3 ms·
This is a fascinating concept, and I always appreciate wiki reads like these whenever they come through HN. One thing I wonder, though, what's going on in this
by glenstein 6y ago
This is a fascinating concept, and I always appreciate wiki reads like these whenever they come through HN.
One thing I wonder, though, what's going on in this part:
>The animal understands that this contradicts the learned behavior to respond to the owner's instructions: instead it makes an alternative decision because the human is not in a position to decide safely.[5] The dog in this case has the capacity to understand that it is performing such an action for the welfare of the person.[6]
I think that's a very bold and categorical claim to make. Not necessarily because it's wrong, but animal cognition is a charged subject where it's easy to become motivated to make claims, and I think it's fair to say it's a sphere where untrue claims abound.
It wasn't clear to me that the source for [6] is sufficiently authoritative. It seems to be derived from interviews with dog owners. Here's a quote from [6] on the cited page:
>"The competent guide dog can recognize dangerous situations and, even when commanded to engage in a articular action, can decide to disobdy in order to protect the owner's welfare.. All of the interviewees spoke of their dogs as regularly involved in behaviors that were not understandable if one were only to see dogs merely as automatons responding to instinct or behavioral conditioning."
Anyway, I bring this up because that sentence stuck out to me as something that felt highly motivated, and in general it's a feature I think you see sometimes in wiki articles - bold claims, almost vulgar in their simplicity, that just go ahead and declare a truth and don't try to couch the language in terms of earned institutional understanding that fully merit the claim. Again, not saying it's wrong, it just stuck out.
- renewiltord 6y agoI think that's just a need to introduce conciseness to the situation. It's less about comprehension and more about "despite an express general request, the device (in this case, a dog) responds differently in this specific situation, unless receiving a countermanding specific command". i.e. it's not about cognition, it's about the tool (in this case, the dog) having certain behaviour. For instance, consider a hypothetical system with pop up dialog boxes requesting confirmation (yes undo is better, etc.). A user hits Del signaling they wish to delete an entry from a list, and a popup is displayed requesting confirmation. The user hits Enter within 10 ms of the appearance of the popup but the system ignores the input. One might describe this as "The program understands that the user did not actually confirm since they did not have sufficient time to do so" and not actually mean "The program acquired sapience within 10 ms and proceeded to overrule the human".
- srtjstjsj 6y agoTeaching a dog to not run into traffic, even if ordered to do s (a) is quite doable, and (b) doesn't the dog to have any notion of the assisted person's mindset.
- renewiltord 6y agoThat's my point. It's just tool behaviour being described and not cognition.
- zoomablemind 6y agoIn the example cases given, the animal's behavior seems to be related to its own survival. Training adds more stimulated links which also aid in its survival standing. We just label this intelligent in our human/social sense.
- nsajko 6y agoYou do realize this is Wikipedia, right? There is no bar to editing it. The rules of the game there are basically, if you can source something to a published book or newspaper, even if idiotic; it's game. Trying to change anything in case of a conflict takes time, effort and allies. And the corporation that owns Wikipedia not being hostile ("Framgate" has been publicized about). And this is one of the few good Wikipedia's, where at least some important articles will receive due care from capable and benevolent editors. Try checking out the "Croatian Wikipedia", or some of the other Wikipedia's relevant to a smaller country.
- glenstein 6y agoThanks for explaining to me how the fifth most visited english language website in the entire world works. A site that I've been visiting on a near daily basis for past 15 years, and to which I've contributed numerous edits and where I've become way too familiar with weirdly specific controversies (my favorite being probably the 'Verifiability Not Truth' debate). But wow, you told me that Wikipedia can be edited, which blew my mind. So thanks to your extremely helpful insights, I'm all up to speed now. But... did you have anything constructive to add that related to my comments on this particular article?