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Raccoons Pass Aesop's Fable Test By Upending It
- baddox 9y agoIt’s interesting that the test involves showing the animals how to use the rocks to raise the marshmallow. Not to insult any particular species, but that seems more like a test of the instinct to mimic behavior with some desirable outcome. I assumed the Aesop’s Fable test was testing for an apparent understand of water displacement and floating.
- SomewhatLikely 9y agoI think that's why they also do the test with floating and sinking balls to see if they discard the lighter balls.
- has2k1 9y agoFor this particular case, are you accusing the raccoons of just merely adapting positive outcome superstitions?
- Mtinie 9y agoRight now, somewhere in the world, a raccoon is posting a comment on the raccoon-equivalent of the web lamenting the fact that ignorant members of her species have fallen into a cargo cult mentality. :P
- baddox 9y agoI don’t know exactly what you mean by that. I’m just claiming that, from the initial experiment, you can’t conclude anything about the raccoon’s understanding of buoyancy or water displacement.
- naasking 9y ago> Not to insult any particular species, but that seems more like a test of the instinct to mimic behavior with some desirable outcome. I assumed the Aesop’s Fable test was testing for an apparent understand of water displacement and floating. How is that not understanding? They associate the outcome with a cause, and so realize how to trigger that cause themselves to achieve the outcome. What more is there to understanding?
- mannykannot 9y agoThere are various levels of understanding. One could simply remember that pebbles falling into the tube was followed by getting a treat, then there is the level that gets the significance of the presence of water and the buoyancy of the treats.
- baddox 9y agoAs a simple example, take the water out of the tube. Do the animals continue dumping rocks on top of the marshmallow, since that process used to work, or do they appear to understand that it was the water in the tube that made the rock-dropping process work?
- naasking 9y ago> As a simple example, take the water out of the tube. Do the animals continue dumping rocks on top of the marshmallow, since that process used to work, or do they appear to understand that it was the water in the tube that made the rock-dropping process work? All you're doing is adding more variables which makes the causal relationship more complicated, it doesn't diminish the understanding of the original causal relationship.
- mannykannot 9y agoThese variables were there from the beginning; the question is whether the raccoon's model of the world was taking them all into account, a question which probably requires more experiments to answer. Understanding is not a binary thing, as demonstrated by Clifford Stoll's 'Why is the sky blue?' question.
- naasking 9y ago> These variables were there from the beginning But not observable given the experiment's configuration. I don't see how bringing these into the discussion clarifies anything. The question the experiment addresses is whether there is any understanding, 0 or not 0. The degree of understanding is out of scope.
- rjbwork 9y agoWow, NatGeo's site is terrible right now. Full screen unskippable autoplaying video that starts off unmuted. It then had at least one of the same type that was unmuted on the actual page, so upon page load it just sounded like a total cacophony of videos. Totally unusable site.
- executesorder66 9y agoI got none of that with uBlock Origin. You should try it.
- rl3 9y ago>She climbed onto the cylinder and rocked it until it tipped over, giving her access to the sweet treat. >“That was something we hadn’t predicted,” and indeed, had designed against, says study leader Lauren Stanton, a Ph.D. student at the University of Wyoming. They should have consulted me for this experiment. Growing up in the suburbs, I have extensive experience in observing the little bastards topple or otherwise gain access to all manner of receptacle—no matter how seemingly impregnable—on inumerable occasions. Their cunning knows no bounds.
- daemin 9y agoTo me that base did not seem like it was designed that way. If it had been the base would be much bigger in area so that far more force would have been required to tip it. Any structural engineers want to take a look?
- stronglikedan 9y agoI'm not a structural engineer, but it seems like they designed it to not tip over by itself or with the added weight of a raccoon, but they neglected to consider said raccoon in motion.
- mannykannot 9y agoThey have apparently created an experiment to test if raccoons understand resonance.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- KGIII 9y agoRaccoons, black bears, and skunks are all smarter than many people seem to think. They can find their way into most anything in common use. There have been cars broken into by bears, for example.
- rhcom2 9y ago
- diminish 9y agoHow can I stop autoplaying video? What I want is to: - mute the sound - prevent autoplaying - prevent video download consume my internet quota.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoFor Firefox: About:Config setting media.autoplay.enabled to false. For Chrome: Chrome://flags set autoplay policy to "Document user activation is required". I know that this breaks animated .gifs in Firefox, though you can get them to animate by viewing the image info (right-click menu). That's rarely a big loss anyway.
- sleepychu 9y agoWith uMatrix I was able to read the article without loading any of the external cruft, it does add some cognitive overhead to browsing sites with a lot of external dependencies
- sampl 9y agoReminds me of this guy who tried to build a cat-proof automatic feeder: http://quinndunki.com/blondihacks/?p=3023 http://quinndunki.com/blondihacks/?p=3023
- jaclaz 9y agoYep, discussed here (just in case): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230904
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y agoIt's a she.