I still can't enter a corvid thread without looking for some Unidan copypasta.
The jackdaw is the smartest corvid because it ragebaits people on the internet
Who's the smartest corvid?
121–130 of 139 posts
Re: Who's the smartest corvid?
#122I live next to a farm in a rural town. We have lots of cats around which are necessary to keep the rodents in check. Our cats love to play their prey to death in our yard (yeah nature is cruel). Some of the local crows know how to get the dead mice from the cats. One or two crows distract the cat, the cat likes to chase the crows for the thrill of the hunt, and then one crow swoops in and steals the cats prey. The ca…
Anecdata: I see this in the park next to my house. Two crows will repeatedly chase and tail-pull an Egyptian goose that has no food and nothing they could want. Hard to read it as anything other than play, which lines up with documented corvid tail-pulling of eagles, cats, etc.
Re: Who's the smartest corvid?
#123Did anyone else first read "the smartest COVID"?
Only far enough to know that the article is a bunch of short anecdotes.
HN's comments include quite a few longer & better ones.
Re: Who's the smartest corvid?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of crow hunting stories feel cruel to read about, though I wonder why that is. There is something about intelligence that seems to carry a degree of... moral responsibility, somehow? Though in reality it's just an animal eating another animal, as ever.
Maybe something like this: Most animals hunt in a way that minimizes their odds of getting hurt, to the best of their ability. Crows are pretty smart, and not very strong in the grand scheme of things. So they engage in tactics that look like cruel manipulative pranks; causing the prey to somehow kill itself or get killed by something stronger. In the end, I think a gazelle doesn’t look up at the lion that killed it…
> a gazelle doesn’t look up at the lion that killed it by outrunning it and the snapping its neck
I know this is tangential to your point, but lions don't really hunt that way. They ambush, as they could never outrun a gazelle, and then they don't snap its neck unless unintentionally. They tend to just start eating it while it is still alive. It's quite brutal to watch.
Re: Who's the smartest corvid?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember reading an article in National Geographic of how crow's brains are much more interconnected than is the norm in mammals, i.e. IIRC they have a higher density of synapses between neurons. From that article, it seems that the usual brain weight vs. body weight to determine intelligence, which seems can be used to approximate intelligence in different species of mammals, cannot be used for birds (or at least…
The brains of corvids are not closely related to mammalian brains. All the mammals have roughly the same brain, but corvids have a different architecture.[1] Intelligence seems to have evolved three times on this planet - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. Octopuses have a distributed system rather than one central brain. They all have neurons, but the higher level architecture differs drastically. Knowing that several…
I appreciate the linked article. I wonder if the the list should be expanded to 'at least three times', and I start to think about intelligence in plants.
See also recent work on honeybees, popularized here https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bumblebees-can-sol...
honeybees are not social insects, but maybe social insects should be added to the list?
Social insects. The original object oriented programming paradigm.
Re: Who's the smartest corvid?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> smart but evil Sadly I have yet to see evidence that something can be smart without being evil.
I glanced at this and moved on but then my brain did a kind of record scratch on this comment. Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil? I’m gonna think about this a bit, but my knee jerk was to (violently) disagree with this but I don’t know why.
I wonder if it's not more accurate to say predators tend to be evil, and predators are typically the ones who have to be more visably clever to get their food. Even a incredibly intelligent sheep will still just be eating plants. A incredibly intelligent crow though will be able to eat deer instead of insects.
Re: Who's the smartest corvid?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
the evil here seems to be being a predator, which for the doe it would be reasonable to say the predator is evil, but examining the natural order of things from outside, as a human observing the doe, the fawn, and the crows, that is a pretty weird judgement to make. The predator has evolved to eat the prey, if that is evil then nature is evil or if you like, whatever created nature.
I suspect the corvids aren't obligate carnivores and so they could choose not to eat animals but they do it anyway. Given that humans aren't obligate carnivores and further more, are capable of advanced chemistry so that even if they were obliged to eat other animals biologically they could just work around this without needing to kill anything - it seems much more compelling to judge us by such a metric than them. W…
They're scavengers, I think scavengers are wired to eat whatever is available at the least expenditure of energy.
Re: Who's the smartest corvid?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Crows in country will wait for a newborn deer to be left alone in a field by their mothers shortly after birth to peck the baby's eyes out so it dies and the crow can eat it later. My neighbor had told me about this happening, and maybe a month later I saw a fawn with its eyes pecked out shortly after it had died. The doe just sat at the edge of the field by it all night. So sad, but really smart of the crows. Crows…
I wonder how much of this is truly smart as in planned/intentional behaviour. Couldn’t it just evolve? Suppose you hang around something that you want to eat . And you make a lot of noise. So now predators show up. none of this was planned, but now you have a fitness advantage.
A) I am allergic to the word Just ;-) It means you stop being curious. How about one or more of the following?
B) Say you have a slow optimizer in a fast world: a lot of the time the optimal solution is going to be some form of computational generalization. Now you have meta-optimization. Life seems to enjoy doing this recursively.
C) Crow intelligence is clearly highly evolved, so you're technically correct, best kind of correct. Though here I'd argue that a very parsimonious answer is single-lifespan learned behavior. You're applying an existing learning system, no new mechanisms needed. (As opposed to positing some new evolved fixed action pattern).
D) There's not even anything stopping it from being planned behavior. Searle is struck out because it is biological; and no one can accuse us of anthropomorphism HERE!
E) Actually, for sparse events, planning using a world model can be more parsimonious. Apply existing model to new problem, again no extra mechanism needed. Which one works better for a particular entity in a particular situation depends on tradeoffs. (For a human example: see eg Memory items vs checklists vs airmanship in eg aviation)
F) That said, I'd even count evolution as a form of intelligence (well... it's an optimizer at least). I will literally die on this hill, and so will you O:-) (unless you represent optimums as valleys) ---> Plot evolution as a dynamic system in phase space, or with your typical hill-climber/gradient descent representations. How much does the trajectory differ from other optimizers? What happens if the 'terrain' is very bumpy with many local optimums? What if it deforms as you cross it?
Re: Who's the smartest corvid?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
'Evil' is a human characterisation, and is not applicable to animals imo; to apply it is to anthropomorphise the animal. An applicable use of 'evil' for an animal, would be if you believe the animal 'knows better', eg a dog that knows right or wrong (in its way) but does something it thinks it shouldn't.
The longer I live the more evidence I see the barrier between humans and other animals is thinner than we would like to imagine. So I counter you with a practical question: can a crow commit a social transgression that will result in punishment by other crows? My strong suspicion is that the answer is yes, though I would love documentation as it would suggest a crow-cultural definition of morality
I agree. But I don't think pecking the eyes of a deer, thereby providing all the crows food, would be considered 'evil'/'bad' by other crows. I think crows would acclaim the action as 'good'/'right'.
Re: Who's the smartest corvid?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
'Evil' is a human characterisation, and is not applicable to animals imo; to apply it is to anthropomorphise the animal. An applicable use of 'evil' for an animal, would be if you believe the animal 'knows better', eg a dog that knows right or wrong (in its way) but does something it thinks it shouldn't.
We have rescue dog (abandoned on the street) and it seems to have a notion that violence within family is bad. I was quite surprised to see that when I mock threatened my wife with a broom in his presence he jumped in to block. Not only that, he took the broom away from me and secured it away. I initially thought it was play, that he wanted to play with the broom. Seems he was just interested in separating me from th…
Nice story. I believe that dogs are capable of moral judgements too. The idea of 'evil' is a human idea though.