151–160 of 186 posts
I'm curious why humans evolved intelligence and chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans did not.
And they still are alongside us right now. Which to me is fascinating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't the first ones always wonder that?
This led me on a tangent that eventually took me to this line on Wikipedia: “Humans have visited the Moon and sent human-made spacecraft to other celestial bodies, becoming the first known species to do so.” How would we know if we’re the first known anything? You don’t know what you don’t know, as they say.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans evolved intelligence too. They are smarter than most other critters in the jungle. Just all not as much as the lineage that leads to humans. It's actually quite difficult to define human intelligence. Every time we think we find something unique by humans eventually some animal turns up that can do it too. It may be all just a question of degree and how it's used.
Are there any other animals that have a system of writing?
Starting from what should be considered "writing" to how to identify specific artifacts as abstract words.
Some researchers spend years in the forest studying one animal to isolate one single word they're speaking. Understanding other kind of intelligences is a crazy complex task.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then come with proof or some shred of evidence, rather than asking an unsubstantiated question that undermines the scientific process unnecessarily by trying to insert doubt from a place of zero expertise in the field.
I think they call this the appeal to authority fallacy, it’s the people without expertise in a field that often see the holes in something first, then the holes start glowing after they get hand waved away by smug narrow-minded experts.
No they don't. That never happens. Would you expect someone who knows nothing about programming to identify flaws in a computer language?
Of course not. You expect it will be people who actually understand the field that can identify issues.
[flagged]
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you might well be right in most of this, but how do you get from OOA to "black Africans are more primitive"? isn't the same nonsense debunked every time with "all living species are equally modern in that they share common ancestors, they didn't descend from one another"?
Maybe I missed the mark, but the point is that just because China makes a claim does not mean it should be automatically dismissed because they have a supposed superiority complex. I mean there are many on this planet who have superiority complexes, and far more consequential and imposing ones at that...by far...but that does not mean we should/can just dismiss what comes out of China. Test it, challenge it in a trul…
(I agree with it, just seems like a non-sequitur...)
Always worth asking how much these reconstructions reflect reality vs the assumptions built into the models
If a thought like this has occurred to you, a dilettante, after reading a headline and/or cursorily glancing over the article, then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis. Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of interesting conversation, tru…
You should sit in some academic meetings and paper drafting e-mail chains! There’s a degree of believing the best in people but in my experience that can unfortunately be misplaced in science.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a thought like this has occurred to you, a dilettante, after reading a headline and/or cursorily glancing over the article, then you should assume that a study conducted by people with substantial academic training and deep expertise in the field have also had this thought and incorporated it into how they perform their analysis. Drive-by anti-intellectualism like this is the death of interesting conversation, tru…
In an ideal world, you would be right. In this world, I just read a study (that passed peer review), where they took per-capita data from a district with 100 people, data from a district with 50.000 people, averaged them without weighing by number of people, then presented the result as the per-capita average for all districts. That is when they're not outright fabricating data, and having their colleagues cover for…