Were we live the (australian) ravens move in in spring to raise their babies, they'll be here soon. There's something extraordinary about the way they look at you. It says : 'yeah we see each other. don't make me come down and smack you'
Average ravens know how to make tools out of wire and how to drop rocks into a bottle to raise the level of its water so they can drink it. I think that's more than your average human can do.
A human would be quite capable of constructing a tool out of wire. Humans figured out water displacement too, and ravens have culture and pass their knowledge on to their young just like we do.
The interesting thing isn't exact measurements of intelligence, though, but rather the fact that intelligence has developed independently. We know that we and our fellow primates are amongst the smartest animals on the planet. The thing about ravens is that they prove we're not the only ones.
I think you're giving the humans far too much credit. Some humans, and most larval humans, are capable of doing that kind of thing. Most of them just imitate. After puberty, almost all of them just repeat their previously acquired behaviors except when imitating. Instead of reasoning, they just rehearse past memories and fictional scenarios, unable to distinguish reality from fiction. Most of them can't remember what they ate for lunch yesterday or the license plate of the car that passed two minutes ago. They engage in complex verbal behavior that's ultimately incoherent, to the point that often even severe senile dementia in a human goes undiagnosed until its victim is in a new situation where their previous mindless habits no longer apply.
They aren't joking, based on their later comments. This "humans are stupid" trope is quite common. It usually becomes clear that it originates from thinly-concealed classism: "People like me can solve differential equations, but most people just sit around watching TV and playing the lottery. No, I haven't met those people, but I know that's all they do."
Oh, no, I wish I could except myself from these comments, but I can stupid right up there with the stupidest of them. In fact, right at this moment I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday. And I'm talking to you. If I were sitting around watching TV, as I was doing a few hours ago, that would at least be pleasant and therefore somewhat rational.
I applaud your adroitness at self-deprecation, but I think it's pretty implicit in your comments that you hold yourself above other people, or else you logically should be simply imitating their views:
> I think you're giving the humans far too much credit. Some humans, and most larval humans, are capable of doing that kind of thing. Most of them just imitate. After puberty, almost all of them just repeat their previously acquired behaviors except when imitating. Instead of reasoning, they just rehearse past memories and fictional scenarios, unable to distinguish reality from fiction. Most of them can't remember what they ate for lunch yesterday or the license plate of the car that passed two minutes ago. They engage in complex verbal behavior that's ultimately incoherent, to the point that often even severe senile dementia in a human goes undiagnosed until its victim is in a new situation where their previous mindless habits no longer apply.
> . . . I think it's pretty implicit in your comments that you hold yourself above other people . . .
This is a common enough cognitive bias that it should be expected.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.
Me: I can read and write in English while knowing how to operate a computer.
The bird: Drops objects into a tube filled with water to get food.
In the human realm nobody gives a damn that I know English and can use a mouse and keyboard. People are so good at these skills they don't even realize they are skills, they are so abundant they count for nothing. The bird wins because of that.
I'm guessing you learned those skills before puberty? A Markov-chain bot also "knows English" and "can operate a computer", though probably posting a comment like yours would require at least GPT-2.
How does one signal a commitment to the falsability of one’s assertions and yet remain convincing?
Am I stupid to think that I am smart? Am I smart to think that I am stupid? If I think I am stupid and desire smartness can I fake it until I make it? Does the simulation of a smarter self developed to better attain smartness through faking it become real?
The Dunning-Kruger effect isn't actually the same thing as overconfidence effect or the superiority complex I'm manifesting here, although there's definitely a relationship. What Dunning and Kruger hypothesized was that sometimes people are bad at an activity, like being funny, because there are important things about that activity that they don't know. This impairs both their performance at that activity and their ability to assess their performance, as well as, for example, other people's performance. In their experiments, they did find the predicted effect, with the result that, while people who were really terrible at an activity had a lower self-assessment than people who were pretty good at it, the really terrible people overrated themselves by a lot. They also found that the more competent people underrated themselves by a little, which was not a prediction of their hypothesis, and is the opposite of what the overconfidence-effect theory predicts.
At least, that's how I remember it. Would I even know if I were misremembering it?
I think "How do [I] signal a commitment to the falsifiability of [my] assertions and yet remain convincing?" is mostly the wrong question. Convincing someone, like a salesman, is a different activity from collaboratively exploring ideas with them, and they are not only mutually exclusive with one another, but also with the kind of self-righteous dominance discourse samhw is engaging in upthread, where the object is to persuade other onlookers to side with you against your contemptible interlocutor (in this case, me). Projecting cocaine-like irrepressible confidence is often a very effective way to convince people of things, because they assume your confidence must be well-founded, but that effect is poisonous to collaborative exploration of ideas, which involves looking for their flaws as well as their merits. It can also damage their confidence in you over time, although fraudsters like Lacan and that delusional coke freak Freud often get away with it for more than a human lifespan, by virtue of carefully crafting their theories to be nonfalsifiable.
In cases where your beliefs are based on objective evidence, you can share that evidence, as Darwin did with his studies of finches and reflections on pigeon breeding and whatnot. This turns out to be very effective at collectively progressing toward the truth even when none of the individual people involved is very smart (and none of us are) or very detached from their beliefs. Semmelweis was eventually convincing about handwashing, for example, but not about the cadaveric-particle thing.
Unfortunately, without computers, this doesn't work for procedural knowledge; every generation has to learn it from scratch by practicing, so, for example, our jokes aren't any better now than they were in Sumeria 5000 years ago. And there are a lot of cases where our knowledge has a basis that isn't objective, so we can't put it into words and numbers, with the result that people who trust us believe it, while people who distrust us don't.
Anyway, so people often misunderstand Dunning and Kruger to have found that the least competent people rated themselves as being the most competent. While that does happen sometimes, that wasn't what they found. However, sufficient levels of overconfidence in your knowledge will totally close you off to new information, as happened to samhw in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592769, so you totally stop learning, eventually making you the least competent. As I said, though, that usually also happens to humans when they go through puberty! In my case, my overconfidence stunted my learning about all kinds of things for many years and probably still does in areas I haven't noticed yet. And probably never will, since I'm apparently totally failing at actually thinking.
The "simulation of a smarter self" thing can actually work, because often what keeps people trapped is not a lack of intelligence but various kinds of mental formations they use to avoid discomfort. Doesn't have to be a self, or smarter; "what would Jesus do?" is a Christian reminder that a mental simulation of a more morally commendable person can be a useful guide.
I am simply imitating their views. I haven't got an original thought in my head, at least not one I haven't had for 30 years. And here I am sphexishly replying to you again like a sucker. Is there anything I could possibly be doing that would be less intelligent? Any raven would have long since flown away, or possibly pecked your eyes out.
How would that help? Wouldn't it just make the problem much worse? Instead of futilely arguing against the kind of scumbag that turned Twitter into the vile cesspool it is today and is now infesting HN, I'd become another one of them!
I mean, I do hold myself above you. But it's not because I think you're even stupider than I am, which would be quite a remarkable feat. It's because you're spending your efforts to try to hurt people and I'm spending my efforts to try to help them.
