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The evolution of stupidity (and octopus intelligence)
- lelanthran 3y ago> But we are also capable of breathtaking stupidity, imagining that it’s a good idea to turn over a nuclear arsenal to Donald Trump And ... nothing bad enough happened to warrant the phrase "breathtaking stupidity". I think the author spent their entire article on the wrong precept, viz that while humans are smarter than cephalopods, they are also stupider, but it is hard to understand what the author's bar for stupidity is, considering that the final example didn't warrant the description of "breathtaking stupidity". It's possible that the author is blind to certain facts, ironically, because it doesn't match their worldview.
- photochemsyn 3y agoHuman mental capabilities don't seem to be well characterized - thus when people say 'intelligence' it's unclear what they're talking about. Case example: John von Neumann, who surely ranks high on anyone's list of 'most intelligent humans of the 20th century'. Brittanica: > "Von Neumann insisted on the value of game-theoretic thinking in defense policy. He supported development of the hydrogen bomb and was reported to have advocated a preventive nuclear strike to destroy the Soviet Union's nascent nuclear capability circa 1950." So, if humans destroy modern civilization with fusion bombs and are reduced to a Stone Age existence on a radioactive planet, will visiting aliens say, "Gosh, wasn't this a stupid species? Clever, yes, but not very wise."
- yedava 3y ago> the Rubik’s cube world record currently stands at 3.13 seconds, set in July 2023. > However, the record-holder, 23 year-old Max Park, didn’t discover the insights that allowed him to solve the Rubik’s cube. His success was built atop a foundation of accumulated knowledge that mathematicians and puzzle enthusiasts derived—mental algorithms that enable “cubers” to solve the puzzle with lightning speed. Looks like intelligence is a collective property and not the domain of any one individual. We tend to build cults of personalities around certain smart people, but if you displace those smart people onto a different time or place, they would have achieved nothing. They owe their success to so many other people. Having a genius on your team is less important than fostering an environment where a group of people feed off each other's ideas and produce intelligence.
- lijok 3y ago> Looks like intelligence is a collective property and not the domain of any one individual. The one question that has kept me up at night the most (can’t recall who posed it) was; “What are we building? Ants build ant hills, beavers build dams, what is humanity building?”
- dmd 3y agoWhat class of answer to this question would you accept? Why don’t you accept “civilizations”?
- pacificmaelstrm 3y agoInteresting information but his key point wasn't really presented with any evidence. He didn't make a good case that octopus don't believe in conspiracy theories. How would we know? Instead he assumed they don't because they learn somewhat complex tasks and exhibit a level of forethought in their activities. But do they hold beliefs that are not true about things they don't understand well? (the basic building block of a conspiracy theory) What do they think about the scientists and the aquarium they are in? Why do they prefer one scientist to another or try to escape? We don't know. Saying they don't fall into "conspiracy theories" kind of comes out of nowhere. So the author exhibits exactly the same trait of assuming we can know things without evidence that produces the kind of thinking he labels as "stupidity". Personally I often find a reference to "Dunning-Kruger" to be associated with a tendency to argue with rhetoric rather than fact. Maybe someone should do a study.
- Galatians4_16 3y agoWhen it comes to the term "Conspiracy Theory", the stupidity is baked in, as a theory is something proven, not assumed. Hypothesis > (test) > Theory The conspiracy among three Physicists, now known as the Manhattan Project, with hundreds of thousands of unknowing participants, with whole new sectors of industries, and supply chains, brought us new medicine, nuclear power, and peace through mutually assured destruction, yet people seem to think of conspiracy as some harebrained concept spun up by halfwits.
- verisimi 3y agoThe Dunning-Kruger effect is auto-correlation. From the article: https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/ https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k... > The irony is that the situation is actually reversed. In their seminal paper, Dunning and Kruger are the ones broadcasting their (statistical) incompetence by conflating autocorrelation for a psychological effect. In this light, the paper’s title may still be appropriate. It’s just that it was the authors (not the test subjects) who were ‘unskilled and unaware of it’.
- petsfed 3y agoI agree with the rest of the post, its hard to say one way or another if octopuses believe in conspiracy theories, and the conclusion drawn seems, at best, orthogonal to the data presented. But I disagree with what you said here: >But do they hold beliefs that are not true about things they don't understand well? (the basic building block of a conspiracy theory) Facilely, this is a tautology. Everyone necessarily holds untrue beliefs about things they incompletely understand. The scientific method taught to school children is a framework for identifying and removing them. Your statement is akin to "the fundamental building block of conspiracy theories is knowledge gained from empirical observation" But less glibly, untrue beliefs held by individuals with incomplete understanding are insufficient building blocks of conspiracy theories. The issue doesn't arise from incomplete understanding, nor is it dismissed by efforts to expand understanding. You need an untrue belief, certainly, but you also need to approach that belief with a confirmation bias.
- bee_rider 3y ago> Krakauer points out that humans and chimpanzees share nearly 99 percent of our genetic code. “Imagine I gave you Hamlet,” Krakauer says, “and I changed less than 1 percent of the text and I said, ‘What’s the play?’ and you said, ‘It’s Hamlet.’ And I said, ‘What have I changed?’ ‘I’m not quite sure…I did see a few typos.’” I can’t stand this comparison, I mean, sure if you got Hamlet with 1% errors you’d recognize it as mostly Hamlet. But if you got a computer program with 1% of the instructions switched out, I bet you’d get a non-working program. Also Hamlet is ~30,000 words long. If you randomly distribute errors, sure, it will look like Hamlet. If you give somebody 300 words to change Hamlet, I bet they could come up with something. Put “actually Hamlet was a ghost the whole time” at the end, I don’t know, I’m not M. Night Shyamalan.
- greenhearth 3y agoYou could do much more damage than that. In poetry and Shakespeare especially, each word is used very carefully as a unit of very dense information. You could make Hamlet not related to his own father and fundamentally change any structural meaning behind the play. The resulting work would be named "Hamlet" but not be THE "Hamlet" at all.
- lajy 3y ago> But if you got a computer program with 1% of the instructions switched out, I bet you’d get a non-working program. I believe it was a comment I saw on here once that took it a step further and included the OS and all hardware logic in there as well. I can have two identical desktop computers with only one program installed on each, the only difference being that the program is totally different. Those two devices could ultimate be two seemingly completely unrelated machines to the end user, even though they share far more than 99% of the exact same instructions. The only "code" they wouldn't share is the specific program they run. Everything else from the hardware to the OS is many millions of "lines" that are the same. Something that plays movies nonstop vs a production database. Photoshop vs Halo: The Master Chief Collection. An IDE vs a point of sale system. Control software vs a web browser. A program that locks you into the software vs one that still gives you access to the OS. The differences can start getting seemingly huge very quickly.
- labrador 3y agoI had an interesting interaction with Claude Opus after reading this article. Prompt: "Before the invention of writing, how did people send each other anonymous messages? How might the most intelligent non-writing species on earth such as dolphins, crows and octopi be sending us messages?"
- Log_out_ 3y agoSending envoys to the spagetthi del mare?
- hermitcrab 3y agoThe author's podcast 'Power corrupts' is really excellent. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/power-corrupts/id1458750622 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/power-corrupts/id14587... The associated book 'Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us' is also very good.
- johngossman 3y agoRegarding the first anecdote about "the juice": my cousin was a crime reporter. She had dozens of similar stories about incredibly stupid crimes. The guy who signed a petition, with his real name and address, right before robbing the convenience store next to the petitioner; the person who tried to smuggle a watermelon out under her skirt; the person who fell asleep on the couch of the house he was robbing (this one is common).
- snapcaster 3y ago"the person who fell asleep on the couch of the house he was robbing (this one is common)." This is common? is it addicts nodding off? I'm picturing myself in this situation and imaging my anxiety how could someone possibly fall asleep? actually baffled
- meiraleal 3y agoAlcohol and/or drugs
- 9991 3y agoProbably not his first time robbing a house.
- johngossman 3y agoIn the case I remember, the burglar broke in, started to steal the XBox, decided to play a game, and fell asleep. But I heard other variations after my cousin told me this one. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/22/asleep-on-the-job-alleged-burglar-found-napping-and-covered-in-doritos https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/22/asleep-on-th...
- TrainedMonkey 3y agoI wonder if "common" in this case is relative. I.E. it's the right type of story to grab our attention so we are disproportionally more likely to hear about few cases that do happen.
- chiggsy 3y ago>I mention Alfred Wegener, the balloonist who proposed that the continents must have drifted, given how clearly their coastlines fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Blinded by scientific precepts, what is now plainly obvious to any child who glances at a map of South America and Africa Problem: coastline shape is a dependent variable. Amount of water is the independent. Looking at S.America and Africa only makes a jigsaw puzzle in modern times. During the ice ages, will those continents still look like a match? I say no. Furthermore, continental drift has pulled these contienents apart. When they eventually collide, there will be mountain building, much like the Pyrenees, or the Himalayas. Also, South America is on the ring of fire, a subduction zone. Ocean floors are erupted basalts, which are pushed over to the continental trenches where they, being heavy and dense, are pushed down into the mantle. Seawater as well. This seawater reduces the density of the basalts, and as they melt in the mantle, the magma is forced upwards. Pumice is an extreme example of this, but continental granites and anthracites are formed in this fashion. These rocks make up the vast majority of the continental crust. Diamonds in Africa suggest that the core of the continent is ancient and very hard rock known as kratons. Rock drifts into these structres and sticks there. creating a continent via accumulation. They root deep in the mantle, Im actually unsure if they move via drift. The diamonds are created at their base, and slowly percolate up to the surface. These rocks are on the order of 2-3 billion years old. Finally, not all continent building happens at subduction zones. Giant blobs of magma called mantle plumes bubble up from the mantle and massively heat the crust that moves over them. Iceland is one such place where this is happening. Hawaii, another. Scotland clearly was wildly volcanic at one point, until it drifted away from the plume. What's the point here? Well, the shape of these places is a complete fluke. They do not fit like any jigsaw. The proof of continental drift is that we see fossils of giant land animals, as well as flora on both continents. There is no way they could have floated over on some sticks, or whatnot. Creatures living in an arid landlocked area roamed freely over these continents, until most likely a mantle plume pushed began to break up that supercontinent. Such plumes are more likely to occur when all the landmassses of the earth are together. Regardless, does it count if you looked at those continents because of erroneous deduction, only to find the proof that the same populations of creatures inhabited both distant ( in the present day ) places? Again, I would say no.
- pixl97 3y ago
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- skulk 3y ago> If we lived in such a world [with no persistent writing] there would be no culture; because we couldn’t transmit across many generations what we had learned in our lifetime Except oral traditions exist and have been passed down for thousands of years without writing.
- sorokod 3y agoExactly, the lack of persistent storage was accounted for by societal structures, e.g. tribe elders.
- irrational 3y agoBut, could the tribal elders transmit orally how to create a silicon chip, how to build a car, how to do all the other things that create the world we live in today? What is the maximum amount of data that can be stored and transmitted orally?
- thayne 3y agoThey can pass down knowledge that eventually leads to a writing system. And indeed, in a sense, the knowledge of how to read and write is still passed down "orally". Or at least directly from teacher to student.
- the_af 3y agoThat sounds like bootstrapping. You still need the rest of the "software" of culture.
- sorokod 3y agoInteresting questions to consider, what sort of social structures would maximise the amount of data retained. What would be a the size of a "tribe", what makes an elder an elder, what sort of tribes have to cooperate to create a car. Here is another one, a single person can be though of as volatile store of information. How many people and what protocols would be needed to implement redundancy and error correction?
- LeroyRaz 3y agoI can't take seriously the suggestion we should expect chimps and humans to be similar due to the "small" number of DNA base changes. Tiny genetic difference can make a huge difference to an organism. Their statement is like saying doing something 10 times versus 100000 times should give similar results, because expressing both as text the difference is only 4 characters ("10" v.s. "100000"). There are literally places in the human genome that have that kind of effect, e.g. small substitutions resulting in extra whole functioning vertebrae.
- Nevermark 3y agoThat was the point they made. In their colorful thought experiment, if all our writing/printing ink faded in short time periods, all recognizable civilization would disappear. Seemingly small changes can result in radical impact.
- LeroyRaz 3y agoI am objecting to their initial motivation: it being surprising that "small" DNA changes lead us to be vastly superior to Apes. They suggest in the disappearing ink thought experiment that this is because the genetic change is sufficient for us to pass some critical threshold (allowing cultural transferences of ideas). That is a completely different from my complaint. I complain that they subtly mischaracterize how we should think about DNA changes. The number of DNA base substitutions is a pretty meaningless metric in the context they are attempting to use it. I dont disagree with their argument that there can threshhold changes and that cultural accumilation might be one of them.
- Nevermark 3y agoIsn’t that what they are saying, after raising the question of how percentage of DNA differences doesn’t account for the profoundness of our developmental and behavior differences? That a few key DNA changes could account for profound change? So small percentage differences are no barrier to very different results?
- wzdd 3y ago