I think you hit the nail on the head here. When I was writing the article I definitely had someone with a high prior in mind, to the point where I expected people to say “so what, why wouldn’t dogs do that if you trained them”.
Sometimes people seem to put dogs closer to reflexive automatons like insects than to fellow mammals. My prior is the base affects that we feel aren’t fundamentally different between us and dogs (and most higher mammals). I’m talking about stuff like fear, excitement, generalized negative or positive affect, tiredness, sexual arousal. Even something like craving a specific food, I don’t see why it should be unique to us, given that dogs are often picky eaters and have favorite foods.
People with strong priors against dog intelligence seem to ascribe everything to anthropomorphism, and there’s often an undertone of “these people are too soft and weak, they call themselves ridiculous things like ‘dog parents’, they’ll project human baby characteristics onto a Furby if you gave them the chance”. FWIW I don’t have a dog and don’t plan to, and in my experience most dogs are fairly dumb. But to me they’re clearly a bit more than simple automatons blindly reacting to stimuli.
My priors include the idea that both animal intelligence is not that different from humans and also that humans tend to overly anthropomorphize animal cognition. The biggest misunderstandings of animal cognition are much like misunderstandings humans have of foreign cultures, often involving forms of mind projection fallacies where we assume other’s values, motivations, priorities, and perceptions are more similar (or more different) than is justified.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. When I was writing the article I definitely had someone with a high prior in mind, to the point where I expected people to say “so what, why wouldn’t dogs do that if you trained them”.
Sometimes people seem to put dogs closer to reflexive automatons like insects than to fellow mammals. My prior is the base affects that we feel aren’t fundamentally different between us and dogs (and most higher mammals). I’m talking about stuff like fear, excitement, generalized negative or positive affect, tiredness, sexual arousal. Even something like craving a specific food, I don’t see why it should be unique to us, given that dogs are often picky eaters and have favorite foods.
People with strong priors against dog intelligence seem to ascribe everything to anthropomorphism, and there’s often an undertone of “these people are too soft and weak, they call themselves ridiculous things like ‘dog parents’, they’ll project human baby characteristics onto a Furby if you gave them the chance”. FWIW I don’t have a dog and don’t plan to, and in my experience most dogs are fairly dumb. But to me they’re clearly a bit more than simple automatons blindly reacting to stimuli.
My priors include the idea that both animal intelligence is not that different from humans and also that humans tend to overly anthropomorphize animal cognition. The biggest misunderstandings of animal cognition are much like misunderstandings humans have of foreign cultures, often involving forms of mind projection fallacies where we assume other’s values, motivations, priorities, and perceptions are more similar (or more different) than is justified.