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Takeaways: * It is meaningful to speak of animals having "opinions" but it's not clear how those match up with human ones. * Individual opinion is guided by a
by tboyd47 7y ago
Takeaways:
* It is meaningful to speak of animals having "opinions" but it's not clear how those match up with human ones.
* Individual opinion is guided by a combination of random chance and direct perception.
* Individual bee opinions have low success rate, but group consensus of bees has an extremely high success rate.
* Opinions acquired via transmission are more weakly held than opinions acquired directly.
* Wrong opinions are held more weakly than right opinions. I find this fascinating because it means there's some information that would not be revealed without the bees challenging each other.
* Opinions are often never changed in an individual, even if they are wrong.
- munchbunny 7y ago> Wrong opinions are held more weakly than right opinions. I find this fascinating because it means there's some information that would not be revealed without the bees challenging each other. This seems to be an emergent effect of a system where every individual scout explicitly communicates a degree of confidence, and the rest of the system can trust the degree of confidence expressed by its individuals so that noise in the actual signal (a scout bee mis-evaluating the quality of a potential home) can be smoothed out a larger number of inputs. That sounds a lot like the one-armed bandit for A/B testing! That's an interesting comparison to modern human society, where you can't at all trust how confident someone sounds, because everyone has learned to game that system.