The fact that this post was curated, and raised so little concern in the comments is worrying.
The author expresses himself maniacally in a mix of meme-speak and LW-lingo. The main claim is never really clarified*, but is presented as if it were, and in an outrageous way. There is no evidence besides YouTube videos**. I have no idea what is going on, and don’t even know where to start.
Comparative cognition is a real scientific field. If you’re interested in the cognitive abilities of non-human animals, and how they compare with the abilities of other species, then there’s a whole scientific literature you can take a look at. Ironically, this post sends us back to the lowest of this field, more than a century ago, when researchers made abundant use of observational anecdotes and interpreted them as they wished.
*None of the videos linked show a use of language at the level of even a child, so it can’t be “Dogs can speak”. Incidentally, nobody ever doubted that dogs can communicate with humans, especially regarding things as food, the presence of other animals or affection.
**That is, cherry-picked, sometimes even edited, videos where the owners of the dog superimposes what they think the dogs are saying.
Really? The main claim is presented “in an outrageous way”?
I can imagine reading the post and being unconvinced by the evidence presented. In fact, that was my reaction (although I haven’t watched the videos yet). But… being outraged?
Posts should not make large, unsupported claims, and criticism should not be hyperbolic. Here is what I have learned from your critique:
You think that StyleOfDog writes “maniacally” and uses “meme-speak” too much.
Unclear why I should care. Not my favorite style of writing, but I understood what they were trying to say, and so communication occurred. It’s not obvious to me that marginally more “meme-speak” would be bad for the site. It just read informally to me, which I don’t mind for this kind of “fun / curiosity” post.
Ironically, your comment is hard to parse. The structure is scattered, which disorients me as I read your critique. In particular, you include two footnotes in quick succession, destroying flow. You could have just left them in the body of the comment.
You found the main claim unclear.
At least you formulated a hypothesis? I’m unsure why you found it unclear.
You are outraged.
Since you made a new account, I can’t even Bayes-update based on existing reputation.
StyleOfDog didn’t mention the field of comparative cognition.
Thank you. This is a substantive critique, and a field I didn’t know how to name.
You worry about cherry-picking.
Ideally, you would have pointed to specific videos. No problem that you didn’t.
Sorry for over-reacting to what I perceived as essentially a curated list of youtube videos with no real context. I made a probably more substantial comment as an answer to the OP.
It sounds to me like you’re thinking of curated as ‘vetted’ or ‘confident’, while Ray is thinking of it more as ‘representing a direction we want to see LW move in more’ (including ‘this topic seems neglected here, I’d like to see it get more attention’).
It’s the difference between ‘curation is like publishing a non-replication-crisis-y journal article or encyclopedia article, a durable summary of humanity’s knowledge we can call back to and base further conclusions on’, versus ‘curation is like sending out an email to a private researcher mailing list you run “hey, I’d love to see more discussion here in the vein of X”’.
To me, and I expect to a group of other readers as well given upvotes to my comments and those of @subconvergence, this is a direction we really think LessWrong should not go in.
I think Raemon is able to see some appeals of this post that are something like:
Boggling at the world is good, and we don’t get as much of that as we’d like
People reading this post may be able to form their own takeaway, which is something like “man, we really should be checking more comprehensively whether dogs can talk.”, and ideas like that are worth sharing.
I think there are some significant problems with this, however:
This post doesn’t really advocate boggling at the world, instead it makes specific, strongly worded claims that there is already decently meaningful evidence of something.
This post does not really advocate for that takeaway, and to the extent someone thinks it does, it’s certainly far from the most prominent message.
If LWers took-this-to-heart, there are likely between 10,000-1,000,000 things of similar potential interest and evidence base that could be shared in this way, the vast majority of which are highly unlikely to be proven out.
Furthermore, in addition to thinking that if I’ve guessed at Raemon’s motivations correctly, they’re based on flawed reasoning for the above 3 reasons, I think there are other factors that make this actively damaging:
This makes strongly worded claims that are either untestable (assumptions on LW readership’s priors in title), or not nearly supported by the evidence.
It employs a number of techniques that, to some, are seemingly effective at actively misleading them (see bullets 2 and 3 of my previous comment, I also find a number more employed in the author’s comments).
This, to me, pattern matches with LWers having much less critical readership than expected, and than should be warranted when confronting a post of this type, which I’ve observed in multiple prominent instances over the past ~3 months of newly close engagement. I think continued promotion of articles with poor calibration, with a lack of critical comments (and instead unwarranted enthusiasm), will further degrade LW’s state of discourse. Even if this is the only article of this type, and I’m wrong about some of the others, I think even one instance of promoting something that is a better fit for Buzzfeed is at least somewhat damaging.
I do think there’s a post that fits my guess at Raemon’s appeal of this post (the two bullets above) and avoids all the numbered issues I outline afterward, but this post is a far departure from that hypothetical one.
Plenty of concern was raised in the comments, have you gone through all of them and all the replies?
I’m aware of comparative cognition, the people posting the pet videos are participating in ongoing research at the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California, San Diego. They give a description of their methodology, but the status updates appear hidden to ensure integrity of the data.
Short recap of the comments: This is a very new thing, early-stage science often looks like messing around, so don’t expect lots of rigor so early. If they had a paper, I would post that. On the balance of evidence, the videos seem to be made in good faith, I don’t think it’s some staged viral crap. Don’t discount evidence just because it’s normie YouTube vids. The main claim is that there’s something interesting going on that makes me suspect dogs could possibly produce something that looks like language. I’m not claiming certainty on that or on the level of dogs’ supposed language ability, it’s research in progress, but I think it’s exciting and worth studying.
Thanks for responding, and also for illustrating all the issues I have in your post in a compressed way. Basically, what you’re saying is:
Something new and exciting is happening
There’s not a lot of evidence BUT
I think this community should be able to see the issue there. (To also be polemical, occultism was also something that was new and exciting in the 19th century, with many intellectual of their time spending their evening around a turntable, most of them also in good faith when they reported paranormal activity.)
1. is being conditioned on something really happening in 2.
But 2. has a lot of issues and you know it, and I think you do a bad job at convincing me. Your justifications are:
“There’s a study ongoing”: good, I haven’t read the methods and it’s probably interesting, but there are no results yet. Maybe you could summarize it to people then if you want to introduce us to this work?
“videos are made in good faith”: Clever Hans, the most infamous exemple in comparative cognition, was literally also in good faith
“don’t discount evidence just because it’s normie YouTube vids”: what evidence again? and evidence to what?
The main claim is that there’s something interesting going on that makes me suspect dogs could possibly produce something that looks like language.
Ok, but you’ll have to define what you mean by “language” here because even if the videos are made in “good faith” (which again doesn’t make the owners immune to biaises, even if they can name drop Clever Hans), I don’t see the dogs using a well defined grammar, nor adding unseen words to their vocabulary, nor composing existing structures to create new ones.
Their “language”, even in the best case, seems to be “bag-of-word” based, or simple sequences of a few words that could be learned by reinforcement, especially given the owner’s involvement. It also relies on the contextual pressing of a couple buttons, which again doesn’t qualify for language. Finally, it also relies extensively on the owners interpretations.
All the recorded interactions span the course of a couple “sentences”. I didn’t see any “discussion” longer than that, but feel free to link a more impressive video as I didn’t watch them all.
You say you’re aware of comparative cognition, so you should have heard about Morgan’s Canon.
All of what I’ve seen in the few videos I watched can be very well explained using a mix of:
the dogs are heavily trained to produce some basic sentences composed of few words that give the illusion of grammar
the rest of the time dogs are able to map stimuli to some single buttons
dogs responds to physical and speech cues from their owner about which button to press (they are heavily encouraged to press some buttons to please their owner and get a reward)
heavy selection biais in the choice of videos
Given the extraordinary amount of efforts that went into training the animals in the videos, the results seem to be in accordance with what we already knew about cognition in dog.
This is a cool hobby for people who love their dogs and want to spend a lot of time training them. Not a groundbreaking discovery.
In the end, I think you and many other people here are being fooled by:
The fact that you like dogs as animal companions (and find cognition in non-human animal amazing in general, which I understand)
The fact that they’re using speakers with pre-recorded speech, which gives you the illusion of language
I agree I should’ve summarized the study methodology in the article. For some reason I expected people to click the links and actually read and watch everything (this is not a knock on anyone, one shouldn’t expect that when writing articles).
There is a lot of evidence, it’s just weak and easy to misinterpret, and it’s in the form of youtube vids, which goes against aesthetic sensibilities of what “evidence” looks like. If you want to have a holistic picture, you’ll have to actually watch a lot of them, I’m sorry.
I think it’s quite obvious that the evidence here has a rather different shape from 19th-century medium reports or grainy VHS tapes with a blob that is claimed to be the Loch-Ness monster.
Being able to tell which “messing around” is likely to be fruitful is a meta-rational skill, but it can be done. Somewhat. To me this has a “shape” of something that could be fruitful, but I can’t transfer the pattern matching inside my brain to yours.
Vids being done in good faith doesn’t preclude clever hans or overinterpretation. It precludes the vids being fake or staged.
I and others addressed multiple times the dangers of seeing phantoms in noise and operant conditioning. I don’t see anyone here who doesn’t acknowledge that. Classic clever hans is unlikely when the owner doesn’t know the right answer or the pet is supposed to make a decision, or alert the owner to something they’re unaware of.
A girl has a cat and trained it to respond “yes food” to “food now hm?”. Cool, that’s just conditioning. But then the cat refuses food repeatedly despite getting railroaded. If it was conditioned to press “yes” after hearing “food”, without understanding what “yes” means, why did this happen?
The danger IMO isn’t clever hans as much as misinterpreting and anthropomorphizing button “speech”. Which counter-intuitively may be an important part of language acquisition (in humans, at least): Kaj_Sotala wrote such an interesting comment, sadly few people read it. I’ll summarize the idea: the first time a toddler raises his arms, it’s random, but mom misrepresents and thinks he wants to be held and so holds it. The toddler learns the association, and the next time he holds his arms up, it’s not random, now it’s a deliberate signal.
“looks like language” != “language”. Personally I don’t care about philosophical arguments about the exact border between non-language communication and “true language”. It’s enough for me to see some elements of human language use to make this interesting, even if it doesn’t check every box.
The pets are trained by reinforcement learning by design. Just saying “it’s all reinforcement learning” isn’t saying anything, the question is what exactly you reinforce, and if you manage to reinforce not just simple associations like “food” or “toy”, but also states of affect and more abstract concepts.
Don’t overuse anthropomorphizing. Claiming the dog pressing “mad” is feeling a human-like emotion and is going to hold a grudge, instead of just feeling negative affect is anthropomorphizing. Claiming that dogs can feel fear, excitement or positive/negative affect is not.
Claiming people here are “fooled” is a bit derogatory to others, especially with the reasons you gave for that.
I think both of us made our arguments clear, so instead of answering point by point, let me give a quick holistic response that should summarize what I think, and provide a general interesting point of view on animal cognition.
(Maybe you know about the following, but I think it is interesting enough by itself to be presented here to other people)
Corvidae are very intelligent birds. There’s ton of evidence of that. You can read studies that test how they can solve problems, you can watch tons of youtube videos showing them interact with their settings and with other animals. These videos are all made in good faith, showing birds evolving in ecological or lab settings, and demonstrating their intelligence.
As you put it, you can build an “holistic picture” of them as very strong problem solvers.
Then comes this observation. You see crows dropping nuts on the road. Cars go over the nuts, crushing them. The crows delight themselves with the opened nuts.
What do you conclude? That the crows are using the passage of cars as a way to break the nuts open? Considering the abilities demonstrated by these birds, it seems like the logical hypothesis to me.
And so this was that a lot of people though back then (Maple 1974, in Cristol et al. 1997). Then people put this assertion to test (Cristol et al. 1997).
[The authors] reasoned that if crows were using cars as tools, the birds would be more likely to drop nuts onto the road when cars were coming than when the road was empty. Furthermore, if a crow was standing in the road with an uncracked walnut as a car approached, it should leave the nut in the road to be crushed rather than carry it away.
This was not what they observed. Despite the apparent simplicity of this hypothesis, crows do not use automobiles as nut-crackers. (If I remember right, the nut-dropping behavior is just standard crow behavior, I’m not even sure they took advantage of the concrete surface).
When dealing with animal cognition, you have to be extra-careful. You have to clearly define the abilities you want to talk about. And you have to put them to test rigorously, by assuming the “lowest” (whatever that mean) cognitive faculties. I don’t think no amount of weak evidence can go over that, especially since there seems to be so much emotional charge involved.
EDIT: There’s just one thing. You and some people here seem to think there are going to be some consequences to what is being discussed. Please feel free to post your predictions about what will be the outcomes. I predict FluentPet is at best going to become a niche hobby down the road, with less than 1% of dog owners having trained their pet in 10 years.
I think we’re mostly in agreement, and I’m not disputing that it pays to be careful when it comes to animal cognition. I’d say again that I think it’s a meta-rational skill to see the patterns of what is likely to work and what isn’t, and this kind of stuff is near-impossible to communicate well.
I’ve read about the car-nutracker thing somewhere, but without the null result from research. If you had asked me to bet I’d say it would be unlikely to work. But it’s illustrative that we both still agree that corvids are smart and there’s a ton of evidence for it. We just don’t know the exact ways and forms, and that’s how I feel about the dog thing. There’s something there but we need to actually study it to know the exact shape and form.
I predict FluentPet is at best going to become a niche hobby down the road, with less than 1% of dog owners having trained their pet in 10 years.
I don’t think it will be niche because it’s already not niche, considering the massive viewership. But your 1% figure sounds about right as a higher bound, given the sheer number of dog owners, the amount of work required and people’s low desire to train their pets. A cursory google search says 4% of US dog owners take a training class, so serious button use will have to be a fraction of that.
Being interested in the lethality of cigarettes or the likelyhood of climate change would also deal in being interedsted in issues where high-scrutinity or high social status stances are not available.
I do think that people have an easier time reading a bit too much into it because the buttons are so legible for humans.
The buttons were developed for communication needds for deaf people. Would not pressing buttons in that cotext qualify as peech? What is the relevant difference to make that not apply there?
I am wondering whether this is a too short conversation. This would probably be of good length. To me it feels there is a discernible difference in the level of vividity that the dog follows on the stories. Also On taht linked place the dog is “confused” by a new word which to me reads as a behaviour about actively trying to keep on board with the story and adaptation to expand vocabulary by talking (if not by definition which the human tries to hand over).
To my underdstanding the core vocabulary needs to be bootstrapped by reinforcdement anyway so that doesn’t make it a disqualifying attribute. YOu can’t learn chinese with only the help of a dictionary in chinese. But until the dogs have a primary language they can not keep developing their language skills by simply talking, it needs to link to their “actual” life.
The interesting thing about K’eyush being commanded around is that it is more like a negotiation. For a command the dog can react by complying, saying “no” or saying “why”. And when they say “why” then giving an explanation can give compliance without repeating the command (but then the dog can also think the reasoning is a rubbish one): I do wonder on what basis judging whether other humans are talking a language the observer doesn’t understand vs speaking gibberish. And when tourists are aboard don’t they use “bag-of-word” kind of communication a lot? But also doesn’t that actually serve for the genuine thing?
The fact that this post was curated, and raised so little concern in the comments is worrying.
The author expresses himself maniacally in a mix of meme-speak and LW-lingo. The main claim is never really clarified*, but is presented as if it were, and in an outrageous way. There is no evidence besides YouTube videos**. I have no idea what is going on, and don’t even know where to start.
Comparative cognition is a real scientific field. If you’re interested in the cognitive abilities of non-human animals, and how they compare with the abilities of other species, then there’s a whole scientific literature you can take a look at. Ironically, this post sends us back to the lowest of this field, more than a century ago, when researchers made abundant use of observational anecdotes and interpreted them as they wished.
*None of the videos linked show a use of language at the level of even a child, so it can’t be “Dogs can speak”. Incidentally, nobody ever doubted that dogs can communicate with humans, especially regarding things as food, the presence of other animals or affection.
**That is, cherry-picked, sometimes even edited, videos where the owners of the dog superimposes what they think the dogs are saying.
Really? The main claim is presented “in an outrageous way”?
I can imagine reading the post and being unconvinced by the evidence presented. In fact, that was my reaction (although I haven’t watched the videos yet). But… being outraged?
Posts should not make large, unsupported claims, and criticism should not be hyperbolic. Here is what I have learned from your critique:
You think that StyleOfDog writes “maniacally” and uses “meme-speak” too much.
Unclear why I should care. Not my favorite style of writing, but I understood what they were trying to say, and so communication occurred. It’s not obvious to me that marginally more “meme-speak” would be bad for the site. It just read informally to me, which I don’t mind for this kind of “fun / curiosity” post.
Ironically, your comment is hard to parse. The structure is scattered, which disorients me as I read your critique. In particular, you include two footnotes in quick succession, destroying flow. You could have just left them in the body of the comment.
You found the main claim unclear.
At least you formulated a hypothesis? I’m unsure why you found it unclear.
You are outraged.
Since you made a new account, I can’t even Bayes-update based on existing reputation.
StyleOfDog didn’t mention the field of comparative cognition.
Thank you. This is a substantive critique, and a field I didn’t know how to name.
You worry about cherry-picking.
Ideally, you would have pointed to specific videos. No problem that you didn’t.
Sorry for over-reacting to what I perceived as essentially a curated list of youtube videos with no real context. I made a probably more substantial comment as an answer to the OP.
FWIW, I do not think you over-reacted, nor do I think I agree with any of the criticisms of the comment above.
It sounds to me like you’re thinking of curated as ‘vetted’ or ‘confident’, while Ray is thinking of it more as ‘representing a direction we want to see LW move in more’ (including ‘this topic seems neglected here, I’d like to see it get more attention’).
It’s the difference between ‘curation is like publishing a non-replication-crisis-y journal article or encyclopedia article, a durable summary of humanity’s knowledge we can call back to and base further conclusions on’, versus ‘curation is like sending out an email to a private researcher mailing list you run “hey, I’d love to see more discussion here in the vein of X”’.
Thanks for the precision, I was unaware of that. I still think this post is of very limited value nonetheless.
To me, and I expect to a group of other readers as well given upvotes to my comments and those of @subconvergence, this is a direction we really think LessWrong should not go in.
I think Raemon is able to see some appeals of this post that are something like:
Boggling at the world is good, and we don’t get as much of that as we’d like
People reading this post may be able to form their own takeaway, which is something like “man, we really should be checking more comprehensively whether dogs can talk.”, and ideas like that are worth sharing.
I think there are some significant problems with this, however:
This post doesn’t really advocate boggling at the world, instead it makes specific, strongly worded claims that there is already decently meaningful evidence of something.
This post does not really advocate for that takeaway, and to the extent someone thinks it does, it’s certainly far from the most prominent message.
If LWers took-this-to-heart, there are likely between 10,000-1,000,000 things of similar potential interest and evidence base that could be shared in this way, the vast majority of which are highly unlikely to be proven out.
Furthermore, in addition to thinking that if I’ve guessed at Raemon’s motivations correctly, they’re based on flawed reasoning for the above 3 reasons, I think there are other factors that make this actively damaging:
This makes strongly worded claims that are either untestable (assumptions on LW readership’s priors in title), or not nearly supported by the evidence.
It employs a number of techniques that, to some, are seemingly effective at actively misleading them (see bullets 2 and 3 of my previous comment, I also find a number more employed in the author’s comments).
This, to me, pattern matches with LWers having much less critical readership than expected, and than should be warranted when confronting a post of this type, which I’ve observed in multiple prominent instances over the past ~3 months of newly close engagement. I think continued promotion of articles with poor calibration, with a lack of critical comments (and instead unwarranted enthusiasm), will further degrade LW’s state of discourse. Even if this is the only article of this type, and I’m wrong about some of the others, I think even one instance of promoting something that is a better fit for Buzzfeed is at least somewhat damaging.
I do think there’s a post that fits my guess at Raemon’s appeal of this post (the two bullets above) and avoids all the numbered issues I outline afterward, but this post is a far departure from that hypothetical one.
Plenty of concern was raised in the comments, have you gone through all of them and all the replies?
I’m aware of comparative cognition, the people posting the pet videos are participating in ongoing research at the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California, San Diego. They give a description of their methodology, but the status updates appear hidden to ensure integrity of the data.
Short recap of the comments: This is a very new thing, early-stage science often looks like messing around, so don’t expect lots of rigor so early. If they had a paper, I would post that. On the balance of evidence, the videos seem to be made in good faith, I don’t think it’s some staged viral crap. Don’t discount evidence just because it’s normie YouTube vids. The main claim is that there’s something interesting going on that makes me suspect dogs could possibly produce something that looks like language. I’m not claiming certainty on that or on the level of dogs’ supposed language ability, it’s research in progress, but I think it’s exciting and worth studying.
Thanks for responding, and also for illustrating all the issues I have in your post in a compressed way. Basically, what you’re saying is:
Something new and exciting is happening
There’s not a lot of evidence BUT
I think this community should be able to see the issue there. (To also be polemical, occultism was also something that was new and exciting in the 19th century, with many intellectual of their time spending their evening around a turntable, most of them also in good faith when they reported paranormal activity.)
1. is being conditioned on something really happening in 2.
But 2. has a lot of issues and you know it, and I think you do a bad job at convincing me. Your justifications are:
“There’s a study ongoing”: good, I haven’t read the methods and it’s probably interesting, but there are no results yet. Maybe you could summarize it to people then if you want to introduce us to this work?
“early-stage science often looks like messing around”: yes, but many other things also looks like messing around, and really are messing around in the end
“videos are made in good faith”: Clever Hans, the most infamous exemple in comparative cognition, was literally also in good faith
“don’t discount evidence just because it’s normie YouTube vids”: what evidence again? and evidence to what?
Ok, but you’ll have to define what you mean by “language” here because even if the videos are made in “good faith” (which again doesn’t make the owners immune to biaises, even if they can name drop Clever Hans), I don’t see the dogs using a well defined grammar, nor adding unseen words to their vocabulary, nor composing existing structures to create new ones.
Their “language”, even in the best case, seems to be “bag-of-word” based, or simple sequences of a few words that could be learned by reinforcement, especially given the owner’s involvement. It also relies on the contextual pressing of a couple buttons, which again doesn’t qualify for language. Finally, it also relies extensively on the owners interpretations.
All the recorded interactions span the course of a couple “sentences”. I didn’t see any “discussion” longer than that, but feel free to link a more impressive video as I didn’t watch them all.
You say you’re aware of comparative cognition, so you should have heard about Morgan’s Canon.
All of what I’ve seen in the few videos I watched can be very well explained using a mix of:
the dogs are heavily trained to produce some basic sentences composed of few words that give the illusion of grammar
the rest of the time dogs are able to map stimuli to some single buttons
dogs responds to physical and speech cues from their owner about which button to press (they are heavily encouraged to press some buttons to please their owner and get a reward)
heavy selection biais in the choice of videos
Given the extraordinary amount of efforts that went into training the animals in the videos, the results seem to be in accordance with what we already knew about cognition in dog.
This is a cool hobby for people who love their dogs and want to spend a lot of time training them. Not a groundbreaking discovery.
In the end, I think you and many other people here are being fooled by:
The fact that you like dogs as animal companions (and find cognition in non-human animal amazing in general, which I understand)
The fact that they’re using speakers with pre-recorded speech, which gives you the illusion of language
I agree I should’ve summarized the study methodology in the article. For some reason I expected people to click the links and actually read and watch everything (this is not a knock on anyone, one shouldn’t expect that when writing articles).
There is a lot of evidence, it’s just weak and easy to misinterpret, and it’s in the form of youtube vids, which goes against aesthetic sensibilities of what “evidence” looks like. If you want to have a holistic picture, you’ll have to actually watch a lot of them, I’m sorry.
I think it’s quite obvious that the evidence here has a rather different shape from 19th-century medium reports or grainy VHS tapes with a blob that is claimed to be the Loch-Ness monster.
Being able to tell which “messing around” is likely to be fruitful is a meta-rational skill, but it can be done. Somewhat. To me this has a “shape” of something that could be fruitful, but I can’t transfer the pattern matching inside my brain to yours.
Vids being done in good faith doesn’t preclude clever hans or overinterpretation. It precludes the vids being fake or staged.
I and others addressed multiple times the dangers of seeing phantoms in noise and operant conditioning. I don’t see anyone here who doesn’t acknowledge that. Classic clever hans is unlikely when the owner doesn’t know the right answer or the pet is supposed to make a decision, or alert the owner to something they’re unaware of.
A girl has a cat and trained it to respond “yes food” to “food now hm?”. Cool, that’s just conditioning. But then the cat refuses food repeatedly despite getting railroaded. If it was conditioned to press “yes” after hearing “food”, without understanding what “yes” means, why did this happen?
The danger IMO isn’t clever hans as much as misinterpreting and anthropomorphizing button “speech”. Which counter-intuitively may be an important part of language acquisition (in humans, at least): Kaj_Sotala wrote such an interesting comment, sadly few people read it. I’ll summarize the idea: the first time a toddler raises his arms, it’s random, but mom misrepresents and thinks he wants to be held and so holds it. The toddler learns the association, and the next time he holds his arms up, it’s not random, now it’s a deliberate signal.
“looks like language” != “language”. Personally I don’t care about philosophical arguments about the exact border between non-language communication and “true language”. It’s enough for me to see some elements of human language use to make this interesting, even if it doesn’t check every box.
The pets are trained by reinforcement learning by design. Just saying “it’s all reinforcement learning” isn’t saying anything, the question is what exactly you reinforce, and if you manage to reinforce not just simple associations like “food” or “toy”, but also states of affect and more abstract concepts.
Don’t overuse anthropomorphizing. Claiming the dog pressing “mad” is feeling a human-like emotion and is going to hold a grudge, instead of just feeling negative affect is anthropomorphizing. Claiming that dogs can feel fear, excitement or positive/negative affect is not.
Claiming people here are “fooled” is a bit derogatory to others, especially with the reasons you gave for that.
I think both of us made our arguments clear, so instead of answering point by point, let me give a quick holistic response that should summarize what I think, and provide a general interesting point of view on animal cognition.
(Maybe you know about the following, but I think it is interesting enough by itself to be presented here to other people)
Corvidae are very intelligent birds. There’s ton of evidence of that. You can read studies that test how they can solve problems, you can watch tons of youtube videos showing them interact with their settings and with other animals. These videos are all made in good faith, showing birds evolving in ecological or lab settings, and demonstrating their intelligence.
As you put it, you can build an “holistic picture” of them as very strong problem solvers.
Then comes this observation. You see crows dropping nuts on the road. Cars go over the nuts, crushing them. The crows delight themselves with the opened nuts.
What do you conclude? That the crows are using the passage of cars as a way to break the nuts open? Considering the abilities demonstrated by these birds, it seems like the logical hypothesis to me.
And so this was that a lot of people though back then (Maple 1974, in Cristol et al. 1997). Then people put this assertion to test (Cristol et al. 1997).
This was not what they observed. Despite the apparent simplicity of this hypothesis, crows do not use automobiles as nut-crackers. (If I remember right, the nut-dropping behavior is just standard crow behavior, I’m not even sure they took advantage of the concrete surface).
When dealing with animal cognition, you have to be extra-careful. You have to clearly define the abilities you want to talk about. And you have to put them to test rigorously, by assuming the “lowest” (whatever that mean) cognitive faculties. I don’t think no amount of weak evidence can go over that, especially since there seems to be so much emotional charge involved.
EDIT: There’s just one thing. You and some people here seem to think there are going to be some consequences to what is being discussed. Please feel free to post your predictions about what will be the outcomes. I predict FluentPet is at best going to become a niche hobby down the road, with less than 1% of dog owners having trained their pet in 10 years.
I think we’re mostly in agreement, and I’m not disputing that it pays to be careful when it comes to animal cognition. I’d say again that I think it’s a meta-rational skill to see the patterns of what is likely to work and what isn’t, and this kind of stuff is near-impossible to communicate well.
I’ve read about the car-nutracker thing somewhere, but without the null result from research. If you had asked me to bet I’d say it would be unlikely to work. But it’s illustrative that we both still agree that corvids are smart and there’s a ton of evidence for it. We just don’t know the exact ways and forms, and that’s how I feel about the dog thing. There’s something there but we need to actually study it to know the exact shape and form.
I don’t think it will be niche because it’s already not niche, considering the massive viewership. But your 1% figure sounds about right as a higher bound, given the sheer number of dog owners, the amount of work required and people’s low desire to train their pets. A cursory google search says 4% of US dog owners take a training class, so serious button use will have to be a fraction of that.
Being interested in the lethality of cigarettes or the likelyhood of climate change would also deal in being interedsted in issues where high-scrutinity or high social status stances are not available.
I do think that people have an easier time reading a bit too much into it because the buttons are so legible for humans.
The buttons were developed for communication needds for deaf people. Would not pressing buttons in that cotext qualify as peech? What is the relevant difference to make that not apply there?
I am wondering whether this is a too short conversation. This would probably be of good length. To me it feels there is a discernible difference in the level of vividity that the dog follows on the stories. Also On taht linked place the dog is “confused” by a new word which to me reads as a behaviour about actively trying to keep on board with the story and adaptation to expand vocabulary by talking (if not by definition which the human tries to hand over).
To my underdstanding the core vocabulary needs to be bootstrapped by reinforcdement anyway so that doesn’t make it a disqualifying attribute. YOu can’t learn chinese with only the help of a dictionary in chinese. But until the dogs have a primary language they can not keep developing their language skills by simply talking, it needs to link to their “actual” life.
The interesting thing about K’eyush being commanded around is that it is more like a negotiation. For a command the dog can react by complying, saying “no” or saying “why”. And when they say “why” then giving an explanation can give compliance without repeating the command (but then the dog can also think the reasoning is a rubbish one): I do wonder on what basis judging whether other humans are talking a language the observer doesn’t understand vs speaking gibberish. And when tourists are aboard don’t they use “bag-of-word” kind of communication a lot? But also doesn’t that actually serve for the genuine thing?