Another honorable mention is Chaser, a border collie who was trained and tested by John Pilley et al with a language design and testing regime that was specifically aimed at making Clever Hans criticisms impossible, and also to make it very clear that certain grammar recognition tasks could be statistically detected VS alternative ways to solve the linguistic challenge that "don't seem like they are doing language learning right"... What if a dog learns "fetchblue" as a single sound that lacks a breakdown into a coherent verb about an action and a coherent object named blue? What if, in the dog's head, "fetchblue" is just like a name for a scene that includes the object and the actions normally done with the object, in a giant swirl? Well...
They taught Chaser more than a 1000 proper names, and at least 3 verbs, and did tests with her in front of audiences using objects that (so far as they could tell from their notes?) hadn't been paired with the tested verb before.
Here's the kind of performance they could do, for video cameras, as supplementary material for the 2010 paper:
In the paper, they also claim something I'd previously thought impossible for dogs, which was to b...
I find it quite fascinating that in the videos I've seen with Bunny, she tends to use SOV word-order (Subject Object Verb) even though her owner always (that I've seen) uses the SVO order of English. Most The majority of human languages use SOV, about 75% 45% of the ones that care about word order. It seems to be mathematically convenient as well.
If the "75%" stat is coming from Wikipedia, that's for SOV and SVO combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object%E2%80%93verb#Incidence .
This sort of thing seems to suggest that EY's claims in this post about the scale of the relative intelligence differences between chimps, a village idiot, and Einstein is incorrect. The difference in intelligence between village idiot and Einstein may be comparable to the difference in intelligence between some nonhuman animals and a human village idiot. Which is a priori surprising, given that human brains are very structurally similar to each other in comparison to nonhuman animal brains.
Curated.
This was one of the most offbeat-but-surprisingly-on-point LW posts I've read in awhile. I quite appreciated the epistemic status woven throughout the post (i.e. concerns about Clever Hans, the steps attempted at addressing it, an the current status of how the jury is still out on some studies)
[edit: I thought the post's title and opening epistemic status line were too strong given the level of evidence displayed in the rest of the post. However, I appreciated the rest of the post for the way it summarized the evidence]
I had recently looked into "how robust is chimpanzee/gorilla sign language, or sound-button language." I was disappointed to find AFAICT a quite small number of case studies. So this article was timely for my interest.
I recall a line in HPMOR when Harry notes that scientists hadn't even bothered checking what a 4 year old human could understand until relatively recently, despite that not require any advanced modern technology. My takeaway from this article was "man, it is sad that we haven't had, like, 100 dog case studies, 100 pigs,100 chimpanzees, 100 gorillas, etc" all with concerted attempts to teach language with varying methodologies. C'mon civilization...
This is an interesting response; mine is of the opposite valence. To me, this doesn't feel too dissimilar from something my cousin-who-is-into-pyramid-schemes would send me. I believe that this post has:
Claims that set off alarm bells to me in this post include:
...
- Your Dog is Even Smarter Than You Think
- Epistemic status: highly suggestive.
- There's a revolution going on and you're sleeping on it.
- her dog started to display capabilities for rudimentary syntax
- Once your dog gets the hang of it, you’re able to add more buttons faster, but it’s never quick. Dogs take a while to come up with a response (they’re bright, but they’re not humans), and you can’t force your dog to learn, so you have to work together and find motivation (for the dog and for yourself!). And not every pet has a strong desire to communicate.
- Bunny is creative with the limited button vocabulary available to her and tries to use words in novel ways to communicate: "stranger paw" for splinter in her paw, "sound settle" for shut up, "poop play" for fart, "paw" to refer to owner's hand.
I'm not sure that we disagree much about how likely Bunny is to be doing complex language. My primary takeaway was not "this dog can talk", it's "man, we really should be checking more comprehensively whether dogs can talk." I tried to be pretty clear about that in the curation notice.
I think early stage science looks more like messing around than like rigorous studies. I think you need to do a lot of messing around before you get to a point where you have something to rigorously study. My curation of this is a celebration of checking things and being curious, not an endorsement of the theory.
I think I do agree that the post's title and opening epistemic status are too strong (and yeah I think it was a mistake not to include that in the curation notice. I'll edit it to do so).
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 hinges on videos being done in good faith. If it's all creative editing of pets' random walks (heh) over the board, then of course we should dismiss everything out of the gate.
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 the definite rather than the hedge in the title, it was worth doing more than the cursory in the article itself. I haven't read your comments nor looked at the timing of them, but I imagine some to most readers read the article without seeing these comments. I'm saddened that those readers likely had much too strong a takeaway and upvoted this post.
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.
This stuff is highly suggestive,
I agree with the first and not with the second. I think this is lightly sugge...
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 which the learning happens! It's a slow, messy, iterative process to get that "meeting of minds".
I also really like the research setup, and I'm glad they're sourcing from several pet households. Most of the attention is on Bunny, because she's the most coherent and is actively posted on YouTube, but I believe there are quite a few more people participating, they just don't post it publicly.
And even though the learning process isn't under strict protocol, you can still design more rigorous experiments. AFAIK the mirror near Bunny's buttons was placed at the suggestion of the researchers specifically to see if she'll recognize herself in the mirror.
I watched the first two videos and was kinda shocked. I could see the dog thinking. Like, it stopped, was slow, then made a deliberate choice to click certain words. It was not something I believed a dog could do. I feel way more like I could chat with a dog. I have a bunch more empathy for dogs too now.
I think there’s a fair chance that somehow this is a mistake / a fluke, but have now visualized the world where it’s not, and it’s really cool.
(Thanks for the post! You may be interested in this other post on dogs that also increased my respect for them.)
I've been watching this with interest when youtube randomly serves me videos (I sometimes search youtube for things like "crows playing", so I think the algorithm figured out that I like animal intelligence videos), but I wasn't aware of everything you mentioned.
imagines a future where people would be surprised to learn that humans thought animals couldn't talk
Thanks for this! This definitely does intersect with my interests; it's relevant to artificial intelligence and to ethics. It does mostly just confirm what I already thought though, so my reaction is mostly just to pay attention to this sort of thing going forward.
From reading the discussion, I get the impression that some of the commenters are writing from a position of "the prior is against significant dog intelligence, and the evidence here could have alternative explanations, so I'm skeptical". That is, the people feel that it would be quite surprising if dogs really were this intelligent, so establishing it requires some pretty compelling evidence.
At the same time, my own feeling is more like "there's no strong prior against significant dog intelligence, and the evidence here could have alternative explanations, so I'm being tentatively open to this being real". As in, even if you hadn't shown me these videos, dogs being approximately as intelligent as described would have seemed like an entirely plausible possibility to me.
If there are any people who feel like my first paragraph does describe them, I'd be curious to hear why they're coming into this discussion with such a strong prior against dog intelligence.
If I had to articulate the reasons for my own "seems plausible" prior, they'd be something like:
I found the first conversations(?) here very interesting:
It seems like a lot of the words could be swapped for each other or reordered and still look meaningful, so you could get a lot of the way to these conversations(?) just by learning what general categories of words tend to produce surprise/confusion (seemingly irrelevant words like 'stranger', 'friend', 'oops', 'dog', 'hi') versus happiness/engagement ('walk', 'outside', 'beach', 'now', 'soon', 'please', 'want', 'go', 'why', 'when') when you want to go for a walk. I'll certainly be interested to see what falls out of a larger-scale analysis of videos/transcripts.
The fact that this post was curated, and raised so little concern in the comments is worrying.
The author expresses himself maniacally in a mix of meme-speak and LW-lingo. The main claim is never really clarified*, but is presented as if it were, and in an outrageous way. There is no evidence besides YouTube videos**. I have no idea what is going on, and don’t even know where to start.
Comparative cognition is a real scientific field. If you’re interested in the cognitive abilities of non-human animals, and how they compare with the abilities of other species, then there’s a whole scientific literature you can take a look at. Ironically, this post sends us back to the lowest of this field, more than a century ago, when researchers made abundant use of observational anecdotes and interpreted them as they wished.
*None of the videos linked show a use of language at the level of even a child, so it can’t be “Dogs can speak”. Incidentally, nobody ever doubted that dogs can communicate with humans, especially regarding things as food, the presence of other animals or affection.
**That is, cherry-picked, sometimes even edited, videos where the owners of the dog superimposes what they think the dogs are saying.
Really? The main claim is presented "in an outrageous way"?
I can imagine reading the post and being unconvinced by the evidence presented. In fact, that was my reaction (although I haven't watched the videos yet). But... being outraged?
Posts should not make large, unsupported claims, and criticism should not be hyperbolic. Here is what I have learned from your critique:
It sounds to me like you're thinking of curated as 'vetted' or 'confident', while Ray is thinking of it more as 'representing a direction we want to see LW move in more' (including 'this topic seems neglected here, I'd like to see it get more attention').
It's the difference between 'curation is like publishing a non-replication-crisis-y journal article or encyclopedia article, a durable summary of humanity's knowledge we can call back to and base further conclusions on', versus 'curation is like sending out an email to a private researcher mailing list you run "hey, I'd love to see more discussion here in the vein of X"'.
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 paper, I would post that. On the balance of evidence, the videos seem to be made in good faith, I don't think it's some staged viral crap. Don't discount evidence just because it's normie YouTube vids. The main claim is that there's something interesting going on that makes me suspect dogs could possibly produce something that looks like language. I'm not claiming certainty on that or on the level of dogs' supposed language ability, it's research in progress, but I think it's exciting and worth studying.
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 really happening in 2.
But 2. has a lot of issues and you know it, and I think you do a bad job at convincing me. Your justifications are:
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 with other animals. These videos are all made in good faith, showing birds evolving in ecological or lab settings, and demonstrating their intelligence.
As you put it, you can build an "holistic picture" of them as very strong problem solvers.
Then comes this observation. You see crows dropping nuts on the road. Cars go over the nuts, crushing them. The crows delight themselves with the opened nuts.
What do you conclude? That the crows are using the passage of cars as a way to break the nuts open? Considering the abilities demonstrated by these birds, it seems like the logical hypothesis to me.
And so this was that a lot of people thou...
I wonder if this could be made more scalable by having a dog who has learned this teaçh its puppies. 🤔
My dog does this unusual roundhouse butt attack when she's playing with other dogs. It's unusual enough that people comment on it.
I've definitely noticed other dogs start doing it too after playing with her a bunch.
There also SEEMS to be a thing where in e.g. Berkeley the dogs at the park play quietly. I wondered how they taught their dogs not to bark while playing, because this is NOT the case in midwest dog parks. But apparently it's "cultural". If the dogs don't bark at the dog park you frequent, your dog will also not bark.
An interesting data point for putting a ceiling on an animal's ability to produce language is this lecture discussing various animals (mostly apes) learning American Sign Language (starting at ~1h18m).
My take-away is that some chimps may be capable of remembering and reproducing words, but not string them together meaningfully: word order is effectively random, length of sentence does not correlate with information content. The lecture discusses (at about 1:34:56) the turning point of the field when H. Terrace was unable to reproduce the generally optimistic findings, e.g. about Koko using "syntax", when teaching his own chimp American Sign Language and then published Why Koko Can't Talk.
If the above is correct, my prior would be for dogs to be at or below the level of chimps - which would still be an interesting finding. What the history of the field highlights, however, is that many humans really want animals to be able to speak AND humans are great at pattern matching meaning into arbitrarily strung together words, which decreases my confidence in anecdotal evidence without more rigorous studies.
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.
If the folk wisdom of "pigs are smarter than dogs" is true, this suggests it should be possible to get a pig perspective on the pork industry. Could be a big deal for animal rights (but it's also highly likely that a pig/cow/etc taught how to say "please don't eat me" will be ignored or rationalized away like everything else).
It is commendable that OP put a lot of work into this post, but tbh it does seem like many claims are way too overconfident given the evidence. I fear the "specialists in field X are grossly incompetent" is a frequent bias on lw, which is why not many people have pointed out the problems with this post.
1) Animal researchers have engaged with these type of videos; that they are not in awe about it, could also mean that they do not find it impressive or novel. Here is a good summary. It did not take me long to find this, and this link (or similar ones) should not be the 81st comment.
2)Yes, doing research on elephants is impractical, but that has nothing to do with doing research on dogs.Many animal cognition researchers have dogs and are totally happy and willing to try to teach their dogs language in their free time.
3)There are lots of studies with insane amount of resources poured into them with the goal of teaching animals language. Take this study in the 60s where they tried to teach a dolphin language by filling an apartment with water, having the handler live with the dolphin, and giving him an occasional hand*** . (yes, you read that right)
4) Bunny app...
From my experience, dog owners and people in general tend to see human-like patterns in dog behavior even when more simple explanations ("looking at the world through dog's eyes") have better predictive power.
As many dog owners would tell, dogs learn how to show their needs (staring at a door to be let outside, bringing a leash when they want to go for a walk, or a toy when they want to play, etc.). I find it pretty impressive that Bunny learned to communicate her needs through the board, but from what I've seen, I don't really think there's much evidence for some of the complex behaviour this post and the owner suggested there is.
I think that she learned which words or parts of the board to use in specific contexts (questions about time and place, mirror) but I don't it shows she can tell time or recognize herself in the mirror (AFAIK, no dog can do that). On the other hand, I think that she can somewhat describe the world around her and I'm really curious what is the extent of this ability.
A lot of the behavior from the videos (eg. the negotiations) reminds me of a dog training technique when you let the dog try things and reward them when they do the thing you want. Dogs can ge...
This raises the natural question: what if you gave an ape the buttons, and taught it from childhood, and put parent-level effort into it, not "70s research”-level effort? Perhaps the answer would surprise us.
The bonobo Kanzi had something very similar ("lexigrams"). And his sister Panbanisha was born in the research center and grew up with the lexigrams. As far as I'm aware, the research never seemed to generate extreme attention, so probably the learnings remained somewhat limited?
Bunny is quite obsessed over her bowel movements (how Freudian) and about her owners' poop cycle.
As a youtube comment on the video points out, maybe the dog is just trying to be polite by imitating the conversation topic of its family. People probably ask their dog all the time about whether the dog needs or wants to go potty.
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 drama. According to her wiki she has left the center and is "embroiled in several legal battles" with her former employer. Their current research page provides scant information on what they're doing these days. They're pretty active on Facebook though, but it's mostly begging for donations and asking people to buy stuff of their amazon wishlist, with no mention of any research. I think they're struggling to stay afloat.
I can't find any videos of Teco using the lexigrams, but here are some of the other apes:
First False -Belief Test Passed by Ape (Liz from the vid apparently was kicked off the project in 2014 and her dying wish was t...
Continuing the previous examples, I think there are old experiments to get animals to talk which are maybe why research into this area has been less than one might expect for a while (which are different from the examples given in the OP).
I have a dog and was aware of these people. My lack of reaction was due to a default assumption that this will turn out to be Clever Hansian once science brings its customary rigor to bear.
If not, I wonder if I will conclude that it's unethical not to teach my dog how to communicate.
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 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. And every pet is going to develop its own idiolect with the owner, further complicating things. Alexis seems to be very aware of those issues and UCSD study claims (or hopes?) to have hundreds of participants, the large scale should help separate signal from noise.
There's also some conflict of interest with Leo Trottier who has sites selling the buttons, pet games and learning material while being part of the research team.
There are some real concerns, but I still think there's something real here.
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 over-interpretation happens with dogs, that only makes it a process similar to human language learning, with the parent/child and owner/dog creating a shared language game.
...Our first type of example comes from our own data concerning Zulu infants of between three and four months of age interacting with their mothers, and suggests an answer to this question. [...]
As noted above, there are times when a caregiver will want an infant to fall silent, or in isiZulu to 'thula'. Zulu children are traditionally expected to be less socially active than contemporary Western children, to initiate fewer interactions, and, crucially, to show a
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 than that happening.
they are at least able to recognize patterns and determine likely outcomes, even if they are at a more reflexive instead of reflective level. Hot dogs for example satisfy reflexive hunger based desires, instead of reflective philosophical desires to be seen as intelligent.
I agree that on the continuum animals are much further towards reflexive, but I just want to point out that most people inhabit reflexive states very often. Maybe it's normie bias cropping up :D But most people aren't obsessively reflective. A lot of self-reflective smart people have trouble understanding what it's like to be someone far ou...
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
This is based on a model of lay science that tends to sh...
I found an interesting video of a cat using the similar buttons:
The cat insisting to go outside looks like a lot of intent of the side of the cat. Pressing the "Love you button" while pleading is also funny.
In the following video the dog owner tells Bunny that another dog is "home". Given our human language it's clear the dog owner meant that it's at the home of the other dog owner but given that home has always meant the dog owners home the dog seems to understand that the other dog is around.
You wouldn't get such misunderstanding with the clever hans effect.
I found this one particularly impressive: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AHiu-EDJUx0
The use of "oops" at the end is spot on.
So this is hearsay, but a zoologist friend of mine has a zoologist friend of hers :) and that person has spent a while observing cows. She says cows are "smart" but kind of live in a different timescale than we do, a "longer" one. I have no idea what this means for any particular cow, yet what I find interesting is the notion of different timescales and how it affects ethology research.
OTOH, I have geese, and I do wonder about that Hans thing. Geese are 1) super fun, 2) variable in aggression, maternal instinct strength, shyness etc. Sure they can't comm...
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.
It's not really suprising to me that dogs are able to have thoughts of the complexity of "I was outside this afternoon".
Given what Neurolink is doing with the chimpanzees it will be interesting how that tool could be used to let animals express themselves.
I still appreciate this post for getting me to think about the question "how much language can dogs learn?". I also still find the evidence pretty sus, and mostly tantalizing in the form of "man I wish there were more/better experiments like this."
BUT, what feels (probably?) less sus to me is JenniferRM's comment about the dog Chaser, who learned explicit nouns and verbs. This is more believable to me, and seems to have had more of a scientific setup. (Ideally I'd like to spend this review-time spot-checking that the paper seems reasonable, alas, in the gr...
This post has successfully stuck around in my mind for two years now! In particular, it's made me explicitly aware of the possibility of flinching away from observations because they're normie-tribe-coded.
I think I deny the evidence on most of the cases of dogs generating complex English claims. But it was epistemically healthy for that model anomaly to be rubbed in my face, rather than filter-bubbled away plus flinched away from and ignored.
The owners over-interpret and anthropomorphize the button "speech"
The is the biggest danger in my opinion. Hopefully with rigorous analysis during the study and specifically set up experiments we'll be able to understand better at what level of communication the dogs actually are.
I think this is most of what's going on here. I'd guess that the owners have in fact taught their animals some new words and associations, but that they're way over-interpreting what the dogs are "saying".
I don't think this question has been asked before here but I'm wondering about the effect of the age of the dog at the start of the training.
IIRC feral children that learn to communicate as adults have missed their critical period for grammatical expression. In effect there oral skills are akin to "dog speak". Maybe if the dog starts at age 0 it can lead to more complex word associations. If indeed there is a "grammatical critical period" for dogs even though dogs don't ever have to use grammars in their natural state that would be a breakthrough in my
great post, two points of disagreement that are worth mentioning
Anyone have any particular intuition for whether a dog would be likely to be able to learn to use a device that combined phonemes as its basic constituent parts, rather than entire words?
I'm working on a device that affords this possibility. I have a functional prototype that is mouth-held and -operated; it uses a pressure sensor (measuring bite) and gyro/accelerometer to produce (at the moment) a limited selection of vowels and consonants; they can be varied by moving the head around and biting down.
My inspiration is these button boards together with the ...
Note: if you convert this post from markdown to LessWrong Docs (available at the top of the edit-post-page), and that you paste the youtube-links into the editor, they will automatically turn into embedded links, which you might find nicer. (You can experiment with it and see if you like it without committing to re-publish the post)
If this turns out to be basically true, then what about wild wolves? I think there is a strong case that the capacity for this sort of communication to have been bred into domestic dogs as a result of humans selecting for e.g. better overall intelligence and ability to understand human commands.
Another option is that wild wolf packs have the capacity for this sort of communication but don't (unless we've simply not noticed it) and this seems much less likely to me, for the sole reason that being able to communicate in this way would give a very large advan...
So we could create another intelligent species on Earth by combining selection and designed culture. Any risks?
Other non-primate animal doing similar: Alex the gray parrot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot) He also made his own terms as "cork nut" for almond.
I was surprised not to find K'eyush as an example. For anybody wondering about interprtations one can compare with his buddy Sherpa. Sherpa is clearly alot behind K'eyush but does have a notion on when it is her turn to "speak" althought with sherpa it doesn't seem to have specified content.
The way the owner subtitles the videos also is a interesting reference point. They are half-littered with jokes which are no an honest interpretation form the handler but also do have genuine disambiguation. Perhaps importantly by following the videos one develops...
Epistemic status: highly suggestive.
[EDIT: Added more info on research methods. Addressed some common criticism. Added titles for video links and a few new vids. Prevented revolution with a military coup d'état]
A combination of surveys and bayesian estimates[1] leads me to believe this community is interested in autism, cats, cognition, philosophy, and moral valence of animals. What I’m going to show you checks every box, so it boggles my mind that I don't see anyone talk about it. It has been bothering me so much that I decided to create an account and write this article.
I have two theories.
The community will ignore fascinating insight just because its normie coded. Cute tiktok-famous poodle doesn't pattern match to "this contains real insight into animal cognition".
Nobody tried to sell this well enough.
I personally believe in the second one[2] and I'll try to sell it to you.
Stella
There’s an intervention to help non-verbal autistic kids communicate using “communication boards” (not to be confused with facilitated communication which has a bad reputation). It can be a paper board with pictures or it can be a board with buttons that say a word when pressed. In 2018 Christina Hunger (hungerforwords.com) - a speech pathologist working with autistic children using such boards - started to wonder if her dog was in fact autistic. Just kidding, she saw similarities in patterns of behavior between young kids she was working with ("learner" seems to be the term of art) and her dog. So she gave it a button that says “Outside” and expanded from there.
Now teaching a dog to press a button that says “outside” is not impressive or interesting to me. But then she kept adding buttons and her dog started to display capabilities for rudimentary syntax.
Stella the talking dog compilation - Stella answers whether she wants to play or eat, asks for help when one of her buttons breaks, alerts owner to possible "danger" outside.
Stella tells us she is all done with her bed!
Stella the Talking Dog says "Help Good Want Eat"
(most of the good videos are on her Instagram @hunger4words, not much is on YouTube)
Reaction from serious animal language researchers and animal cognition hobbyists was muted to non-existent, but dog moms ate this stuff up. One of them was Alexis.
Bunny
Most useful research is impractical to do within academia
A lot of useful research isn't done because it's too inconvenient, too expensive or otherwise impractical to execute within confines of academia. This is a massive shaping force. Existence of ImageNet and its quirks is a stronger shaping force on AI research than all AI ethics committees combined.
Nobody had done this before because it takes months of everyday training to get interesting results. Once your dog gets the hang of it, you’re able to add more buttons faster, but it’s never quick. Dogs take a while to come up with a response (they’re bright, but they’re not humans), and you can’t force your dog to learn, so you have to work together and find motivation (for the dog and for yourself!). And not every pet has a strong desire to communicate.
But it may be practical to do for a layperson
Lucky for us, Alexis has many more commendable qualities besides willing to spend time and effort on her dog. She maintains healthy skepticism, she's well aware of confirmation bias and "Clever Hans" effects and of the danger of over-interpreting the dog's output. She has partnered with researches from University of California, San Diego to have several cameras looking at the button pad running 24/7, for them to do more rigorous study.
Please watch this vid first where she gives a brief explanation of what she's doing, and importantly shows her attitude and skepticism towards her dog's "talking". She even namedrops Chomsky & Skinner 😄
Study by Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California, San Diego
I encourage you to read their research methodology page yourself. Here's a summary:
This is an ongoing study with hundreds[3] of participants and a mission to "use a rigorous scientific approach to determine whether, and if so, how and how much non-humans are able to express themselves in language-like ways". It's headed by Prof. Federico Rossano, Director of Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego and Leo Trottier, PhD Candidate, UC San Diego. The latter has websites selling dog soundboards and interactive pet toys, indicating a potential conflict of interest, but I also don't want to knock him for simply being enterpreneural.
They mention previous research with a dog named Rico and a border collie named Chaser (video of Chaser) that had rigorous experiments performed with an opaque barrier between the dog and the experimenter to preclude possibility of unwittingly influencing the dog's behavior. In those studies dogs were able to recognize 200+ toys by spoken name and perform fast-mapping (better known in some circles as one-shot learning). Encouraged by the studies they aim to ask:
They're splitting the study into 3 phases:
Things I've seen the dog (appear to) do that surprised me
Bunny is creative with the limited button vocabulary available to her and tries to use words in novel ways to communicate: "stranger paw" for splinter in her paw, "sound settle" for shut up, "poop play" for fart, "paw" to refer to owner's hand.
Talking With Bunny | Ouch, Stranger! - this video was what first made me decide to follow Bunny more closely
Bunny "Talking" About Cats - "sound settle cat bye" to tell meowing cat to shut up. Also note how she reacts to the possibly random button presses after 2:13 and the big note about confirmation bias that she put in the video.
Bunny knows each of her doggy friends by name, thinks about them when they're not there, asks where they are, requests to play with them.
Bunny and Friends - Bunny "Talking" About Her Friends - note how Alexis wasn't sure how to explain the concept of her dog friend's "home" and how Bunny cleared it up
Bunny understands times of day like today, morning, afternoon, night.
Talking With Bunny | Contemplating Time
And can recall what time of day she went to the park.
Talking With Bunny | When Bunny Went Park (Hmm?) - mind the note that says the question was suggested by UCSD scientists to test Bunny's episodic memory
Bunny is quite obsessed over her bowel movements (how Freudian) and about her owners' poop cycle.
Bunny "Talking" About Number 2 - Bunny The "Talking" Dog - note how she appears to use "poop play" to mean "fart".
Bunny communicates emotional states like mad, happy, concerned. And "ugh".
Ugh! | Bunny The "Talking" Dog
Bunny wants to know what and why is a "dog".
What Dog Is | What About Bunny
And whether Mom used to be a dog. And she seems to recognize herself in the mirror.
Who This? | Bunny The "Talking" Dog
There's a long-running debate about whether human brains possess a special ability for language. Although "feral" human children who are raised with no language lose the ability to pick it up later in life. Maybe they could learn button talk, I don't think anyone tried for lack of steady supply of feral children.
But what I see is strongly suggestive that language facilities are not unique to us and a dog that is given ability to produce words and is taught from puppyhood with the same massive amount of effort that we put into human children will be able to talk. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect dogs to start writing poetry and doing particle physics. But I expect them to produce something that can undoubtedly be called language[4].
It's all "Clever Hans"
I don't think this can be explained by classic Clever Hans where the owner tells the dog what to do with subconscious cues. You see lots of interactions where the dog is supposed to make a decision and the owner doesn't know the right answer, or the dog alerts the owner to something they're unaware of.
When Bunny used "stranger paw" to indicate a splinter in her paw, how was the owner supposed to influence the answer without even being aware of the splinter?
It's all operant conditioning
First, it can't be all just conditioning. By induction: pets already communicate with owners to request things, teaching your dog to press "Food" instead of barking or "Outside" instead of scratching at the door simply changes the modality. Usage of simple buttons like that doesn't require clever hans or conditioning as an explanation.
Second, look at this video of Billi the cat. Assuming it's just conditioning, we'd expect the cat to always go "yes food" when asked about food, because it doesn't understand "yes" or "no". But here we see it getting practically railroaded by the owner and still refusing food, and in several different ways (first "no", then "all done later"). How could this happen if it was just simple conditioning?
The owners over-interpret and anthropomorphize the button "speech"
The is the biggest danger in my opinion. Hopefully with rigorous analysis during the study and specifically set up experiments we'll be able to understand better at what level of communication the dogs actually are.
Interestingly, at least for humans, misinterpretation may be a necessary requirement for language acquisition, as mentioned in this comment! The short summary of the mechanism:
I think the videos are fake
I wrote a comment on that and I think the videos are done in good faith. Of course this doesn't preclude other problems, Clever Hans was in good faith too, after all.
This doesn't look like real science, it's just "dog moms" enjoying a fun hobby, YouTube videos aren't evidence of anything.
Early stage science often looks like "messing around", before theory and rigor is built. Telling what "messing around" is likely to be fruitful is a meta-rational skill, and it can be done, somewhat.
YouTube (and especially Instagram and TikTok) videos go against usual aesthetic sensibilities of what evidence looks like, but that's not a reason to discount them completely. They still constitute a lot of evidence, albeit the kind that is weak and easy to misinterpret. If we're to be good rationalists, we can't exclude the messy parts of the world and then expect to arrive at a useful worldview.
The work on the ground being done by laymen may be a blessing in disguise - I won't be surprised if taking a formal and procedural approach to training would "ruin the magic" and lead to poor results. Especially if mutual misinterpretation is an important part of the mechanism. I hope that given the number of participants in the study and the amount of data (every interaction recorded) and well-designed experiments will together let us separate signal from the noise.
Koko
So what, you ask, some apes have been taught sign language and they produced rudimentary syntax as well.
For starters you wouldn't predict dogs to be capable of the same, and it's significant to see that ability given their evolutionary distance from us (even with selective breeding pressure from domestication).
Most of the ape research was done in the 70s, and it is, well, very 70s. Those things aren't known for being well-run or replicating well. And it was done with sign language, perhaps buttons are much more conductive to language acquisition. Since the 70s craze, it apparently became unfashionable, and nothing new happened for decades. To this day any conversation on animal language is about Koko (who died in 2018) and the parrot who said "love you, bye" before dying in 2007. Utter stagnation.
What we have is something new, orders of magnitude easier to study and reproduce (how many of you have gorillas at home?), massive PR potential, modern tech that allows you to have cameras running 24/7 to preclude criticism. It started with an outsider to the field, who wasn't conceptionally limited by prior art. And it's accessible to regular people, potentially revolutionizing our relationship with our pets.
This raises the natural question: what if you gave an ape the buttons, and taught it from childhood, and put parent-level effort into it, not "70s research”-level effort? Perhaps the answer would surprise us.
[EDIT: Exactly this has been attempted with bonobos, but unfortunately little data is available and the experiment disintegrated over human drama. Read the linked comment for details and a few existing videos]
Honorable Mentions
Billi
A cat who initially became famous for pressing "MAD MAD MAD" at a slightest inconvenience, but she has meollowed out a bit.
"Mad" A Short Film Starring Billi the Cat
Mom’s Choice - appears to ask "mom" what she wants to play. Normally mom is the one asking her what toy she wants to play.
Imposter - an important video. In it, Billi repeatedly refuses food, despite the owner practically railroading her. With simple conditioning you could expect "want food hm?" -> "yes food" from the cat, without understanding of what "yes" or "no" is. But if all of this is just clever conditioning, why did this video happen?
Others
Talking dog Tiktok compilation | Flambo the dog
Dog Communicates with Human by Talking Buttons PT2
Izzy the talking dog uses recordable buttons to help her sister Luna
What did we do with the word buttons? 😯 | Pharaby the Talking Dog
HowTheyTalk.org
Community of people trying to replicate this, ran by the people running the UCSD study.
Maybe later
“Maybe later” at substack for trying in vain to tell others about this, only to be summarily ignored. I got your back, buddy.
aka blindly trusted stereotypes ↩︎
Normie blindspot does exist in the community, but that's kind of obvious and expected, and should be a separate article. ↩︎
Possibly, they're not clear on the number of participants. I personally find it hard to believe that there would be more than about a hundred. ↩︎
In the layman sense of "tool for communication". Philosophical discussions about the exact border between non-language communication and "true language" aren't really interesting to me. Duck typing, etc. ↩︎