Fully agree on the bias part, although specialists being incompetent isn't a thread in my article? There's an entire aside about why some research doesn't get done, and incompetence isn't among the reasons.
I've read the Slate article you linked, and I think it's good. I don't see anything in there that I disagree with. The article is from 2019 when the amount of evidence (and importantly the number of people who successfully replicated it) was just one Instagram dog. Even back then in the article scientists are cautious but lukewarm and want a more rigo
word order is effectively random, length of sentence does not correlate with information content
That seems to be the case with dogs, and it won't surprise me if they never progress much further than that.
I've updated the article to include a more in-depth explanation of the study design and philosophy instead of just two links (I suspect almost nobody clicked them). Also added responses to common criticism and titles and short explanations for video links (I suspect a lot of people didn't click on most of the videos). Also removed the revolution part.
If you've already read the article, I suggest you read the research and criticism parts under Bunny and watch the new Stella video I added, which is more representative of the kinds of videos that led me to watch the dog space more closely. All of the good Stella stuff is on Instagram, but not on YouTube.
I think we're mostly in agreement, and I'm not disputing that it pays to be careful when it comes to animal cognition. I'd say again that I think it's a meta-rational skill to see the patterns of what is likely to work and what isn't, and this kind of stuff is near-impossible to communicate well.
I've read about the car-nutracker thing somewhere, but without the null result from research. If you had asked me to bet I'd say it would be unlikely to work. But it's illustrative that we both still agree that corvids are smart and there's a ton of evidence for it...
I think you hit the nail on the head here. When I was writing the article I definitely had someone with a high prior in mind, to the point where I expected people to say "so what, why wouldn't dogs do that if you trained them".
Sometimes people seem to put dogs closer to reflexive automatons like insects than to fellow mammals. My prior is the base affects that we feel aren't fundamentally different between us and dogs (and most higher mammals). I'm talking about stuff like fear, excitement, generalized negative or positive affect, tiredness, sexual arousal...
I think both of us made our arguments clear, so instead of answering point by point, let me give a quick holistic response that should summarize what I think, and provide a general interesting point of view on animal cognition.
(Maybe you know about the following, but I think it is interesting enough by itself to be presented here to other people)
Corvidae are very intelligent birds. There's ton of evidence of that. You can read studies that test how they can solve problems, you can watch tons of youtube videos showing them interact with their settings and w...
Plenty of concern was raised in the comments, have you gone through all of them and all the replies?
I'm aware of comparative cognition, the people posting the pet videos are participating in ongoing research at the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California, San Diego. They give a description of their methodology, but the status updates appear hidden to ensure integrity of the data.
Short recap of the comments: This is a very new thing, early-stage science often looks like messing around, so don't expect lots of rigor so early. If they had a ...
Thanks for responding, and also for illustrating all the issues I have in your post in a compressed way. Basically, what you're saying is:
I think this community should be able to see the issue there. (To also be polemical, occultism was also something that was new and exciting in the 19th century, with many intellectual of their time spending their evening around a turntable, most of them also in good faith when they reported paranormal activity.)
1. is being conditioned on something re...
I don't think it's fair to say my dismissal of concerns is "cursory" if you include my comments under the post. Maybe the article itself didn't go deep enough, partly I wanted it to scan well, partly I wanted to see good criticism so I could update/come up with good responses, because it's not easy to preempt every criticism.
As for cursory evidence, yes it's mostly that, but cursory evidence can still be good Bayesian evidence. I think there's enough to conclude there's something interesting going on.
For starters, all of this hinge...
I appreciate your response, and my apologies that for time-efficiency reasons I'm only going to respond briefly and to some parts of it.
I don't think it's fair to say my dismissal of concerns is "cursory" if you include my comments under the post. Maybe the article itself didn't go deep enough, partly I wanted it to scan well, partly I wanted to see good criticism so I could update/come up with good responses, because it's not easy to preempt every criticism.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this. I do feel as though given large claims e.g. "revolutionary" and t...
I like the idea of interacting with the dog normally as you would a 2-year-old human, while having the cameras running 24/7 so less biased people can look over the data.
Yeah it's an important point that some phenomena (perhaps most phenomena) are impractical to recreate under a strict research protocol. If you tried to teach your dog with a very formal approach, you'd probably "lose the magic" that makes it happen. Kaj Sotala posted a comment that suggests that "incorrect" overinterpretation of babies' behavior is actually an important mechanism by whic...
I think I'm gonna keep the links, YT embeds are pretty large and break the flow of text.
I wasn't aware of this and it indeed looks very similar! Sue Savage-Rumbaugh who started the work did appear on Oprah and gave a TED talk, so she generated some attention. And in the Oprah clip she says she's living and sleeping with the bonobos 95% of the time, and is raising a small one (Teco) being exposed to lexigrams from birth. That's about as close to "parent-level effort" as one can get!
Unfortunately in 2012 she had a spat with her bonobo center over ethical concerns, which included a shadowy group of whistleblowers named "Bonobo 12" among other dr...
Different timescale is an important part of it. In a lot of those pet buttons videos you can see that the pet takes an uncomfortably long time to respond. They would often go away from the board to "pace" and then after a solid minute come back to finally respond. In Bunny videos this part gets fast-forwarded to make it watchable, in Billi vids you can see the cat go away and sit with her tail swishing, you can practically see the gears turning in her head.
I've checked him out, this kind of animal "speaking" always seemed like just a fun party trick, you can read anything into dog vocalizations. I expected nothing there, but in this clip (and only at 1:15) I can see him actually trying to mimic speech. But the rest is just reading on tea leaves. Like, there's no chance in hell that the dog would know the word "werewolf" and know to use it in context as happens later in the video.
https://youtu.be/dxBpESjiefo?t=75
Siri does understand his "hello", but "I know he can" a few seconds later is a ridiculous reach. T...
When you say "Clever Hans" are you talking specifically about the handler's subconscious cues determining what the dog does? I think that's very unlikely, in a lot of interactions you can see an exchange where the pet is supposed to make a decision - the owner doesn't know the right answer! When Bunny presses "ouch stranger paw" to indicate a splinter in her paw, how was the owner supposed to "influence" that, without even being aware of the splinter? Some interactions are owner asking a question with a defined right answer, but there's clearly much more t...
I also mentioned Clever Hans, and you made a good point in response. Rather than sound like I am motte-and-baileying you, I will say that I was using "Clever Hans" irresponsibly imprecisely as a stand-in for more issues than were present in the Clever Hans case.
I've updated in the direction of "I'll eventually need to reconsider my relationship with my dog" but still expect a lot of these research threads to come apart through a combination of
Thank you for the info, I was not aware of Chaser! By the way, how did you do the YouTube embeds? I couldn't make them work in my article.
By induction: it's obvious that you can teach most dogs to press a button for "Food", "Outside", "Pets", "Play", and they won't need to rely on clever hansian subtle cues from you to express desire for food, they're already doing it just with a different modality.
For more abstract concepts like mad, happy or concerned or the ever-popular "love you", you're supposed to model those buttons when the dog is feeling these things, so you need to understand your pet very well, and it's easy to delude yourself into thinking you understand when you don't.
So the dan...
So the danger is over-interpreting their output. Was this sentence intended or just random babbling? Does the dog understand the word differently from what it means in English? E.g. "bye" seems to become a verb meaning "leaving", "love you" is used for affection but obviously doesn't reflect deep understanding of the human concept of love.
Interestingly, there's an argument that human infants also learn language by their parents over-interpreting their input, with the infants then adopting those interpretations as true. So one could argue that even if...
I've had that thought as well. So far it doesn't look like dogs spontaneously use the buttons to communicate among themselves (they mostly don't have the opportunity though). Some of Bunny's neighbor dogs' owners got on the button craze as well, so maybe we'll see some of that.
I think the mama dog would still likely teach it to puppies as a way to communicate with humans, even if it's not used as a way to talk between them.
I've noticed that the more high-level and complex the work you're doing, the sillier your bugs get. Perhaps because you focus so much on the complex parts since they're difficult to get right, so you gloss over the more basic parts.
I don't think your pyramid is a good conceptual framework to understand programming expertise. Expertise comes mostly from seeing common/overarching patterns (which would be all over the place on your pyramid) and from understanding the entire stack - having at least some sense of how each level functions, from the high-level ab... (read more)