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Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

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Re: Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

#91

Post by spaceribs »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #86
spaceribs wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a systemic misconception in this thread is that we're teaching crows anything other than how to get food from a device we designed. They are not rational actors in this situation. They are never on the same playing field as we are. We would be taking advantage of their limited intelligence to do our bidding.

Ah. That's why it's not ethical to train a crow to do this, but it is ethical to pay a person to do this. (Yes? I was genuinely wondering about this)

Yeah, pretty much, although if we keep going in this direction we'll end up talking about drugs, slot machines, human slavery, and what really is willpower and choice. Bioethics is incredibly interesting and underrated for dinner conversation.

Re: Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

#92

Post by warent »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #86
spaceribs wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a systemic misconception in this thread is that we're teaching crows anything other than how to get food from a device we designed. They are not rational actors in this situation. They are never on the same playing field as we are. We would be taking advantage of their limited intelligence to do our bidding.

Ah. That's why it's not ethical to train a crow to do this, but it is ethical to pay a person to do this. (Yes? I was genuinely wondering about this)

I have not done a paper on this or given it nearly as much thought as OP. That being said, my 2 cents is that paying a person to do it should also be considered unethical, because it's encouraging the reduction of human abilities to something very menial.

But if there were like, an ethics ranking, then it's probably more ethical than going the crow route.

Re: Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

#93

Post by spditner »

andymcsherry wrote: post #75
RandallBrown wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put them out and put them in the garbage, your pocket, or a plastic bag. When people go out to a national park they don't just throw trash on the ground because "I paid an entry fee that should fund the clean up."

I think what I've mention already should outline the impracticality of your suggestion. It's hard to distinguish between a cigarette that's fully extinguished or not. This is why ashtrays are made of glass or contain sand, you can't set it on fire. Smokers are easy to demonize when you don't understand their dilemmas. Don't worry we're pretty used to it. Most smokers I know understand their habit bothers people and d…

There is a category of products to help address that called a "portable ashtray", they can often clip on your key ring.

Re: Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

#94

Post by CryptoPunk »

dTal wrote: post #34
__s wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crows aren't punished for not exhibiting this behavior. Positive reinforcement training is distinctively different than negative reinforcement training. Slavery is the latter

Slavery is not 'negative reinforcement training'. Indeed, it is possible to be a slave and be rewarded for good work. Slavery is where you have no choice but to work. If the food reward is substantial enough to be worth a crow's while, then it confers a competitive advantage and crows that refrain from this behaviour will face pressure on their food sources from the offspring of the well-fed crows; essentially you've…

>>Slavery is where you have no choice but to work.

Only if you are denied choices you are entitled to, like running away, through negative reinforcement. Slavery is not simply the state of needing to work to survive. Such a definition would stigmatize all poor people in developing countries as slaves, and anyone employing them as a slaver. It would imply that the natural state of man, where he must hunt and gather to survive, as slavery. That would obviously be inconsistent with what the word means in common parlance.

Re: Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

#95

Post by adventured »

eric-hu wrote: post #81
dTal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery is not 'negative reinforcement training'. Indeed, it is possible to be a slave and be rewarded for good work. Slavery is where you have no choice but to work. If the food reward is substantial enough to be worth a crow's while, then it confers a competitive advantage and crows that refrain from this behaviour will face pressure on their food sources from the offspring of the well-fed crows; essentially you've…

> Slavery is where you have no choice but to work. If the food reward is substantial enough to be worth a crow's while, then it confers a competitive advantage and crows that refrain from this behaviour will face pressure on their food sources from the offspring of the well-fed crows; essentially you've artificially raised the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, for those crows that agree to your "bargain". Effective…

You have a choice to not work under Capitalism. What you don't have a choice to do, is to enslave someone else to meet your needs or desires by using the State as a violence proxy that handles the racket for your benefit (while the cartel that runs the State takes a big cut of the action).

Socialism: where other people have to work for your benefit because you don't want to. It is in fact Socialism that meets the perfect definition of slavery. Not only are you a slave of your neighbor's whims or wants or laziness, you're a slave of the State which holds absolute power over the means of production and all property (ie all means of keeping yourself alive, thus your existence; the State owns you, thus slavery).

Re: Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

#96

Post by gicadin »

spaceribs wrote: post #44
diego_moita wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that doesn't sound like room and board to you? No, sounds like a job: do a task, get a reward. You do it, janitors do it. If the crows want...

If you're talking about jobs, most humans have a plethora of survival options. Once a wild animal is trained to an easy single source of food, it prevents them from naturally diversifying their diet to prevent starvation, removing that natural challenge could be deadly. This isn't just about doing a task and getting a reward, this is about addiction.

This experiment would not be removing any existing food sources but adding another one. I doubt there will be enough cigarette buds for every single crow for it to become the dominant method of obtaining food for the whole species.

Re: Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

#97

Post by jaggederest »

spaceribs wrote: post #91
MikeTheGreat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah. That's why it's not ethical to train a crow to do this, but it is ethical to pay a person to do this. (Yes? I was genuinely wondering about this)

Yeah, pretty much, although if we keep going in this direction we'll end up talking about drugs, slot machines, human slavery, and what really is willpower and choice. Bioethics is incredibly interesting and underrated for dinner conversation.

How do you feel about the ethics of keeping animals as pets? Despite my ethical concerns, I have a cat as a roommate, but I generally think that pet ownership is unethical for precisely the reasons you discussed in the thread above.

Re: Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

#98

Post by retox »

rossdavidh wrote: post #37
spaceribs wrote: post #16

Back in college I did a paper on if this was ethical or not for my bioethics class, I warn people to really take a step back from the positive possibilities with something like this and understand that these are wild animals being trained to become slaves to benefit our human failings and appetites. I would definitely draw a line between this kind of domestication and the domestication of animals by our ancestors for…

I think crows (and grackles, and other urban birds) have already changed their behavior in lots of equally big ways, to take advantage of where we leave food scraps, etc. The only difference in this case is there's some planning. If we don't plan it, it's not like they retain their natural behavior. Urban raccoons, possums, grackles, crows, etc. do lots of things on a daily basis they would never do if not in a city.

In the train station near where I used to live there were a couple of pigeons which learned to simply lie on their backs on those plastic deterrent spikes. They looked quite comfortable.

Re: Training crows to pick up cigarette butts for food

#100

Post by jaggederest »

eric-hu wrote: post #81
dTal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery is not 'negative reinforcement training'. Indeed, it is possible to be a slave and be rewarded for good work. Slavery is where you have no choice but to work. If the food reward is substantial enough to be worth a crow's while, then it confers a competitive advantage and crows that refrain from this behaviour will face pressure on their food sources from the offspring of the well-fed crows; essentially you've…

> Slavery is where you have no choice but to work. If the food reward is substantial enough to be worth a crow's while, then it confers a competitive advantage and crows that refrain from this behaviour will face pressure on their food sources from the offspring of the well-fed crows; essentially you've artificially raised the carrying capacity of the ecosystem, for those crows that agree to your "bargain". Effective…

It turns out, in an economic sense anyway, that paying people wages can be qualitatively worse than slavery.

To delve into the macabre, you can pay people less than the cost of maintaining a slave to do the same work, and those people are not a capital expenditure but an operational one, i.e. you don't take a loss if they happen to starve, get sick, or quit, you just hire someone else.

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