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There is a pretty profound communication gap that you seem to be discounting. A closer analogy might be trying to teach a 7 year old who speaks a different lan

by Veserv 3y ago

There is a pretty profound communication gap that you seem to be discounting. A closer analogy might be trying to teach a 7 year old who speaks a different language. Or even deeper, a 7 year old child who only knows sign language and you do not. The communication gap makes it very hard to figure out how much is a “intelligence” difference versus just being unable to even communicate the contents of the test.

tombert 3y ago
Sure, but even then isn't that making an assumption that animals have the same capacity for communication that we do? Let me try and explain; I don't speak Spanish, but if I had teach a 7 year old who only knew Spanish, presumably I, as a human, could learn Spanish and then teach the 7 year old whatever I needed to. I'm not sure there's an equivalent "crow" language that is even possible for anyone to learn, at least in the same way that humans have language. I know that animals "communicate" in some senses with mating calls and the like, but I don't think they have anything even approaching "grammar" and "syntax". But I suppose if you're going on a deeper level, if you had some way of directly communicating with a crow (like beaming information directly into their brain already translated in a form that they could understand), I still don't know that you could teach them that money equivalence analogy I used. Again, I'm speaking out of my ass here, I don't know anything about this stuff, just spitballing.
- Veserv 3y ago
  No. I am pointing out how being unable to communicate makes it very hard to determine intelligence. It is hard to determine if another human is smart without being able to speak the same language or explain the procedure and contents of the test. Given that there is no known means to effectively communicate with animals, we are restricted to tests that do not demand shared communication to identify intelligence. These tests must be benchmarked on mutually unintelligible humans. For instance, a grade school Chinese exam might be a good way of gauging the intelligence of Chinese children, but is a terrible way of gauging the intelligence of French children. Such a test is lousy in certain domains. We must be cognizant of such testing methodology limits in the design of animal intelligence tests. tl;dr A test that would fail animals and speakers of a different language are not good tests. An animal intelligence test needs to at least pass all humans of comparable intelligence regardless of language to reach the bare minimum of acceptability.
  - riwsky 3y ago
    Raven’s progressive matrices, obviously intended to test the intelligence of birds.

by Veserv 3y ago

tombert 3y ago

Sure, but even then isn't that making an assumption that animals have the same capacity for communication that we do? Let me try and explain; I don't speak Spanish, but if I had teach a 7 year old who only knew Spanish, presumably I, as a human, could learn Spanish and then teach the 7 year old whatever I needed to. I'm not sure there's an equivalent "crow" language that is even possible for anyone to learn, at least in the same way that humans have language. I know that animals "communicate" in some senses with mating calls and the like, but I don't think they have anything even approaching "grammar" and "syntax". But I suppose if you're going on a deeper level, if you had some way of directly communicating with a crow (like beaming information directly into their brain already translated in a form that they could understand), I still don't know that you could teach them that money equivalence analogy I used. Again, I'm speaking out of my ass here, I don't know anything about this stuff, just spitballing.

Veserv 3y ago
No. I am pointing out how being unable to communicate makes it very hard to determine intelligence. It is hard to determine if another human is smart without being able to speak the same language or explain the procedure and contents of the test. Given that there is no known means to effectively communicate with animals, we are restricted to tests that do not demand shared communication to identify intelligence. These tests must be benchmarked on mutually unintelligible humans. For instance, a grade school Chinese exam might be a good way of gauging the intelligence of Chinese children, but is a terrible way of gauging the intelligence of French children. Such a test is lousy in certain domains. We must be cognizant of such testing methodology limits in the design of animal intelligence tests. tl;dr A test that would fail animals and speakers of a different language are not good tests. An animal intelligence test needs to at least pass all humans of comparable intelligence regardless of language to reach the bare minimum of acceptability.
- riwsky 3y ago
  Raven’s progressive matrices, obviously intended to test the intelligence of birds.