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.
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.