The fact that their performance dropped with smaller differences but still stayed well above chance makes it feel a lot like human error patterns in similar visual tasks. It's like they're not just reacting - they're thinking.
Animal's intelligence is often underrated. We used to keep goats which many wont consider problem sovlers. They had learned to open gate bolts with their mouths. The bolts I am talking about have a handle and a rod. the handle needs to be rotated then the bolt can be slided out while keeping the handle in the rotated state.
Kind of off topic but I just got back from the park and there is a public water bowl set out for dogs and a crow was manipulating something in the water - after a time my eyebrows went up as I realized the crow was softening some dried out discarded human food to make it easy to break up and eat!
I wouldn't be surprised if that crow's got a whole routine down: grab snack > hydrate snack > enjoy snack > judge the dog for drinking from its prep station
They've been known to both wash the salt off french fries and dip chicken nuggets in sauce packs.
Anyone who's ever argued that you shouldn't feed crows because it interferes with nature hasn't figured out that crows already adopted to urban human-inhabited environments, and feeding them quality food (cat kibble is cheap and works) is very much a net positive. If you see crows with white feathers, that's malnutrition, and you should give them something good to eat.
They started washing their food in my bird bath like that. I had to put a stop to it once they started soaking dead rodents and things like that. A) gross, B) they don't need soaking. (:
Crows soak all their food in our (sorry, their) swimming pool!
Sadly, that includes rodents too. I wonder if it is because of the chlorine that could potentially "clean" the food, or if they want to wash out sand, etc.
Been careful not to yell or approach abruptly and they definitely learn to recognize our faces, since we can get pretty close to them now.
I love crows so much. I had some in my backyard that I would give stuff too a lot. When I would leave in the morning for work, they would perch on my gutters and make clucking sounds while looking down at me. I'd wave and be on my way.
The interesting part of this research is that baboons, while evolutionary closer to humans, fail to perform this task.
So scientists were thinking "hmm, maybe perception of geometric regularity is a unique skill to homo sapiens?". It turned out that crows can tell a square from trapezoids, too.
I assume the subtext of this research is not that human are special, and more that each specific claim towards each species of animal needs exploration and confirmation.
And it genuinely takes a lot of time when dealing with reasonably complex animals.
It reminds me of the research on cinereous tits, where the researcher had to spend like half a year at a time to validate a given chant matches a given word.
It does but one has to hold a belief for it to be eventually confirmed or denied.
Many people historically and presently see themselves as the pinnacle of a godly creation, so they put humans above everything and anything, meaning that most perspectives to validate or not are about how unique we are. It might be annoying or backwards but at least there are people out there still willing to chip at it, one study at a time.
Because of the ways the benefactors want us to think it X
It really doesn't matter as much as the hysteria around it. Maybe the hysteria is 0.0001% accurate and that's generous. This is true for any political tribe, politics and political messaging in general.
How comparable is the intelligence of crows, dolphins, octopi and non human apes? Somewhat or not at all? There seem to be a host of things that each of those can do. Can apes do all of those things and the other groups just a few things each? Is there a huge leap of separation or does the leap come between us and them? Is it in any way quantifiable?
I was watching some crows eat some food in a parking lot yesterday. The first one landed next to a tiny morsel, investigated it a bit, then did a head bob thing while looking up and making what sounded like a cross between a hoot and a caw. Another crow swooped in about ten seconds later and they poked at it a bit. Then a lady walked over towards them, they flew away, and she dumped out her half eaten to-go meal in the parking spot. Too easy.
A lot of it comes from communication. We don't know how intelligent some of these things are simply because we can't communicate with them.
For apes and gorillas we can communicate. We've taught them sign language so we know hands down in terms of language we beat them. But for dolphins and octopi, we just don't really know.
We have not taught apes sign language. They can learn and form crude signs and use them to respond to stimuli or for rewards (wanting an orange, for example) but they’re not meaningfully communicating. It’d be like me claiming I taught my dog English because he can press the little button that plays a sound of me saying “biscuit!” when he wants a treat (which you have to take away from him because he will just mash it, since dogs want dog biscuits).
I know a dog that jumps on a door to indicate that she wants to go out in the big backyard.
Yesterday she did the same, but didn't want to use that exit when I opened the door, but went to another door and looked at me with a clear expectation that she wanted to use the smaller backyard instead.
That is a relatively advanced form of communication to me. She combined the "let me out" signal and indicated which backyard to use. The way she looked at me was also a form of communication.
In a squishy philosophical sense, I think LLMs are doomed to hallucination/confabulation because we’re making systems that use language and hoping they figure out the basics of communication. That certainly is not how it works in humans:
> Did I not, then, as I grew out of infancy, come next to boyhood, or rather did it not come to me and succeed my infancy? My infancy did not go away (for where would it go?). It was simply no longer present; and I was no longer an infant who could not speak, but now a chattering boy. I remember this, and I have since observed how I learned to speak. My elders did not teach me words by rote, as they taught me my letters afterward. But I myself, when I was unable to communicate all I wished to say to whomever I wished by means of whimperings and grunts and various gestures of my limbs (which I used to reinforce my demands), I myself repeated the sounds already stored in my memory by the mind which thou, O my God, hadst given me. When they called some thing by name and pointed it out while they spoke, I saw it and realized that the thing they wished to indicate was called by the name they then uttered. And what they meant was made plain by the gestures of their bodies, by a kind of natural language, common to all nations, which expresses itself through changes of countenance, glances of the eye, gestures and intonations which indicate a disposition and attitude--either to seek or to possess, to reject or to avoid. So it was that by frequently hearing words, in different phrases, I gradually identified the objects which the words stood for and, having formed my mouth to repeat these signs, I was thereby able to express my will. Thus I exchanged with those about me the verbal signs by which we express our wishes and advanced deeper into the stormy fellowship of human life, depending all the while upon the authority of my parents and the behest of my elders.
Maybe, but then my dog also communicates with me via his “biscuit” button so mere “communication” isn’t a particularly high bar. I was disputing the “we’ve taught them sign language” part - because we haven’t, we’ve taught them signs and they try to use some of them. That is impressive and interesting but we shouldn’t oversell it
In the sense that my cat communicates by meowing at me when it's dinner time, sure. But so far I don't think apes are signing about remembered events, future plans, or descriptions of non-immediate reality.
I had a similar thought. Birds are extremely visual animals. They should be good at noticing changes in patterns and such.
It might seem remarkable that they can do this in a structured setting like humans do, but the more I learn about animals… The less remarkable I think this kind of behaviour is.
ISTR a study where someone trained crows to retrieve street garbage. It stopped working because the peanuts or similar they were using to pay the crows were less valuable to them than the discarded pizzas etc they were supposed to be bringing back
This is a real thing with cigarette butts. You just need to set up a vending machine where the crows can "redeem" their trash for treats and they'll even teach each other about it.
I recall the story, and the attention the author received.
I can imagine this working, but digging into it at the time, there was no validation it worked at all. I couldn't get videos of it working, or even a cogent response from the author.
I always thought these plurals were just crazy, and felt so relieved to see decent researcher explaining them as potential jokes that ended up catching on and staying for centuries afterwards.
Edit, to add: years ago a lot of people kept pigeons in rooftop coops around NYC. As a kid there was an older guy near by who you'd see on his roof waving around a cloth that sort of directed the birds as they flew in a big flock. Now I'm imagining that but a flock of crows bringing back loot to some gangster on a rooftop.
Went down that rabbit hole of training crows to do things. Crows are such amazingly intelligent creatures. There is a whole scene of people teaching and training wild crows silly things.
It's always me coming into these comment sections on animal intelligence posting shadow the rat videos, well, I love rats sooo much, so here I am again. They're really wonderful pets who are clearly very loving and extremely intelligent. Cannot recommend them enough, they're fantastic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA
I had to stop feeding the local crows. I thought I'd been training them to come when I called, but realized that they had started training me to come out by pecking my roof.
I started feeding a wounded pheasant that frequented my garden. I trained it to come to a specific place near the back door so the local squirrels didn’t grab everything. The pheasant soon learned that it could get me to come out with food by going to that place and squawking loudly
The fact that their performance dropped with smaller differences but still stayed well above chance makes it feel a lot like human error patterns in similar visual tasks. It's like they're not just reacting - they're thinking.
Animal's intelligence is often underrated. We used to keep goats which many wont consider problem sovlers. They had learned to open gate bolts with their mouths. The bolts I am talking about have a handle and a rod. the handle needs to be rotated then the bolt can be slided out while keeping the handle in the rotated state.
Goats are way smarter than people think. Once they get curious about something, they're relentless
Kind of off topic but I just got back from the park and there is a public water bowl set out for dogs and a crow was manipulating something in the water - after a time my eyebrows went up as I realized the crow was softening some dried out discarded human food to make it easy to break up and eat!
I wouldn't be surprised if that crow's got a whole routine down: grab snack > hydrate snack > enjoy snack > judge the dog for drinking from its prep station
They've been known to both wash the salt off french fries and dip chicken nuggets in sauce packs.
Anyone who's ever argued that you shouldn't feed crows because it interferes with nature hasn't figured out that crows already adopted to urban human-inhabited environments, and feeding them quality food (cat kibble is cheap and works) is very much a net positive. If you see crows with white feathers, that's malnutrition, and you should give them something good to eat.
They started washing their food in my bird bath like that. I had to put a stop to it once they started soaking dead rodents and things like that. A) gross, B) they don't need soaking. (:
Crows soak all their food in our (sorry, their) swimming pool! Sadly, that includes rodents too. I wonder if it is because of the chlorine that could potentially "clean" the food, or if they want to wash out sand, etc.
Been careful not to yell or approach abruptly and they definitely learn to recognize our faces, since we can get pretty close to them now.
Your second paragraph seems at odds with the perceived goals in the first.
I love crows so much. I had some in my backyard that I would give stuff too a lot. When I would leave in the morning for work, they would perch on my gutters and make clucking sounds while looking down at me. I'd wave and be on my way.
We have been very welcoming to the crows in our backyard and they now hang out with the chickens and ducks when they get leftovers / table scrapes.
Now they are arriving slightly before the hawks and other predators and scaring them off.
If you see crows randomly arrive, and look around, there is almost always a circling bird in the sky.
It's super cool.
I made a terrible video of the event.
https://youtu.be/EnFAW-ZxAQ0
Does the idea that "only humans can recognize shapes" sounds ridicolously outdated? Its like "Science confirms animals feel pain".
The interesting part of this research is that baboons, while evolutionary closer to humans, fail to perform this task.
So scientists were thinking "hmm, maybe perception of geometric regularity is a unique skill to homo sapiens?". It turned out that crows can tell a square from trapezoids, too.
I assume the subtext of this research is not that human are special, and more that each specific claim towards each species of animal needs exploration and confirmation.
And it genuinely takes a lot of time when dealing with reasonably complex animals.
It reminds me of the research on cinereous tits, where the researcher had to spend like half a year at a time to validate a given chant matches a given word.
It does but one has to hold a belief for it to be eventually confirmed or denied.
Many people historically and presently see themselves as the pinnacle of a godly creation, so they put humans above everything and anything, meaning that most perspectives to validate or not are about how unique we are. It might be annoying or backwards but at least there are people out there still willing to chip at it, one study at a time.
For better or for worse an idea sounding (ridiculously) outdated doesn't exactly make for a good argument, which becomes an issue when you need one.
Given the ways of the current US administration, not so sure if that is even something open to discussion.
Why does everything need to devolve into a discussion or comment about US politics? Not everyone cares that much about it.
Because of the ways it influence modern life, and technology choices.
Those that don't care will eventually find themselves on a situation where they will care, by then it will be too late.
> because of the ways it X
Because of the ways the benefactors want us to think it X
It really doesn't matter as much as the hysteria around it. Maybe the hysteria is 0.0001% accurate and that's generous. This is true for any political tribe, politics and political messaging in general.
How comparable is the intelligence of crows, dolphins, octopi and non human apes? Somewhat or not at all? There seem to be a host of things that each of those can do. Can apes do all of those things and the other groups just a few things each? Is there a huge leap of separation or does the leap come between us and them? Is it in any way quantifiable?
Humans have so far failed all the tests that crows set up to measure their intelligence
I was watching some crows eat some food in a parking lot yesterday. The first one landed next to a tiny morsel, investigated it a bit, then did a head bob thing while looking up and making what sounded like a cross between a hoot and a caw. Another crow swooped in about ten seconds later and they poked at it a bit. Then a lady walked over towards them, they flew away, and she dumped out her half eaten to-go meal in the parking spot. Too easy.
A lot of it comes from communication. We don't know how intelligent some of these things are simply because we can't communicate with them.
For apes and gorillas we can communicate. We've taught them sign language so we know hands down in terms of language we beat them. But for dolphins and octopi, we just don't really know.
We have not taught apes sign language. They can learn and form crude signs and use them to respond to stimuli or for rewards (wanting an orange, for example) but they’re not meaningfully communicating. It’d be like me claiming I taught my dog English because he can press the little button that plays a sound of me saying “biscuit!” when he wants a treat (which you have to take away from him because he will just mash it, since dogs want dog biscuits).
I know a dog that jumps on a door to indicate that she wants to go out in the big backyard.
Yesterday she did the same, but didn't want to use that exit when I opened the door, but went to another door and looked at me with a clear expectation that she wanted to use the smaller backyard instead.
That is a relatively advanced form of communication to me. She combined the "let me out" signal and indicated which backyard to use. The way she looked at me was also a form of communication.
Isn't that what communication is?
In a squishy philosophical sense, I think LLMs are doomed to hallucination/confabulation because we’re making systems that use language and hoping they figure out the basics of communication. That certainly is not how it works in humans:
> Did I not, then, as I grew out of infancy, come next to boyhood, or rather did it not come to me and succeed my infancy? My infancy did not go away (for where would it go?). It was simply no longer present; and I was no longer an infant who could not speak, but now a chattering boy. I remember this, and I have since observed how I learned to speak. My elders did not teach me words by rote, as they taught me my letters afterward. But I myself, when I was unable to communicate all I wished to say to whomever I wished by means of whimperings and grunts and various gestures of my limbs (which I used to reinforce my demands), I myself repeated the sounds already stored in my memory by the mind which thou, O my God, hadst given me. When they called some thing by name and pointed it out while they spoke, I saw it and realized that the thing they wished to indicate was called by the name they then uttered. And what they meant was made plain by the gestures of their bodies, by a kind of natural language, common to all nations, which expresses itself through changes of countenance, glances of the eye, gestures and intonations which indicate a disposition and attitude--either to seek or to possess, to reject or to avoid. So it was that by frequently hearing words, in different phrases, I gradually identified the objects which the words stood for and, having formed my mouth to repeat these signs, I was thereby able to express my will. Thus I exchanged with those about me the verbal signs by which we express our wishes and advanced deeper into the stormy fellowship of human life, depending all the while upon the authority of my parents and the behest of my elders.
(From the Confessions of St. Augustine)
Maybe, but then my dog also communicates with me via his “biscuit” button so mere “communication” isn’t a particularly high bar. I was disputing the “we’ve taught them sign language” part - because we haven’t, we’ve taught them signs and they try to use some of them. That is impressive and interesting but we shouldn’t oversell it
In the sense that my cat communicates by meowing at me when it's dinner time, sure. But so far I don't think apes are signing about remembered events, future plans, or descriptions of non-immediate reality.
They can identify a worm from 300 feet, why would they not be able to do that.
There might be lots of things going on there: colour, depth, pattern matching.
This one shows that they can distinguish shapes even slightly different from another. I think it is still significant and interesting.
Pattern matching can recognize shapes
I had a similar thought. Birds are extremely visual animals. They should be good at noticing changes in patterns and such.
It might seem remarkable that they can do this in a structured setting like humans do, but the more I learn about animals… The less remarkable I think this kind of behaviour is.
I was discussing the matter of sense with some pelicans once and they told me they are more smell-oriented than visual.
What's the legality on training an army of crows to collect loose change around the city for me?
ISTR a study where someone trained crows to retrieve street garbage. It stopped working because the peanuts or similar they were using to pay the crows were less valuable to them than the discarded pizzas etc they were supposed to be bringing back
This is a real thing with cigarette butts. You just need to set up a vending machine where the crows can "redeem" their trash for treats and they'll even teach each other about it.
I recall the story, and the attention the author received.
I can imagine this working, but digging into it at the time, there was no validation it worked at all. I couldn't get videos of it working, or even a cogent response from the author.
Not great. You'd be an accomplice to a murder.
I always thought these plurals were just crazy, and felt so relieved to see decent researcher explaining them as potential jokes that ended up catching on and staying for centuries afterwards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5rcbUqiZKI
Define "loose".
Edit, to add: years ago a lot of people kept pigeons in rooftop coops around NYC. As a kid there was an older guy near by who you'd see on his roof waving around a cloth that sort of directed the birds as they flew in a big flock. Now I'm imagining that but a flock of crows bringing back loot to some gangster on a rooftop.
If the crows' money is your money, would it also make you responsible for anything these crows do while collecting it ?
As long as you report your earnings to the IRS, you should be good.
I guess you also need to make sure whether the crows are properly classified as employees or independent contractors.
Went down that rabbit hole of training crows to do things. Crows are such amazingly intelligent creatures. There is a whole scene of people teaching and training wild crows silly things.
It's always me coming into these comment sections on animal intelligence posting shadow the rat videos, well, I love rats sooo much, so here I am again. They're really wonderful pets who are clearly very loving and extremely intelligent. Cannot recommend them enough, they're fantastic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA
It's interesting to think about how past a certain level of intelligence and independence it becomes less "training" and more "teaching".
I had to stop feeding the local crows. I thought I'd been training them to come when I called, but realized that they had started training me to come out by pecking my roof.
I started feeding a wounded pheasant that frequented my garden. I trained it to come to a specific place near the back door so the local squirrels didn’t grab everything. The pheasant soon learned that it could get me to come out with food by going to that place and squawking loudly
Id bet so can dogs and every other animal with eyes. Its a matter of interest in learning to do distinguish.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43675829
They are also great at recognizing when I’m trying to plant grass seed in my lawn
Science Advances paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt3718