221–230 of 230 posts
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Why do blue tits nest in tiny boxes with tiny holes?
Tree hollow analog? Small birds worry a lot more about predators.
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> 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 ac…
I was at a wildlife sanctuary in Tasmania, about 50 minutes drive from where I live.
The tour guide said something like: every year 250,000 native animals are killed every year on Tasmanian roads.
And I just blurted out: and they just keep coming.
Because, obviously, if it was a problem then that number wouldn’t be sustained. It’s kind of self evident that the deceased animals free up resources and territory for the living animals, who then go on to have more offspring.
I feel the same about cats: if they were a problem for the native fauna, we’d expect that problem to have auto-resolved by now, as in the cats would have killed all the native fauna.
But, like all environmental problems, it’s perennial: the problem always needs more funding, more restrictions on human activity, increased red tape for developers, and home owners who want to manage their land. Like you can cut a tree down until after it falls on your house and kills your infant.
Again, I don’t believe it’s well fed house cats that are allowed outside that are the problem, it’s the ferals that need to kill to survive.
And there are ways to solve that problem, or at least greatly curtail it.
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Apartment is no good for a cat but suddenly fine for you? It isn’t like it is in human nature to live in a shoebox either. Human nature is to live in the sahel, sleep under the stars, forage, and track game. The office and the apartment is genuinely a prison for the human in their evolved element.
How do you go sleeping under the stars when it’s below zero, blowing its guts out, and snowing.
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How do you go sleeping under the stars when it’s below zero, blowing its guts out, and snowing.
Look at how much hair is on your skin, you aren’t meant for that. You are meant to persistent hunt game and forage in fairer weather. You are optimized for that. Everything else is compromised, swimming uphill only bailed out by happenstance technological affordance.
But when humans do it’s unnatural?
And besides, if you saw how hairy I am you’d probably reconsidered your opinion.
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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.
> answer the actual question
I literally did. You asked, which task that requires intelligence would I rather use an animal over an Llm. I'd much rather have a dog as my guide dog than an Llm. It can use it's innate intelligence to sense danger, navigate around obstacles it's never seen before, and even communicate with other humans through barking.
> trained clearly means it is not something based in intelligence, but in repetition and conditioning
I can't tell if you're trolling at this point. Llms are also trained and therefore are based on repetition and conditioning.
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It's unclear what you're saying or how it responds to the OP and his critics. If birds and primates today belong to equally long evolutionary lineages, then they have both had the same amount of time to adapt. Now, speciation is what makes things interesting, because species diversify the subjects of adaptation. So, if we say some bird species has been around for longer than the human species, then you can say that t…
If the lineage that led to humans had fewer reproductive cycles that fit within a given time frame, then the faster reproducing animals and the animals that generated more offspring had more time to evolve because evolution is primarily driven through reproduction cycles and how many offspring you have (when there’s selection pressure). There’s epigentics to tweak things but the major driver is still a full reproduct…
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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.
If you think being a guide dog doesn't require intelligence, you're delusional. > answer the actual question I literally did. You asked, which task that requires intelligence would I rather use an animal over an Llm. I'd much rather have a dog as my guide dog than an Llm. It can use it's innate intelligence to sense danger, navigate around obstacles it's never seen before, and even communicate with other humans throu…
I see you dropped "sniffing out drugs" as a task requiring intelligence, that's a start.
> It can use it's innate intelligence to sense danger
So sensing danger requires intelligence? Bacteria can sense danger.
> navigate around obstacles it's never seen before
Not intelligence, but dexterity. Only if it has to solve a puzzle does intelligence come into play. And dogs suck ass at solving puzzles. Some birds are somewhat decent at it, but still very far removed from what an LLM can do.
> communicate with other humans through barking
Yeah, Timmy fell down a well, right? Perfect example of 'intelligence' and something you'd prefer a dog over an LLM /s
> I can't tell if you're trolling at this point. Llms are also trained and therefore are based on repetition and conditioning.
That is a fair point, but remember that your training examples were "sniffing for drugs" and "being a guide dog", both of which are very much in-distribution training (guide dogs only do a very specific very small set of things and require a lot of training to even be able to do those).
But for the sake of argument, let's say that there are some tasks requiring intelligence where you would prefer a dog over an LLM. Answer me this: Roughly what percentage of distinct tasks requiring intelligence would you prefer to have a dog over an LLM? For each task, imagine that failure to complete the task will cause serious harm to your loved ones, so the stakes are high.
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If the lineage that led to humans had fewer reproductive cycles that fit within a given time frame, then the faster reproducing animals and the animals that generated more offspring had more time to evolve because evolution is primarily driven through reproduction cycles and how many offspring you have (when there’s selection pressure). There’s epigentics to tweak things but the major driver is still a full reproduct…
Sure. But the "if" is doing a lot of lifting. In other words, it is an a posterior empirical question, not an a prior logical necessity.
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A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically. I don't know where you get "torture" from. What's most important is stimuli such as scratching posts, toys, etc. Otherwise, they're insanely copacetic to the point many "house" cats don't want to leave the home even when being dragged out. Now, putting a dog in an apartment, especially when you're unable to give them constant exercise and attention. T…
> A decently sized apartment is fine for most cats, psychologically. And how do you objectively come to this conclusion? Could you say a human prisoner can learn to cope in a prison and present "psychologically" well, but it still feel like a form of torture?
Your entire comment screams of a PETA ad warning about cruelty to ferrets without realizing that domesticated ferrets literally can and will not survive in nature in 99% of cases. Their "wild" instincts are gone. Cats aren't nearly as helpless, but are similarly co-evolved to domestic life.