13 ms·

Crows are even smarter than we thought

• defusioner 2y ago
  [flagged]
• naveen99 2y ago
  Similar discussions: Input Story Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates (www.bbc.com) 690.0 by hhs None None | hide | comments 1. Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates (https://www.bbc.com https://www.bbc.com) similar stories 690 by hhs 38929 12/11/2019, 11:51:28 PM | hide | 356 comments 2. When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015) (http://news.nationalgeographic.com http://news.nationalgeographic.com) similar stories 626 by reimertz 6120 7/19/2016, 8:38:24 PM | hide | 227 comments 3. Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute (https://www.statnews.com https://www.statnews.com) similar stories 679 by felixbraun 2132 9/24/2020, 3:37:33 PM | hide | 377 comments 4. How to Befriend Crows (https://fediscience.org https://fediscience.org) similar stories 800 by karmanyaahm 1146 12/26/2022, 10:27:11 AM | hide | 212 comments 5. A girl who gets gifts from birds (https://www.bbc.com https://www.bbc.com) similar stories 506 by th0br0 1454 2/26/2015, 6:10:40 AM | hide | 136 comments 6. Crows found to be smarter than we think (https://www.wsj.com https://www.wsj.com) similar stories 108 by lxm 137238 11/3/2022, 12:14:24 PM | hide | 91 comments 7. Crows possess higher intelligence, thought a primarily human attribute (2020) (https://www.statnews.com https://www.statnews.com) similar stories 368 by SubiculumCode 5082 3/24/2022, 11:23:05 AM | hide | 217 comments 8. Japan Fights Crowds of Crows (2008) (https://www.nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com) similar stories 81 by DyslexicAtheist 33392 6/1/2018, 7:38:56 AM | hide | 83 comments 9. Scientists Have Found Another Species of Crow That Uses Tools (http://www.theatlantic.com http://www.theatlantic.com) similar stories 198 by okket 40747 9/14/2016, 2:11:22 PM | hide | 103 comments 10. Crows are capable of recursion, scientists claim (https://www.scientificamerican.com https://www.scientificamerican.com) similar stories 111 by kposehn 13804 11/5/2022, 1:21:56 PM | hide | 95 comments 11. Ravens score just as high as big-brained chimps on cognitive tests (http://arstechnica.com http://arstechnica.com) similar stories 160 by shawndumas 66678 4/20/2016, 7:18:38 PM | hide | 60 comments 12. The Secret Lives of Urban Crows (https://www.seattlemet.com https://www.seattlemet.com) similar stories 106 by robteix 2074 11/21/2017, 9:41:28 AM | hide | 23 comments 13. Crows can perform as well as 7- to 10-year-olds on cause-and-effect tasks (http://www.news.ucsb.edu http://www.news.ucsb.edu) similar stories 179 by evo_9 57420 7/25/2014, 11:39:58 AM | hide | 72 comments 14. A bird feeder that accepts bottle caps for food (https://www.boredpanda.com https://www.boredpanda.com) similar stories 368 by matthewsinclair 2368 11/22/2020, 2:16:57 PM | hide | 102 comments 15. Footage of Australian Raven Attacking a Wing Drone in Canberra, Australia (https://www.linkedin.com https://www.linkedin.com) similar stories 240 by adrian_mrd 15030 9/20/2021, 3:20:08 AM | hide | 323 comments 16. Ravens parallel great apes in flexible planning for tool-use, bartering (2017) (https://science.sciencemag.org https://science.sciencemag.org) similar stories 72 by jelliclesfarm 11691 6/26/2019, 3:55:17 PM | hide | 47 comments 17. How to tell a raven from a crow (2012) (https://www.audubon.org https://www.audubon.org) similar stories 210 by souterrain 1216 4/14/2019, 7:25:56 AM | hide | 100 comments 18. Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero (https://www.quantamagazine.org https://www.quantamagazine.org) similar stories 231 by digital55 12579 8/10/2021, 10:21:10 AM | hide | 150 comments 19. The Crow Whisperer: What happens when we talk to animals? (https://harpers.org https://harpers.org) similar stories 133 by drdee 5054 4/12/2021, 10:23:44 PM | hide | 74 comments 20. How Animals Perceive the World (https://www.theatlantic.com https://www.theatlantic.com) similar stories 80 by pseudolus 150124 6/14/2022, 4:37:46 PM | hide | 17 comments
• tomrod 2y ago
  Neat!
• naikrovek 2y ago
  I don’t know why these things are surprising. To me, the assumption that animals can’t do things we later discovered they could do is the surprising thing. Such arrogance we humans have.
  • lll-o-lll 2y ago
    Because they have such little brains. When I look at a crow, I think - not much room for brains in there.
    • dasyatidprime 2y ago
      Among other things, avian brains have a higher density of neurons than mammalian ones! https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2822%2901221-0 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%282... seems to be a primer on some of the differences.
    • pajeets 2y ago
      parrots too are extremely smart. I swear they know how to perform basic math and know what things are called.
    • CuriouslyC 2y ago
      We're finding through LLM research that smaller models aren't necessarily dumber, so much as their intelligence is more limited in terms of domains and knowledge encoding ability. Those small brains might have limited knowledge encoding ability, but that doesn't mean they can't reason about the things they have encoded.
    • naikrovek 2y ago
      What does size have to do with anything? We should not assume that the human brain size to brain capability ratio is the highest in nature, or even that it’s in the top half of all creatures. Humans are just arrogant and overconfident. We’re an incredibly flawed species and we’ve created incredibly flawed societies.
  • imoverclocked 2y ago
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Apparently you can scare a few of them like crazy from your land and they will tell their bros to stay away.
  • pajeets 2y ago
    This is what I find most fascinating. That crows are capable of gossip, organization, planning and execution. "you know that dude that lives by the water? protect him he feeds us." "you know the big guy that walks his dog and barks at us? we found out where he lives." I've seen crows execute their own (seriously). They would crowd and walk him over the edge and when he fell they would just attack him. I've seen crows leave gifts behind for feeding them regularly. I've seen crows protect our property from raccoons and squirrels. I've seen crows remember people and harass them (even when they moved to another city!)
    • manbitesdog 2y ago
      Some years ago I started leaving food in my patio for one crow that lived in an electric post nearby. Then he started leaving random shiny stuff in the outside table: pieces of metal, coins and once an SD card. The most suprising thing to me was that the stuff was always in the exact center of the round table.
      • pajeets 2y ago
        same what is amazing is that they seem to know we are attracted to shiny stuff: constantly glancing at our phones, counting coins, jewelry i dont know if this urban legend is true but apparently one guy was raking in a few hundred bucks a month by training crows to find coins and cash on the street
      • ethbr1 2y ago
        I had never considered the attack vector of USB stick, distributed by crow...
    • picafrost 2y ago
      Communicating about something not immediately present is called displacement [1] and it's a property of language, not limited to vocalization, thought to be unique to just a few species: humans, ants, bees, corvids, etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(linguistics)
• lr4444lr 2y ago
  Sometimes I wonder whether we're being watched by a super intelligent species beyond our current detection that occasionally places objects in certain configurations in front of the smarter of our species throughout history, and writes articles based on their observations titled things like, "homo sapiens smarter than previously known: demonstrates understanding of unified theory of electromagnetic waves through RF send/receive devices"
  • sitkack 2y ago
    Found Gary Larson's alt account. You should turn it into a short movie using AI. I have thought something similar but more along the lines that in the universe above us, we are 3 days into a science experiment and either a) they don't know we exist or b) the look in with their microscope and see patterns for cities or c) they have a statistical measure of how many have developed ecosystems and set off a nuclear weapon. But on the scales they are viewing, the known universe might fit into a 50cm sphere (their dimensions).
    • thelastparadise 2y ago
      No, it most definitely is not.
      • sitkack 2y ago
        Is a joke, it is very much in the theme of humans as test subjects, a common gag in his comics.
    • dayjah 2y ago
      Honestly I envision this concept a lot; I was first inspired by Men in Black where a cat has a universe in a bauble attached to a collar around its neck. The bauble looks like a marble.
    • 0xblinq 2y ago
      Lots of ideas here for SciFi movies. I also like the idea of everything being a simulation (like in Matrix) but managed/set up by an alien civilization and just experimenting or having fun with us, or us actually just being their avatars… and we are them!!! Alright, time to go to bed.
• nonotanymore 2y ago
  The imprinting seems like a drawback if it can't be changed in new environments.
• fn-mote 2y ago
  > Researchers have not yet determined whether mental templates related to tool making remain flexible This quote shows the arrogance mentioned in one of the other comments. A 15 year old crow is somehow going to make a "mental template" that is then as firmly entrenched as a young bird learning the wrong mating song? Nah....
• imoverclocked 2y ago
  This is just as interesting as any other article on finding that X can do Y where X isn’t human and Y is a behavior that humans value. What would be even more amazing to me is finding cognitive things that other animals do that humans can’t. Of course, many humans can’t do mental math so … maybe the quest is ill defined?
  • CapeTheory 2y ago
    The only bit of animal behaviour research I have ever found to be really interesting or meaningful is that on cephalopods. Their nervous system is very different to ours, and it seems like that difference shows clearly in their learning abilities.
  • nradov 2y ago
    Some marine mammals can do cognitive things with 3D echolocation that humans can't. (A few visually impaired people have learned to do a bit of echolocation but in a much more limited way.) Cephalopods use multiple mini-brains to independently control their arms in a way humans can't.
  • jumploops 2y ago
    There was a bunch of hype around superior memory in chimpanzees for certain tasks[0]. However, this has subsequently been debunked[1]. Still impressive on the part of chimps! [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNrWUS13th8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNrWUS13th8 [1]https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/humans-1-chimps-0-correcting-the-record https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/humans-1-chimps-0-correc...
  • tbrownaw 2y ago
    Aren't humans a bit lacking in the "instinct" department? I don't think we can do something as complex as say a spiderweb without needing time to learn or first.
• mewpmewp2 2y ago
  We consider this smart and intelligent, but many people don't want to admit that LLMs are intelligent?
  • egypturnash 2y ago
    There’s no CEOs excitedly talking about how crows will take over all the work that they’re currently paying humans to do, and how it is absolutely imperative that we allow them to ignore the fact that “shoveling all the data they can find into a for-profit turbo-autocomplete made up of trained crows” may be within the letter of fair use laws, but sure feels well outside the spirit of them.
    • mewpmewp2 2y ago
      How do CEOs talking anything relate to an intelligence of a thing?
    • mulmen 2y ago
      Are crows better suited to search than pigeons? https://archive.google/pigeonrank/ https://archive.google/pigeonrank/
  • hiracat 2y ago
    I think its because animals are many interconnected systems or models which are made to create "intelligent" behavior, like one for speak one for movement and alike. LLMs are trained purely off text, so they are more similar to a very simple animal that only has one type of inputs and outputs like a worm that only knows where its body is and then where it wants to be. LLMs are also only trained for a short period of time, and thats when something interesting is going on and its able to learn and change. We then take a snapshot of it and give it different inputs to get some result instead of to teach it something. I would say that a crow brain that has been frozen and can only get a certain amount of inputs and then only produce a certain amount of outputs is not intelligent.
    • mewpmewp2 2y ago
      But you can also give audio and video to multimodal LLMs - although it does become odd to call them LLMs then. And in theory you could give any sensory input data.
• jeffiel 2y ago
  Timely! https://theonion.com/study-crows-intelligent-enough-to-steal-trinkets-but-foolish-enough-to-think-material-goods-will-solve-problems/ https://theonion.com/study-crows-intelligent-enough-to-steal...
• jumploops 2y ago
  > This kind of feat, according to animal behavior researchers, requires the ability to form “mental templates.” Essentially, a mental template is an image in the mind of what a particular object looks like, even when that object is not present. As someone with aphantasia, can I get points for recreating something I've seen _without_ having an "image in the mind"?
  • Retr0id 2y ago
    I'm curious, could you describe your mental process of recreating a shape you've seen before? (via drawing, I suppose) I would of course start by visualising it in my head, but I know that's not how aphantasia works.
    • sfink 2y ago
      As another someone with aphantasia, I remember what something looks like, so I draw what I remember. That memory is not an image, it's knowledge of what something looks like. For simple things, that's enough. For complicated things, I sketch out what I remember of the overall appearance, look at it and gauge how far off it is and what is off, and add in details to gradually reduce the difference. I'm not a very good artist, so it'll always look kind of bad, though oddly it doesn't feel like aphantasia is all that much of an obstacle to my ability to draw. It's more just skill in making things look "right", skill that is learnable and seems like is necessary to learn by anyone, include those without aphantasia. It's difficult to communicate to someone without aphantasia, because to them apparently the memory of what something looks like is an image. It's similar to the question about whether I dream in color. I mean, I dream in color just as much as I read in color. If asked, I could tell you what color something is. It's part of my knowledge of what that thing looks like. But knowing what color something is and seeing the thing in color are definitely not the same. I don't dream in images at all. I certainly don't dream in "black and white". Colors and grayscales only have meaning in an image. (And maybe it's just me, but if the color of something never strikes me as an important characteristic, I will have no memory of what color the thing is. Right now, I couldn't tell you what color the walls of the next room over are, despite seeing it every day. Even though I could probably roughly model the entire room and get the dimensions and positions of everything about right.) Though I'm skeptical that "normal" people are as restricted to images as their descriptions often imply. Not everything is 2D, so memories are going to have to include at least some shape information. And I'm sure you have all kinds of associations of the texture and feel of things you visualize, and if it's prickly how much it would hurt to bump into it or hold it in your hand. Memories are rich multi-sensory things, and they aren't just limited to point-in-time sensations either.
• teleforce 2y ago
  Fun facts, according to Quran in human very first murder crime when one of Adam's sons killed his younger brother out of disagreement on offerings to God, the crow showed him how to properly bury the dead body: Then Allah sent a crow digging a grave in the ground for a dead crow, in order to show him how to bury the corpse of his brother. He cried, “Alas! Have I even failed to be like this crow and bury the corpse of my brother?” So he became regretful. https://quran.com/en/al-maidah/31 https://quran.com/en/al-maidah/31
  • Flop7331 2y ago
    To be fair to Cain/Qabil, he didn't know ambushing Abel/Habil was going to kill him. Nobody had died before.
    • cabbageicefruit 2y ago
      Do you have to have seen a human die to know that a human could die? Surely Cain had seen plenty of animals die. I think you might not be giving Cain enough credit (or maybe too much credit) by assuming he couldn’t have put 2 and 2 together
      • tedunangst 2y ago
        But beasts and man were created in distinct phases, with different rules and instructions.
• tux1968 2y ago
  Have posted this before, but it really left an impression about crows, and the bond between their mates: Years ago I was putting out the garbage in the back alley behind our building where I lived on the 8th floor. A crow attacked me out of the blue. Distracted by the attack, the back door slammed shut behind me. Since my key was only good for the front door, I had to walk around the building. That damn crow followed me the entire time, dive bombing my head, and screaming bloody murder at me. It was a little spooky. When I finally got back inside and upstairs, I went and looked out the living room window, which looked out the same direction as the back alley. The crow had flown back around and was at the 8th floor looking in the window, from the other side of the pigeon netting we had on our balcony. On the inside of the pigeon netting, was another crow, desperately trying to figure out how it could escape. Not really sure how it had got itself through the pigeon netting in the first place. I went out and sliced a hole through the netting and the trapped crow quickly joined its mate outside, who finally stopped screaming bloody murder. To this day it still amazes me that the crow's mate, knew which apartment I lived in and spotted me downstairs.
  • jiggawatts 2y ago
    Corvids can recognise faces and they are territorial and know the humans in their territory.
    • nullhole 2y ago
      A cheeky experiment was done to prove this back in the aughts: https://www.science.org/content/article/caveman-or-dick-cheney-crows-know-difference https://www.science.org/content/article/caveman-or-dick-chen... "In a creative experiment that relied on rubber masks of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other distinctive mugs, researchers have shown that American crows have an uncanny ability to pick a familiar human face out of a crowd."
      • 000ooo000 2y ago
        I vaguely remember a doco (about a study?) where they established similar fear in crows using similar masks. They tracked these crows, waited for them to breed, and tested how the babies responded. Saw this over a decade ago now I'd guess, so my memory is fuzzy, but IIRC the takeaway was that the parent crows were able to communicate the knowledge to their offspring that these masks were bad news.
• ggm 2y ago
  The article could be clearer how many shapes they had to train to and something like complexity eg vertex count. A triangle and a square can be a judgement call when you're using your beak to tear it off. I'd worry "eh good enough" is distorting the outcome.
• tetrisgm 2y ago
  We're not the only intelligent life on earth. We cant even define intelligence or measure it meaningfully. If we accept that human children are smart, then we must accept that species at equivalent levels of cognition are as well. Elephants, crows, dolphins, octopi, chimps, orang utan are all clearly very smart, and more intelligent than a human child. Besides being biologically irrelevant, the separation between humans and animals creates this weird divide where we constantly assume that we are the only intelligent life. It feels to me a bit like thinking the earth is the center of the universe. Maybe one day we'll understand better what other minds are like and we'll understand better how we are not alone or special.
  • api 2y ago
    IMO all life is intelligent in some way or form. Evolution itself is even intelligent in that it’s a learning system that adapts and solves problems.
    • milchek 2y ago
      It’s an interesting idea. Reminds me a little of some parts of Christopher Langans CTMU theory in that everything serves to simply further develop intelligence in the universe.
      • Aerroon 2y ago
        While I'm unskilled with CTMU theory, what you mentioned could be considered a consequence of the first law of thermodynamics, right? Intelligence might decrease entropy locally, but they always increase entropy globally to do so. Ie we accelerate the natural process of increasing entropy.
        • Intralexical 2y ago
          That's the second law.
          • Aerroon 2y ago
• t-3 2y ago
  Crows are definitely smart, but I've seen other birds outsmarting them before. It seems to me that social behavior is a bit overweighted when it comes to attempting to measure animal intelligence.
• tonetegeatinst 2y ago
  My next AI prediction will be that the next big leap will use crows intelligence in problem solving to advance towards AGI
• brcmthrowaway 2y ago
  What is the difference between a raven and crow?
  • downboots 2y ago
    One of them is like a writing desk, the other is like a computer desk https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0393/0345/files/CROW_V_RAVEN_edited_1024x1024.jpg?v=1700248523 https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0393/0345/files/CROW_V_RAV...
  • ianburrell 2y ago
    Ravens are bigger than crows. They also have diamond tails, throat feathers, and deeper sounds. Ravens also travel in pairs while crows are frequently in groups.
  • tczMUFlmoNk 2y ago
    "If you see a corvid and think, 'ooh, is that a raven?', then it's a crow. If you instead think, 'dear lord that's the biggest bird I've ever seen', then it's a raven."
• nikolay 2y ago
  There are tons of crows around my house. I feed them, I know them, they know me, but they are so hard to become friends with. They know I'm not a threat, but they are still so afraid of me. This to me is the opposite of intelligence. Otheriwse, they are probably the best parents among the birds. They little ones have such characters and the entire extended family takes care of them.
  • natmaka 2y ago
    "Intelligence" may imply "not uselessly exposing yourself to danger". As long as they don't know what they could win by becoming more familiar there is no reason for them to do so. You may try to let them discover such a reason...
  • hnfong 2y ago
    Humans are probably the most unpredictable beings the crows have seen. How would they ever know you're not a threat for sure? Usually, it's hard for a human to kill another (unless with a lethal weapon and lots of intention), but it's really easy for a human to kill a bird, even recklessly or carelessly. Note that humans in developed societies are generally much "nicer" than what we have been for thousands of years. And even so, for many individuals today, they're not different from our barbaric ancestors...
  • inglor_cz 2y ago
    "They know I'm not a threat, but they are still so afraid of me. This to me is the opposite of intelligence." Frankly, you don't have enough information for that conclusion. First of all, from a bird's point of view, we are massive, clumsy and extremely powerful creatures the size of a 10-story building. If I had to live around such creatures, I would keep my distance just in case. Something that big can hurt you even without intending to do so. Second, you don't really know if they can trust you. It is entirely possible that someone else in your neighbourhood / region fed them, gained their trust, then hurt them (or maybe "just" captured them for some time etc., an ornithologist would do). In that case, once bitten, twice shy. Most long-lived smart birds probably witnessed their kin being killed by humans; people would be expected to suffer from a bit of PTSD after that. Third, there may be other factors at play. For example, you might smell bad to them. We generally underestimate olfactory impressions, but few of us would love to be close friends with someone who smelt strongly of, say, gasoline. Personally, I have the experience that ticks avoid me, I had just three in my entire life, approximately once in a decade, even though I go to nature fairly frequently and Czech woods are infested like hell. I must be repulsive to them. If you have a cat or a dog, they might be smelling them off you.
• DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Yes, but how can we develop the next killer app for crows?
• DiscourseFan 2y ago
  [flagged]
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
  I think there are two things that are true: 1. Non-human animals have intelligence and are not “stupid” or automatons. 2. Human intelligence is just so much at an another level that it isnt even close.
• ProAm 2y ago
  Adam Carolla did this research in the 90's on Love Lines...I'll die on this hill.
• coding123 2y ago
  https://crowpro.net/ https://crowpro.net/ (kitboga related)
• jackmalpo 2y ago
  There will be an X is smarter than we thought post about every single species until we realize that every living thing is smart
• azemetre 2y ago
  I've posted this comment before but I grew up in Florida on a decent amount of land for a curious child. One day I was feeding the crows some stale cuban bread, there were probably 5 of them sitting on the fence watching me throw the bread. Each one would fly down and take a piece. One of them flew down and tumbled, his friends started laughing something fierce. His friends then all took turns mimicking his tumble in the grass, you can just tell they were laughing. One would dive bomb into the grass and flop around like an athlete faking an injury while the others were squawking up something fierce. Probably the funniest thing they saw in weeks.
  • meowface 2y ago
    They probably have rich social lives. I wonder how fine-grained their communication signals are.
    • azemetre 2y ago
      Probably very good. They've been known to communicate highly specific dangers to other crows and supposedly understand recursion: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crows-perform-yet-another-skill-once-thought-distinctively-human/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crows-perform-yet... I haven't read it yet but there's also a sci-fi book about intelligent society of crows (Children of Time series): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Memory_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Memory_(novel)
      • fuzzfactor 2y ago
        "It's the same story the crow told me, it's the only one he knows . . . "
      • shafouzzz 2y ago
        the first book in the series is amazing. Unfortunately it goes down from there. Could not finish the third one ( Crow one )
        • 2y ago
• textlapse 2y ago
  How cool would it be to have a reinforcement learning playground to teach ‘crows’ and ‘octopuses’ and ‘cuttlefish’? The key thing is the biological evolution that seeks rewards for survival and reproductive partner selection over generations. Forget AGI… this would be way cooler to try.
• jimmytucson 2y ago
  The article title perhaps mischaracterizes the significance of these findings. The paper finds that Hooded crows—who are not specialized tool users—demonstrate some of the same abilities that have already been observed experimentally in New Caledonian crows—who are specialized tool makers, including: the ability to manufacture tools from novel materials, select or manufacture a tool depending on the specifics of the task, …etc. The authors cite a dozen papers published over the last 20 years that have documented these findings in NC crows, as well as Goffin’s cockatoo (who, like the Hooded crow, are not specialized tool users). The significance of this paper must be that the abilities are more widespread in crows than previously thought, which is stated in the article, but blotted out by the juicier headline. Here’s the actual paper, which as usual, is more substantive than the article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-024-01874-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-024-01874-6
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• nforgerit 2y ago
  I once had the opportunity to watch two crows attacking a swarm of sparrows. I've never seen birds hunting birds before so it made me watch the whole scene for 3-5min and I was baffled how the crows systematically 1) induced chaos trying to isolate a sparrow from the swarm then 2) killed it and 3) while one crow was busy eating it the other crow kept the infuriated swarm at distance. After a while 4) the crows changed jobs.
• keepamovin 2y ago
  The title should be humans are dumber than we thought (compared to crows | for thinking crows weren't as smart as they are ) hahaha! :)
• rsync 2y ago
  What if they’re all, by our own definition, intelligent… … but what makes us special is that we’re the only ones who care ? What if ego is the unique human trait? What if the reason my goats don’t communicate with me isn’t because they’re dumb… but because they couldn’t care less ?
  • card_zero 2y ago
    Ego, motivation, a sense of quest, existential dread, trouble-making. Perhaps so.
  • qup 2y ago
    Okay, but have you been around a goat? Hold a bucket of grain and they will have the incredible urgent desire to communicate with you.
• dilawar 2y ago
  Here are a few cultures bits about crows from a village in Northern India. - If a crows is sitting near your house and screaming, you are about to get guests or visitors. - During monsoon time, a whole month is devoted to feed your ancestors. We put food out on leafs (banana is hard to find, peepal or turai squash leaf does the job). It's mostly eaten by crows. It is believed that ancestors visit you back as crows. I never saw local crows doing extraordinary "smart things". They were very good at stealing food: especially butter during winter. But never heard about a crow opening a latch. While nesting, they will dip a dry branch in water to make it soft so that they can bend it without breaking when making nest. I never liked crows as kids. They would often kill small squirrels (chipmunks rather) and sparrows whom I liked very much -- though rarely.
• Aleksdev 2y ago
  I would not be surprised if the average crow is as smart or smarter than some people I have met in my life.
• nunez 2y ago
  This isn't surprising. Birds are incredibly intelligent, and crows/ravens are up there. Magpies too. We have grackles here in Houston; those fuckers are clever as well!
• bane 2y ago
  I think I've come to an inevitable conclusion that there appears to be at least two "sources" of intelligence, genetic, and (I guess for lack of a better word), "learned". Learned could mean all kinds of things, the capacity measurement of IQ, the effort by parents to fill that capacity, social normative steering, whatever. But genetic really means "instinct" in the way that a day old deer can stand, run, graze (I live in an area with lots of deer, so I get a first-hand chance to observe them). Suppose a sci-fi story, where humans encounter a fantastically advanced alien species. Over the course of the story events occur where individuals in the alien species see not learn anything at all, while later generations seem imbued with those same learnings. What humans are encountering might be instead incredibly advance, and highly encoded instinct. Is that not intelligence? I'm reminded of the schools of buddhism, where a differentiation is that you are able to achieve enlightenment in one-lifetime or in many. The main distinction between life and non-life appear to be the ability to experience the universe. A blade of grass is alive no different than a human, but entirely different from a rock. Experience seems to be some kind of basis for intelligence, without which it cannot exist, thus perhaps, all experiential beings are intelligent in some way. Every living thing has survived everything its ancestors' environment threw at them and made it to "now".
  • Intralexical 2y ago
    > Is that not intelligence? "Intelligence" should be adaptive, and general purpose. Complex systems that are unable to grow or change are basically the definition of an unliving "mechanism", contrasted against an intelligent mind/being.
  • azemetre 2y ago
    You should check out the sci fi book Blindsight by Peter Watts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) It's a first contact story about an alien species that doesn't have consciousness.
  • fennecbutt 2y ago
    Yeah there's definitely instinctual and then "lived/learnt" intelligence. Not sure about the biological mechanism for the latter becoming the former. I was thinking about this the other day actually, how all of our advanced behaviours and emotions and society are really just formed on the foundation of basic biological principles/evolution. Every supposedly complex behavior can be explained by this. The ultimate meaning of life is to live long enough to pass on genes if you're fit enough to make this happen, then you age and for all your learned experience you will become slow and eventually be the gazelle at the rear of the herd that the lions catch, saving the younger newer generations. With the possibility of one of those younger gazelle also dying beside you, if it wasn't aware or fast enough - preventing it from passing on genes. Even complex and strong emotions were evolved for a purpose, those that could empathise and work together did better, same with language. Then we get side effects like depression etc in the same way that you can physically injure ourself, our minds can be injured as well. Basically spent a couple hours thinking about the future of machine learning.
• keiferski 2y ago
  I have watched crows wait at stoplights in order to cross the road, even when flying over it would have taken a few seconds. It’s funny how the sign of intelligence in this case was laziness.
• milleramp 2y ago
  When I was little I had a small bb gun and would shoot cans in the backyard. A couple times i shot a crow and it would bounce off their strong chest and they would fly off seemingly unfazed. One time by pure chance I hit a crow in the neck and it died instantly, crashing down into my neighbor's yard. It was very shocking because I had not killed anything like that before. Immediately crows started circling my parents house, making an incredible amount of noise. I was so scared, I jumped over the fence to retrieve the dead crow. At this point crows started to dive bomb me and I thought for sure the whole neighborhood must know what is going on. I buried the crow in the backyard and the crows continued to be in high places around the house making noises until evening. The coordination and the intentional effort they made to disrupt and stop me was something I have never forgotten. This had a big effect on me, I thought of it's family, and how they were trying to protect it. Needless to say I have not shot another bird since.
  • whamlastxmas 2y ago
    I had a similar experience when I was a kid shooting a .22 and was like “no way I can hit this bird” and totally did. I instantly felt like a huge prick as I stood there watching this bird die. I went back to get my gun to humanely finish it off but didn’t manage to find it again when I walked back. First and last time I’ve ever thoughtlessly harmed an animal
  • snet0 2y ago
    This is a hard way to learn it, but I think the recognition of non-human animals as being alive in the same way we are is quite a profound moment. Just that realisation of this thing that was previously just a robotic, animated part of "the natural world", like a blade of grass that can move, suddenly being - in its own way - related to itself and others of its species. People find this easy with pets, I guess, but I think the moment you recognise a farm or wild animal as being of a similar kind as you, it can really change your perspective.
    • mptest 2y ago
      Most I've met don't gain that reverence/insight til their first shroom trip lol. Or they read a 'Silent Spring' type book.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• moi2388 2y ago
  Seriously animal researchers are so weird.. Of course animals can form mental representations of shapes. Do you think they wouldn’t be able to form a mental representation of another one of their species? Their surroundings? Objects they commonly interact with? It’s getting them to reproduce it on command that’s tricky, but that has nothing to do with their capabilities
• erikaww 2y ago
  hand fed a crow hot cheetos right outside the palace of fine arts. good times.
• theflyingpigeon 2y ago
  This is interesting. However, too bad a British university is working with a russian university
  • filoeleven 2y ago
    A British university working with a Russian university is far more beneficial to humanity than a British university working with a British weapons manufacturer.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• picafrost 2y ago
  We put a lot of effort and funding into trying to contact other intelligent lifeforms in this universe. Why should we believe we can understand each other if we can't even understand the intelligent lifeforms right next to us?
  • keiferski 2y ago
    “Science? Nonsense! In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally useless! I must tell you that we really have no desire to conquer any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth up to its borders. We don't know what to do with other worlds. We don't need other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle to make contact, but we'll never achieve it. We are in a ridiculous predicament of man pursuing a goal that he fears and that he really does not need. Man needs man." - Solaris
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    Because symbolic communication is vastly simpler to define and use and translate than non-symbolic communication. If whale songs and crow language could be written down in discrete symbols, we could figure them out too. And with higher intelligence we assume that the symbolic language of mathematics will be a universally shared starting point. The kind of analog pattern-matching required to decipher animal language seems to be notoriously difficult to do if your brain doesn't already come with the right analog "circuits". I definitely hope that we'll have an AI breakthrough at some point that can decipher animal language, however. One thing's for sure though -- it won't be LLM's since they operate at a symbolic level.
• ehnto 2y ago
  Make sure you are kind to our crow friends, judging by the trajectory of these articles I fear their intelligence is growing as fast as ours is dropping. While that's definitely a joke, I wouldn't be that surprised by a human getting outwitted by a crow even today.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • k4rli 2y ago
    Any crow is definitely smarter than the average Tiktok user.
• 14 2y ago
  I have always loved crows. I used to carry a bag of unshelled peanuts in my car to feed to them if I saw them. One day I was pulled over and saw a lone crow. So I threw a peanut and watched him open it easily with his beak and eat the nuts. Then I threw 2 peanuts and he picked up both in it's mouth and flew a short distance away and ate them. I always new crows could fit 2 peanuts but not 3 so I thought what would you do if I throw 3? So I do and for a moment he tries to fit all of them in his mouth but can not. So he flies about 15 feet away to a cement path walkway and on the side of it I watched him bury one of the peanuts. Smart I thought. Then he immediately flew back and grab the other nuts. I have always been impressed by that moment.
  • qup 2y ago
    Sounds like they were shelled
    • 14 2y ago
      Yes shelled I screwed up by saying unshelled
      • redlac 2y ago
        I think you were correct. Shelled peanuts have had the shell removed.
• mangeshbankar21 2y ago
  [flagged]
• omnee 2y ago
  We have come a long way from Descartes argument that animals are no more than automata. Which supported our unabashed exploitation of countless species. It is now abundantly clear that animals have their own phenomenological experience of the world, and their intelligence is part of a continuum, shaped mostly to survive in their niches. And some species demonstrate a higher level of general intelligence - something in which we are quite easily the best. Although, it's worth noting that some cultures (Buddhists or Jain's for example) did give animals their due with respect to their lives and intelligence.
  • tjoff 2y ago
    Well, many argue that humans are no more than automata. So from that view Descartes argument holds, but the conclusion that such a life has no meaning does not.
    • pessimizer 2y ago
      Descartes couldn't figure out how humans weren't automata either. That's where his explanations start getting supernatural, and not particularly insightful. Any kook can babble on about an invisible pineal gland soul-thread. edit: I think the interesting thing for people is how insight like Descartes' becomes useless when he tries to distinguish us from automata.
  • literalAardvark 2y ago
    As far as I can tell, current theories are that animals are also somewhat conscious and intelligent, but that we're all, including humans, automata, with zero or near zero free will.
    • card_zero 2y ago
      I don't even know what that means or why it worries people, I think it's a big red herring. (And near-zero is a confusing concept.) We're machines that make choices, spontaneously and deterministically (which is not a contradiction). People fretting about free will are getting caught in some kind of category error that confuses the physics of time with being controlled by an invisible tyrant.
• lifeisstillgood 2y ago
  I think there is an intelligence / co-operation grid where low intelligence high co-operation gets you herd like protective nature but crows aren’t great on co-operation - not at herd scale Intelligent sparrows though - that would be deeply scary
• squidbeak 2y ago
  Compare with the significantly more limited brains and existences of the idiots who massacre them as a hobby. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/misguided-slaughter-german-crow-killing-group-faces-growing-backlash-a-811262.html https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/misguided-slaug...
• esquivalience 2y ago
  > "Conflict of interest All the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest." Glad to see this in the original article. I had been wondering whether they were in the pocket of Big Crow.
• TomMasz 2y ago
  Corvids and parrots upended our beliefs about bird intelligence and made us realize there's more than one way to organize a brain. We still have a lot to learn about them.
• wileydragonfly 2y ago
  And if you split their tongues, according to family lore, they can talk.
• 29athrowaway 2y ago
  Never piss off a crow for sure.
• auraai 2y ago
  Their intelligence was clear to me growing up around them, without knowing anything about crows specifically. They clearly have intelligent interactions with each other and the environment, and have a "theory of mind" of people approaching them/interacting with them. They could also figure out how to open/untie garbage bags, gang up to bully other birds and take their food, etc. In the mornings, right outside our house, they would congregate on a tall pine tree and it really looked like they were having a daily standup - one of them yells loudly, others listen silently, then start making noise together :)
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• cyberax 2y ago
  I have crows nesting in a tree just outside my house. Crows are monogamous, so I see the same pair flying together all the time. Several months ago, they started to look a bit frazzled, they have chicks growing up. So I started giving them bits of food (meats and thawed mice). They are now bringing me pieces of colored glass :) They also caw if I wave at them. They are also keeping pigeons and seaguls away.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • smcnally 2y ago
    > Crows are monogamous, so I see the same pair flying together all the time. We see hundreds of crows every morning and dusk. Even close up, I’m hard pressed to distinguish most of them from one another. Perhaps ours in Southern California are more uniform than yours? Or perhaps you’re viewing them with binoculars?
    • cyberax 2y ago
      Their nest is about 15 meters from my window, and they often sit on a fence about 5 meters from my window. And because it's always the same pair, you learn how they look after a while. I probably won't be able to distinguish them in a big flock, but we only have a few crows that regularly fly around my area. Recently, their chicks also started flying around, so I also keep seeing them. They are slightly smaller, with really nice glossy "baby" feathers.