Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions and think critically. But we can’t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display intelligent behavior, birds have been shown time and again to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan for the future, crows count and use tools, cockatoos open and pillage booby-trapped garbage cans, and chickadees keep track of tens of thousands of seeds cached across a landscape. Notably, birds achieve such feats with brains that look completely different from ours: They’re smaller and lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence.
“at least twice” says the jokers who have picked an arbitrary human concept of “intelligence” to try to measure.
That’s not science because they don’t have any reasonable or reliable definition of the constraints of what they’re claiming to measure (“intelligence”).
It’s intellectual supremacist bullshit. They always shift the goal posts away from the term intelligence - for the same reason IQ tests measure a relativistic “quotient” of score (relative to others tested) rather than being able to measure anything going by “intelligence”.
“Intelligence” is essentially just a brand they slap on research because they all think they’ve got it in spades.
That is a really dumb response to an article whose whole point was to argue that we have been thinking too narrowly about intelligence.
Whatever you want to call the set of traits that makes humans so good at manipulating the world, surely that set is still an interesting and worthwhile thing to study? It does frame every experience any of us ever has, after all. It seems notable to me that the birds that are amongst our closest peers in that specific set of traits seem to have gotten there by a completely separate path. I’d like to understand how we wound up thinking the way we do, anyway.
Heh. You both make perfect sense. I agree with both of your somewhat opposing viewpoints.
I am fine with someone arguing that maybe the traits we consider to be a sign of intelligence are defined too narrowly–though in this case it is a really weird take because the article authors would clearly completely agree with this sentiment! I am not so fine with them calling the people they disagree with things like “intellectual supremacists”.
Take it easy. It’s the internet. Hyperbole is a thing.
And what’s the issue with that term? Really. As you say, the article does in fact support this very viewpoint. “Intelligence doesn’t come with an instruction manual. It is hard to define, there are no ideal steps toward it, and it doesn’t have an optimal design”.
That entire comment is specifically being derisive of the article authors, so it is calling them “intellectual supremacists”, rather than agreeing with them.
And that’s ok …
Not really; being as derisive of the authors as that comment was contributed absolutely nothing positive to the conversation.
You’re making Lemmy a great place to be.