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Elephants use namelike calls
- tomrod 2y agohttps://archive.ph/9gvHZ https://archive.ph/9gvHZ
- mannyv 2y agoOne 'deeply human' behavior is feeding other, unrelated animals.
- dboreham 2y agoMy cats will happily feed raccoons.
- The_Blade 2y agoMy cats will happily eat raccoons.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Viliam1234 2y agoHumans will happily feed and then eat their farm animals.
- ziggyzecat 2y agountil no things grow no more, that our farm animals could eat
- azemetre 2y agoReally? Can you explain what they do? Do they watch the raccoons take it? Do they look at you while they feed them? Sounds fascinating.
- sheepscreek 2y ago> The thought of someday being able to address an elephant in a way it can understand is downright magical. To say, “Hello, I’m Tove. Please tell me your name.” I truly believe that thinking other species are “less intelligent” than us comes down to our own inability to have a complex dialogue with them. Time and again, we have a pioneer who is somehow able to break this barrier through sheer perseverance. Then we get Kokos of the world. Now we’ve noticed traits resembling true human toddler like understanding in dogs and even some birds. Perhaps one day, brain interface devices and machine learning will help us cross that barrier for good, and unlock a new age of learning from our peers in the animal kingdom.
- geuis 2y agoThere's a brief scene in Heavens River, book 4 of the Bobiverse series, where some characters spend some time with the equivalent of alien dolphins. The "dolphins" have a very limited language that main consists of names and one word inquiries and warnings. For example, the local replicant who they know introduces his fellows. The dolphin speech is essentially "who? Marvin! Marvin friends?" Which is basically "Who are the strangers? Oh it's Marvin! Marvin, are these your friends?" I imagine most animal languages are at this level. And nothing wrong with that. For their lifestyles, many intelligent animals with a language like this are served perfectly well. Personal identifiers to call out friendly individuals, names for threats, maybe even general welcomes for fellow groups like elephants and whales that generally live in family groups and occasionally meet up for mating or due to resource constraints like grazing and seasonal water construction.
- dgfitz 2y agoThese posts make me wish there was a heart emoji button. I really need to go read those again, it’s been too long.
- sheepscreek 2y agoThis is cool, thanks for sharing it with us! Also to those downvoting my comment - would you be kind enough to also leave a comment? I’d like to know what part did you disagree with.
- advael 2y agoLove to hear stuff like this, both because it's interesting in its own right, and because the fact that it gets published and taken seriously gives me hope that we're finally getting our heads out of our collective asses with regards to the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals. I think there's a natural tendency for humans to anthropomorphize, to project human behaviors and motivations onto other animals, which can get pretty extreme and silly in some cases, like how we project this assumption onto non-living phenomena, like a rainstorm or machine learning model. However, I think in the case of animals, especially complex charismatic megafauna, and especially especially things like highly social mammals, it's actually a better assumption that their internal experience and motivations may resemble ours than this ridiculous contrarian backlash against it we got in the last few hundred years, where now we're supposed to treat "These tiny variations on what we are are somehow so fundamentally ontologically different that we should assume we can understand nothing about how they think, or whether they even do at all, without doing a zillion RCTs" (and this dovetails conveniently with immiserating them to an unheard-of degree at an unfathomable scale by modern industry). Similarly-shaped contrarianisms are unfortunately still much of the dominant culture of institutions, but it's nice that some of them are losing their grip
- linearrust 2y ago[flagged]
- advael 2y agoDam, the angry backlash mindset shows up like clockwork, complete with my favorite triad of its hallmarks - vague references to "philosophers", invocation of numbers with the specific intent of saying buckwild unquantifiable shit, and the combination of personal attacks frothing with derision while simultaneously accusing me of thinking with "mindless emotions" for, I'm pretty sure, using language you've pattern-matched as overly compassionate toward things you don't respect Anyway, I'm trying to get into less pointless arguments with people who open by demonstrating themselves unamenable to reason this week. Shoo, fly
- 2y ago
- grecy 2y agoI was lucky to spend a lot of time with elephants during my three years around Africa. I feel certain future generations will look on us as barbarians for keeping elephants and other intelligent animals in concrete cells. They are magnificent, and care deeply for each other. One day when we speak to them I feel certain they’ll say humans suck and every animal knows it.
- randomdata 2y ago> I feel certain they’ll say humans suck and every animal knows it. I don't know. Growing up with cattle, they regularly stood free, but then always waited around to let them back into their "concrete cells". They had every chance to escape, but never wanted to. They clearly preferred being there. Same goes for the farm dogs and cats. In fact, the cat population "mysteriously" kept growing without a corresponding number of kittens (in other words, foreign cats would voluntarily find their way into those "concrete cells"). It very well may have been a case of Stockholm syndrome, but regardless of the exact mechanics it is doubtful that they know that to be the case.
- grecy 2y agoThey've been bred for that for hundreds of generations. Go find a wild bison and see how it behaves. I've chased herds of wild bison on many occasions - they are NOT like domestic cows. Same story for mountain lions and lynx, etc. They are a far cry from cats. Having our tiny falling down cabin surrounded by wolves in the Yukon at -44 degrees makes you appreciate how far THOSE are from house dogs.
- randomdata 2y ago> They've been bred for that for hundreds of generations. What is significant about this specific mechanism that makes it noteworthy enough to violate what was already established?
- freejazz 2y agoAre you genuinely asking this question because you can't fathom how?
- geuis 2y agoI kinda wish HN had a rule against submissions to sites with login walls related to news, articles, etc. Basically, content sites. It's constant these days and the only way to read the articles is via archival sites like this. My guess is the sites don't benefit from the traffic being directed to them. The signup rate for this strategy is in the single digit percentage at most. Meanwhile, at least if you're like me, the user just immediately navigated back to HN. Out time is wasted and the "front page" of HN is being somewhat diluted by unreadable content.
- elphinstone 2y agoMaybe a tiny lock icon? Submitter checks a box: reg/subwalled Y/N?
- nerevarthelame 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html: "Are paywalls ok? It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."
- tomrod 2y agoComplaint: "This article has a paywall! Ugh!" Solutioning: "You know, paywalls are awful. Is there any technology tweak we can apply to make the situation better?"
- dang 2y ago(Not sure if this is what you mean, but) Blocking paywalls wouldn't make HN better. It would make it much worse, because it would exclude many good articles. That's why the rule is to allow paywalls that have workarounds, i.e. that the community can still read. If anyone has a suggestion that would actually make the situation better, I'd love to hear it, because the current situation sucks, and has sucked for at least 10 years. It just sucks less than the alternatives we know of.
- smitty1e 2y agoDecades ago, I was in Thailand at a safari park with a coconut cracked open from the refreshment stand, sipping the milk through a plastic straw. An elephant did something deeply human and thugged that coconut right out of my hand, and into its mouth it went. Those trunks are quick and I, a dumb tourist, was not on guard. Best thing I could do was pluck the straw from its maw, as that probably would not have been healthy.
- tetrisgm 2y agoThey mourn, they can paint, they save people from drowning, they take the trash out. I've seen so many videos of elephants behaving in a way that shows some form of consciousness and reflection on the world. They are clearly intelligent beings. Last century saw us enter the age of information, where logic and manipulating data became our main way of creating value. Maybe this century will be about understanding the shape of our intelligence. We've clearly already got a machine intelligence that we don't understand well. (see Chess, Go, LLMs). Now there are hundreds of species that are likely to have intelligence close enough that we could communicate with. Hopefully we will come up with ways to get there.
- treme 2y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1qQOGCyRbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1qQOGCyRbY my fav elephant behavior: appreciating music
- tetrisgm 2y agoOh thanks for reminding me!
- kirubakaran 2y agoHere's Jazz for Cows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXKDu6cdXLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXKDu6cdXLI
- complaintdept 2y agoThere's a video I saw a while back of these Indian women who knitted sweaters for the elephants because there was a very cold winter that year. The elephants, normally aloof, heard them singing at the edge of the woods, saw the elephant sized clothes, came up and let the women put giant sweaters on them and left.
- xenospn 2y agoWon’t the sweaters snag easily tho?
- nokun7 2y agoHow long before they have collisions and start using last names!?
- tetris11 2y ago(nah, the hash function of the vocalization mappings easily exceeds 512bits...) I do wonder of they're actually naming themselves, or if they're being named by others. Is there a handshaking protocol, where a bird says "hi I'm Fred" followed up by "greetings Fred!" "hiya Fred!" or if it's more akin to schoolboy nicknames that stick. e.g. a bird yells at another bird "hey wifepooper, you're pooping on my wife!" and that target bird will never refer to themselves as 'wifepooper' but merely 'I'/'me', though other birds will refer to that singular bird as 'wifepooper'
- purpleblue 2y agoShouldn't machine learning be easily able to decipher animal communication at this point?
- ben_w 2y agoThey've only just managed human communication in the last few years — and even then, nowhere near all of them. With animals, we're still at the level of trying to figure out what might count as a token-like-thing.
- sambeau 2y ago"Hello, Bignose!"
- vhvj 2y ago[dead]