the crows realized that the lens cap belonged to those people. Perhaps they just saw it as another neat thing to gift. Perhaps they smelled the family on it, and just returned it to a place that smelled similarly.

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#24

Post by shutupalready »

> Lisa logged on to her computer and pulled up their bird-cam. There was the crow she suspected. "You can see it bringing it into the yard. Walks it to the birdbath and actually spends time rinsing this lens cap."

Why wouldn't they put this video in the BBC article?

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#25

Post by autechr3 »

im3w1l wrote: post #6
mxfh wrote: post #4

There already exists an automated exploit for this behavior: Joshua Klein's Crow Machine: https://www.josh.is/crow-machine/ see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470840

I think there is a big difference between gift and payment. Your article is on skinnerian conditioning to train crows to pay for peanuts. In this article the crows got peanuts whether they gave gifts or not. They just decided to give gifts. No training occured.

Perhaps in the mind of the crows, they are giving gifts as a reward. In effect, training the human (in the article).

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#26

Post by kbenson »

shutupalready wrote: post #24

> Lisa logged on to her computer and pulled up their bird-cam. There was the crow she suspected. "You can see it bringing it into the yard. Walks it to the birdbath and actually spends time rinsing this lens cap." Why wouldn't they put this video in the BBC article?

They may not have kept it. The camera system may keep a certain amount of prior footage that is automatically flushed at a certain age, or that the users clean out when it gets large. This is recounting a story from a few weeks ago.

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#27

Post by kbenson »

Lewton wrote: post #21
dragontamer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The final example though, where a Crow returns the camera-lens cap to the family requires some pretty advanced thinking. We know that Crows recognize human faces and expressions, and communicate these facts amongst each other. Crows / Ravens are the only creature aside from Humans who perform meta-tool use. They can use tools to grab tools to accomplish a goal. In many ways, they're smarter than (non-human) primates,…

It sounds like there's a pretty big amount of crows that got in on the "drop gifts for food" program. And a camera lens is well within the range of what a crow would usually be interested in. It doesn't sound unlikely to me that it would just pick it up as any other thing and gift it. Crows are awesome though, I'm not trying to put down their intelligence, haha. I just wanted to point out that neither deeper reasonin…

That's not what the researcher said. He made no claim to having fed them often (and consistently, which is mentioned as helpful to induce the behavior).

But crow gifts are not guaranteed. "I can't say they always will (give presents)," Marzluff admits, having never received any gifts personally, "but I have seen an awful lot of things crows have brought people.

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#29

Post by lloydde »

mxfh wrote: post #4

There already exists an automated exploit for this behavior: Joshua Klein's Crow Machine: https://www.josh.is/crow-machine/ see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470840

I stopped being mesmerized by TED talks after reading http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-CORRE... . I was further disappointed that the Ted talk webpage was not updated after that development.

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#30

Post by vinceguidry »

im3w1l wrote: post #6
mxfh wrote: post #4

There already exists an automated exploit for this behavior: Joshua Klein's Crow Machine: https://www.josh.is/crow-machine/ see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470840

I think there is a big difference between gift and payment. Your article is on skinnerian conditioning to train crows to pay for peanuts. In this article the crows got peanuts whether they gave gifts or not. They just decided to give gifts. No training occured.

That only proves how smart crows are, they can both participate in an economy and operate on a gifting basis.
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