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First, let me clearly state that I agree that the "science" surrounding Koko was not great, and that her language abilities are consistently overstated. Howeve

First, let me clearly state that I agree that the "science" surrounding Koko was not great, and that her language abilities are consistently overstated. However, as someone who has met Koko I can also tell you that there is something there. She did not have a human mastery of sign language, but was capable of communicating new and unique ideas. It was remarkable to witness. She was a genuine friend to those who knew her well. As with most things the truth is somewhere in the middle, right?

bojan 8y ago
> As with most things the truth is somewhere in the middle, right? Personally I really hate this assertion. The truth doesn't care if it is in the middle or not.
- ansible 8y ago
  Yes, the truth can be somewhere else entirely. And it doesn't have to fall along some neat axis made up by humans.
- arbitrage 8y ago
  You know it's a metaphor, right?
  - Numberwang 8y ago
    A metaphor for shit thinking that people interpret as profound. A deepity.
    - vibrato 8y ago
      Yea nothing profound about the eightfold path... /s
- drb91 8y ago
  Well, that’s what you get for interpreting idioms literally.
  - scrumption 8y ago
    The problem is that everyone does it. That dumbass idiom should be swatted down at every opportunity. It's the motto of an entire generation of right-wing "centrists" in the USA who have no ability to evaluate their ideas in a larger historical context and so pick the middle ground between center-right and far-right thinking it makes them savvy paragons of compromise.
  - JackFr 8y ago
    > Well, that’s what you get for interpreting idioms literally. How do you think it should be interpreted? The parent interpreted it correctly and asserted it was wrong.
- mpartel 8y ago
  The truth does not care but human opinions tend to be biased towards extremes.
philipodonnell 8y ago
I think its rather binary. Koko could either form complex thoughts into rudimentary sign language or she could not and was simply mimicking what her trainers expected of her in a Pavlovian way. You and I may have different opinions of Koko based on our differing experiences and it is right and fair that we hold those opinions, and we may always be faced with this uncertainty, but the "truth" whatever it may be, is probably not somewhere in the middle. :-)
- drb91 8y ago
  What makes you think that language is binary? That strikes me as absurdly unlikely.
  - arcticfox 8y ago
    Either Koko could communicate complex thoughts, or she was just spamming nonsense and the trainers are deceiving us. That's the binary part. Surely a lot of what she signed was garbage, and surely she could communicate some of the simplest things regardless (like a dog can). But if she legitimately communicated even one complex thought with signs, that's a binary difference from the rest of the animal kingdom.
    - JackFr 8y ago
      > Either Koko could communicate complex thoughts, or she was just spamming nonsense and the trainers are deceiving us. That's the binary part. That's a false dilemma. "Either Koko could communicate complex thoughts, or she could not." That is a binary choice. And even that is contingent on precise definitions of complex, communicate and thought.
    - drb91 8y ago
      > Either Koko could communicate complex thoughts, or she was just spamming nonsense and the trainers are deceiving us. If there is a worldview where it makes sense to structure thinking of communication as a dichotomy between "complex and nonsense", I cannot see it.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
Maybe. The question is to what extent personal experiences of this sort help anyone else understand what was really going on with Koko. I mean, I would personally really like to know exactly how proficient she was with language and what was the extent of her ability to communicate with Patterson and others. But since I wasn't there and didn't try to communicate with her, I'll never know. And because the only evidence that she was at all capable of communication is in Patterson's shoddy publications and personal anecdotes like the one you relay, I have to put the question in the "impossible to ever know" bin. Edit: Look, a personal connection, with a human or an animal, is a wonderful thing to have and I don't wish to belittle it. But what good is it to you, say, to know that I had a warm friendship with my grandmother's partner and that he was the only person ever to manage to teach me how to play backgammon well? I'd guess- not much. The problem is that Koko's linguistic abilities are a scientific question and personal relations with her don't really cut the mustard as an answer.
- mistersquid 8y ago
  > But what good is it to you, say, to know that I had a warm friendship with my grandmother's partner and that he was the only person ever to manage to teach me how to play backgammon well? I'd guess- not much. I think you dramatically underestimate the power of people to empathize, which requires great intelligence and (yes) is vulnerable to manipulation. When you, a virtual stranger to me, write about a "warm friendship" with an elderly person who taught you to "play backgammon well", an avalanche of emotional associations surrounding happiness, childhood, security, caring and many other things wash over me. Which brings me to the point that communication is an intellectual, emotional, and all-encompassing phenomenon and our attempts to scientifically understand communication between sentient beings (including interspecies) is at present unequal to our ability to perceive meaningful communication is occurring. One day our scientific understanding of primate cognition may better explain the ability of humans to communicate with non-humans. Until that time, I am among those who trust the reports of Dr. Francine Patterson, Dr. Ronald Cohn, and others who have communicated directly with Koko that Koko was capable of communicating meaningfully. EDIT: add "scientific" to first sentence of last paragraph.
  - 8y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
Humans are wired to see meaning. For example the simple 1960’s program ELIZA was perceived by some to be intelligent, even though it was rather simple. In a very novel situation such as an encounter with Koko, a person would be primed to see meaning in almost every action, whether or not it was really warranted.
lambda 8y ago
How many of these "new and unique ideas" could be attributable to Koko and not her handlers? Almost all interpretations of what Koko's signing means come from her handlers, not from neutral observers. Dogs can be trained to recognize hundreds of words, perform many tricks based on hand gestures, can engage in different body language to indicate different things that they want at the time, and can show true affection to their human companions or other pets in the house. What bothers me most about Koko is that she has been presented as something entirely different than a smart, well trained dog; that she has some deeper understanding of language and can combine words in novel ways, but the evidence really looks like there's a lot of cherry picking and prompting by the researchers to get at that.
- lawlessone 8y ago
  How many new and unique ideas that you have come up with in life could be attributed to your parents, teachers , the media?
  - apeace 8y ago
    You're talking about the source of the idea. I can't speak for lambda, but I believe what they meant is that the researchers only interpreted Koko's ideas as unique, or as ideas at all. There has never been scientific validation that she actually meant what the researchers thought she meant. I think there's something wonderful about Koko and her relationship with humans. But at the same time, it saddens me that the scientists involved seem to have mostly treated her as a friend, and lacked the scientific rigor to answer some of the most important questions about her actions.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - lambda 8y ago
    This isn't about "new and unique ideas" in the sense of some profound insight. I was responding to the "was capable of communicating new and unique ideas" from the parent, which is a way of paraphrasing some of the claims about Koko's language ability, in which it is claimed that Koko was going beyond mere use of single words to refer to literal objects or actions. I can put together a complex sentence describing abstract ideas, which is what I'm doing here. A dog cannot; a dog can understand a single word or sign in isolation, and may be some amount of literal sequencing, but there is no ability to understand an arbitrarily complex sequence of signs or words containing abstraction like human language is capable of. The claim about Koko's use of sign language is that she has been able to compose sentences out of combinations of words, and express abstract ideas; maybe somewhat more limited than humans in some way, but fundamentally the same way that human language works. That's what the skepticism is about; since while it's clear that she could be trained to recognize individual words and produce individual signs, and maybe some limited pairs, all of the evidence of anything more complex seems to come from interpretation through her handlers, who could have been consciously or subconsciously prompting her, and are using their own theories of mind and inference ability to read more into Koko's actions than what is really there. There's plenty of non-verbal communication you can do with a dog or even a cat. They can pick up on emotional states. They have memories. They can learn words or signs. They can be caring. A lot of the claims about Koko seem to be either unsurprising for anyone who has owned a pet (yes, pets can sometimes be surprisingly emotionally intelligent), or go far beyond what the evidence actually supports, relying much too much on subjective judgements and unblinded tests by the researchers. One of the reasons that this is a problem is that this exact same kind of thing is done with humans sometimes, in the form of "Facilitated Communication" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication), which is claimed to be a way of training "facilitators" to help calm and guide non-verbal autistic children's hands to be able to type out sentences and communicate. This was a very popular form of assistance for a while, and it even led to autistic children being able to speak out about their abusive parents. Except, as it it turns out, it was entirely based on pseudoscience. Once you did any kind of blinded testing, where you showed something different to the facilitator as you did to the patient, they would spell out the word for what the facilitator saw. The parental abuse, for which parents had been kicked out of their own homes and not allowed contact with their children? Entirely imagined by the facilitators. I'd recommend watching the PBS documentary "Prisoners of Silence" on this topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sO9LyXuOQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sO9LyXuOQY). Allowing this kind of pseudoscience to get so much coverage can cause real harm to people, and it erodes faith in the scientific process.
agumonkey 8y ago
I guess this effect is why the reports are amplified, communication is such a powerful thing for us that even limited means to do so with an animal feels grand. I wish I could met Koko
crunchlibrarian 8y ago
Which new and unique ideas did Koko personally communicate to you?

bojan 8y ago

> As with most things the truth is somewhere in the middle, right? Personally I really hate this assertion. The truth doesn't care if it is in the middle or not.

ansible 8y ago
Yes, the truth can be somewhere else entirely. And it doesn't have to fall along some neat axis made up by humans.
arbitrage 8y ago
You know it's a metaphor, right?
- Numberwang 8y ago
  A metaphor for shit thinking that people interpret as profound. A deepity.
  - vibrato 8y ago
    Yea nothing profound about the eightfold path... /s
drb91 8y ago
Well, that’s what you get for interpreting idioms literally.
- scrumption 8y ago
  The problem is that everyone does it. That dumbass idiom should be swatted down at every opportunity. It's the motto of an entire generation of right-wing "centrists" in the USA who have no ability to evaluate their ideas in a larger historical context and so pick the middle ground between center-right and far-right thinking it makes them savvy paragons of compromise.
- JackFr 8y ago
  > Well, that’s what you get for interpreting idioms literally. How do you think it should be interpreted? The parent interpreted it correctly and asserted it was wrong.
mpartel 8y ago
The truth does not care but human opinions tend to be biased towards extremes.

philipodonnell 8y ago

I think its rather binary. Koko could either form complex thoughts into rudimentary sign language or she could not and was simply mimicking what her trainers expected of her in a Pavlovian way. You and I may have different opinions of Koko based on our differing experiences and it is right and fair that we hold those opinions, and we may always be faced with this uncertainty, but the "truth" whatever it may be, is probably not somewhere in the middle. :-)

drb91 8y ago
What makes you think that language is binary? That strikes me as absurdly unlikely.
- arcticfox 8y ago
  Either Koko could communicate complex thoughts, or she was just spamming nonsense and the trainers are deceiving us. That's the binary part. Surely a lot of what she signed was garbage, and surely she could communicate some of the simplest things regardless (like a dog can). But if she legitimately communicated even one complex thought with signs, that's a binary difference from the rest of the animal kingdom.
  - JackFr 8y ago
    > Either Koko could communicate complex thoughts, or she was just spamming nonsense and the trainers are deceiving us. That's the binary part. That's a false dilemma. "Either Koko could communicate complex thoughts, or she could not." That is a binary choice. And even that is contingent on precise definitions of complex, communicate and thought.
  - drb91 8y ago
    > Either Koko could communicate complex thoughts, or she was just spamming nonsense and the trainers are deceiving us. If there is a worldview where it makes sense to structure thinking of communication as a dichotomy between "complex and nonsense", I cannot see it.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

Maybe. The question is to what extent personal experiences of this sort help anyone else understand what was really going on with Koko. I mean, I would personally really like to know exactly how proficient she was with language and what was the extent of her ability to communicate with Patterson and others. But since I wasn't there and didn't try to communicate with her, I'll never know. And because the only evidence that she was at all capable of communication is in Patterson's shoddy publications and personal anecdotes like the one you relay, I have to put the question in the "impossible to ever know" bin. Edit: Look, a personal connection, with a human or an animal, is a wonderful thing to have and I don't wish to belittle it. But what good is it to you, say, to know that I had a warm friendship with my grandmother's partner and that he was the only person ever to manage to teach me how to play backgammon well? I'd guess- not much. The problem is that Koko's linguistic abilities are a scientific question and personal relations with her don't really cut the mustard as an answer.

mistersquid 8y ago
> But what good is it to you, say, to know that I had a warm friendship with my grandmother's partner and that he was the only person ever to manage to teach me how to play backgammon well? I'd guess- not much. I think you dramatically underestimate the power of people to empathize, which requires great intelligence and (yes) is vulnerable to manipulation. When you, a virtual stranger to me, write about a "warm friendship" with an elderly person who taught you to "play backgammon well", an avalanche of emotional associations surrounding happiness, childhood, security, caring and many other things wash over me. Which brings me to the point that communication is an intellectual, emotional, and all-encompassing phenomenon and our attempts to scientifically understand communication between sentient beings (including interspecies) is at present unequal to our ability to perceive meaningful communication is occurring. One day our scientific understanding of primate cognition may better explain the ability of humans to communicate with non-humans. Until that time, I am among those who trust the reports of Dr. Francine Patterson, Dr. Ronald Cohn, and others who have communicated directly with Koko that Koko was capable of communicating meaningfully. EDIT: add "scientific" to first sentence of last paragraph.
- 8y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

Humans are wired to see meaning. For example the simple 1960’s program ELIZA was perceived by some to be intelligent, even though it was rather simple. In a very novel situation such as an encounter with Koko, a person would be primed to see meaning in almost every action, whether or not it was really warranted.

lambda 8y ago

How many of these "new and unique ideas" could be attributable to Koko and not her handlers? Almost all interpretations of what Koko's signing means come from her handlers, not from neutral observers. Dogs can be trained to recognize hundreds of words, perform many tricks based on hand gestures, can engage in different body language to indicate different things that they want at the time, and can show true affection to their human companions or other pets in the house. What bothers me most about Koko is that she has been presented as something entirely different than a smart, well trained dog; that she has some deeper understanding of language and can combine words in novel ways, but the evidence really looks like there's a lot of cherry picking and prompting by the researchers to get at that.

lawlessone 8y ago
How many new and unique ideas that you have come up with in life could be attributed to your parents, teachers , the media?
- apeace 8y ago
  You're talking about the source of the idea. I can't speak for lambda, but I believe what they meant is that the researchers only interpreted Koko's ideas as unique, or as ideas at all. There has never been scientific validation that she actually meant what the researchers thought she meant. I think there's something wonderful about Koko and her relationship with humans. But at the same time, it saddens me that the scientists involved seem to have mostly treated her as a friend, and lacked the scientific rigor to answer some of the most important questions about her actions.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- lambda 8y ago
  This isn't about "new and unique ideas" in the sense of some profound insight. I was responding to the "was capable of communicating new and unique ideas" from the parent, which is a way of paraphrasing some of the claims about Koko's language ability, in which it is claimed that Koko was going beyond mere use of single words to refer to literal objects or actions. I can put together a complex sentence describing abstract ideas, which is what I'm doing here. A dog cannot; a dog can understand a single word or sign in isolation, and may be some amount of literal sequencing, but there is no ability to understand an arbitrarily complex sequence of signs or words containing abstraction like human language is capable of. The claim about Koko's use of sign language is that she has been able to compose sentences out of combinations of words, and express abstract ideas; maybe somewhat more limited than humans in some way, but fundamentally the same way that human language works. That's what the skepticism is about; since while it's clear that she could be trained to recognize individual words and produce individual signs, and maybe some limited pairs, all of the evidence of anything more complex seems to come from interpretation through her handlers, who could have been consciously or subconsciously prompting her, and are using their own theories of mind and inference ability to read more into Koko's actions than what is really there. There's plenty of non-verbal communication you can do with a dog or even a cat. They can pick up on emotional states. They have memories. They can learn words or signs. They can be caring. A lot of the claims about Koko seem to be either unsurprising for anyone who has owned a pet (yes, pets can sometimes be surprisingly emotionally intelligent), or go far beyond what the evidence actually supports, relying much too much on subjective judgements and unblinded tests by the researchers. One of the reasons that this is a problem is that this exact same kind of thing is done with humans sometimes, in the form of "Facilitated Communication" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication), which is claimed to be a way of training "facilitators" to help calm and guide non-verbal autistic children's hands to be able to type out sentences and communicate. This was a very popular form of assistance for a while, and it even led to autistic children being able to speak out about their abusive parents. Except, as it it turns out, it was entirely based on pseudoscience. Once you did any kind of blinded testing, where you showed something different to the facilitator as you did to the patient, they would spell out the word for what the facilitator saw. The parental abuse, for which parents had been kicked out of their own homes and not allowed contact with their children? Entirely imagined by the facilitators. I'd recommend watching the PBS documentary "Prisoners of Silence" on this topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sO9LyXuOQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sO9LyXuOQY). Allowing this kind of pseudoscience to get so much coverage can cause real harm to people, and it erodes faith in the scientific process.

agumonkey 8y ago

I guess this effect is why the reports are amplified, communication is such a powerful thing for us that even limited means to do so with an animal feels grand. I wish I could met Koko

crunchlibrarian 8y ago

Which new and unique ideas did Koko personally communicate to you?