I went through my bookmarks and found an old hacker news discussion thread where people are going in circles with some quite sincerely insisting that crows are more intelligent or every bit as intelligent as humans and that it’s a kind of specieism and arrogance to suggest humans are more intelligent.
I felt like I was losing my mind reading that thread, which I think is why I bookmarked it.
I get appreciating the remarkable intelligence of animals and understanding their capabilities and the application of different forms of intelligence in different contexts. And the importance of having humility when it comes to understanding human intelligence and how a lot of our productive capacity comes from standing on the shoulder of giants. But take all of those caveats and add them all together and none of them I think at the end of the day amount to the idea that we should be uncertain about whether humans are more intelligent than crows.
I think there’s a trap here of vortex of excessive humility that seems like a virtuous principle, but ends up missing the forest for the trees and putting people in the preposterous position of insisting that there’s nothing special about humans building jumbo jets or being able to run hospitals compared to crows who apparently in the right circumstances could if they wanted to.
So I’m not crazy, right? Can reasonable people agree that humans are more intelligent than crows? And if that question sounds like a crazy question to ask in the first place, I’m glad you agree. But check out the Hacker News thread and try not to lose your mind.
Some Humans are more intelligent as Crows, without a doubt.
Can reasonable people agree that humans are more intelligent than crows?
Generally. Conditionally.
There are a rare few people who are, and I mean this without exaggeration or irony, not smarter than a typical crow.
But if you want a semi-ironic response anyway:
Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open—you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it’s actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it too complex and people can’t get them open to put away their garbage in the first place. Said one park ranger, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
I like that quote, but it fails to take into account the incentives for each group. The bears wants free and easy accessible foods, which means they will spend a great deal of effort to succeed. The humans are weighing “give a shit about environment” Vs “I don’t care enough to spend two seconds here”
Place a crisp 100 dollar bill inside the trash can and you would have a dramatically different outcome…
A great way of re-framing it. A lot of how we tease out whatever intelligence an animal has is with some incentive. And sometimes we’re comparing apples and oranges if we’re making a comparison where one side has more of an incentive.
The dramatic part of the outcome would be many stupid humans stuck in garbage cans.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“They were too stupid to have invented guns?”
Well then, why hadn’t they?
Because… some cultures… find… different things important… like basket-weaving or crafts…
I would however argue that the average crow is smarter than the average hacker news commenter.
I think I would agree with this.
I think it’s like with bears, where parks have the issue of designing a trashcan that is easy for humans to open but hard for bears to open - there’s a significant overlap between the dumbest humans and the smartest bears. I’d argue it’s the same with crows.
I agree with this! Maybe US citizens should set a fox as their president! It would be more wisely ruled then.
Don’t mistake inability with lack of intelligence.
Crows haven’t had the need to evolve the same way we did. They can fly and thus don’t need jumbojets and such.
There’s plenty of animals that show signs of extremely high intelligence. But if you’re measuring an animals intelligence by it’s ability to build a functional nuclear reactor, it will fail miserably. As would most humans for that matter.
Which is why we measure intelligence with problem solving skills. And Crows have shown themselves remarkable at problem solving.
Like utilizing waterdisplacement to reach water, Cars to crack nuts and even basic bartering skills to trade trinkets for food with other species (like humans).
Crows, in general, are very smart. Not all humans are.
Don’t mistake inability with lack of intelligence.
Do you think that that’s what’s going on when someone says that humans are more intelligent than crows?
This is what’s so puzzling to me. I could spend paragraph after paragraph saying, crows have adapted to a specific niche, that they demonstrate their intelligence in unique ways. That human problem solving has benefited from a specific evolutionary history that’s involved fine motor manipulation and vocalization and social hierarchies and intergenerational sharing of knowledge. I could say things about how the development of specific forms of intelligence is in response to evolutionary pressures rather than the specific intentional choice; that the intelligence we see is intelligence as applied to specific domains. I can say that the apex of complex demonstrations of human intelligence, whether it’s via the coordination and scientific understanding and planning necessary for great feats of engineering, the depth of social and emotional sensitivity demonstrated by the greatest of human poets or social and political thinkers, etc etc are not things that should be credited to your average Joe. I can talk in romanticized wonder about the beauty of the animal world.
I can wade into that process of making caveats and appreciations and so on and still come out the other side not having lost sight of the fact that humans are indeed more intelligent than crows.
But some people wade into that same vortex of humility, and apparently become hypnotized and never recover. I almost want to call it the Crow Quicksand.
This is what I mean about that seductive vortex of intellectual humility causing us to lose sight of the big picture.
How much of that do you think is inherent intelligence and how much is nurture?
We spend years helping and teaching our offspring the most basic of functions and how to communicate. We’ve taught other species very basic communication skills as well, like Coco the gorilla. Hell, my own dog knew how to tell me when he had to pee. And that’s nurture, but it does speak to a certain potential.
I’m no expert on this subject. But I’m not closed off to the possibility that other species might be inherently more intelligent than us. As intelligence is mostly measured in ones ability to learn through observation and trial and error. And crows happen to display quite an aptitude for this that I don’t know if we can even call it niche.
How much of that do you think is inherent intelligence and how much is nurture?
We spend years helping and teaching our offspring the most basic of functions and how to communicate. We’ve taught other species very basic communication skills as well, like Coco the gorilla. Hell, my own dog knew how to tell me when he had to pee. And that’s nurture, but it does speak to a certain potential.
Breaking this off for a separate comment. I want to reply on two levels. First and most importantly, I think there’s probably an integral relation between the two (the capability of responding to training and socialization is an aspect of intelligence, and being able to learn is an important part of being intelligent and may very well be something we are born with).
So I wouldn’t want to tie the whole question of intelligence to the idea that we’re supposed to adjust for X amount of nature and Y amount of nurture, and then look at animals in light of those adjustments, scaling down how much we credit humans because we benefit from social knowledge. Our capability of growing our intelligence through training and socialization is a reflection of our knowledge and we get full credit for that. Crows have been around for between 17 to 30 million years(!!) enough time for the fruits of socialization and training to materialize, if the ground were fertile for it. Apes are 25 million years, possums curiously are 65 million years, bears 20 million years. Humans depending on where you start, have been here for 300,000 years, or maybe 2 million if you want to go back to homo erectus, yet we leapfrogged everybody.
So that’s the first level. But the second level is just a direct answer: humans go through a practically supernatural level of language explosion between ages 2 and 3, and start retaining new words at nearly impossible speeds, something like 20, 30 new words a day at its peak. A 3-year-old can hear a new verb in one sentence and apply it correctly in another, something that stumps even the most language-trained non-human animals. Apes in controlled conditions can take months to learn, and even then through rote repetition.
I think it’s just getting too lost in the weeds to look at a dog needing to go outside and pee, and set that side by side with linguistic capability that gave rise to human civilization like an ounce of one is equivalent to an ounce of the other. And here’s the thing: I do think it’s impressive, dogs especially are social creatures, apes learn sign language is special. And I don’t think anyone is losing sight of that when they say humans, at the end of the day, still do it better.
How much of that do you think is inherent intelligence and how much is nurture?
I want to get there, but I want to stick with my question for a second. Do you think “humans are smarter than crows” necessarily involves conflations around ability and intelligence? Because I don’t think that’s the case at all.
I think we can be respectful of these nuances about how we understand intelligence and still not treat them like they imply superior intelligence to humans.
If I say “humans are more intelligent than crows” and your impulse is to respond by emphasizing the dynamic nature of animal intelligence as if that’s not already accounted for, that’s what I mean by Crow Quicksand.
I’d be assuming either way.
The question is interesting, but I can’t claim to have an educated opinion on the matter. Barely an informed one, really.
If we took the baseline human and and baseline crow, disregarding anomalous individuals deemed hyper intelligent and so on. I’d venture we’re more on par than we realize. But I’d probably also lean towards humans having a slight edge. Though I have little to base it on other than us already being fairly anomalous simians.
If the anomalous outliers of human intelligence are inventing calculus or formulating germ theory, what are the equivalently anomalous crows?
There are some things that crows can do that we can’t that require brainpower. They’re not included in our definition of intelligence, but that’s only because we base that off of what we are capable of.
When we talk about athleticism, we rarely talk about neck rotation, but if we wanted an unbiased comparison with an owl, we’d probably have to start.
Similarly, we’d likely need to start assessing the ability to differentiate, recognize, and remember individuals of different species based on seeing their faces once, if we wanted to be at all fair to crows. They can do that to us pretty consistently, and we are capable of very little in that area. I’ve spent many hours looking at my beloved cat, but if another black, green eyed cat of the same size and with the same level of snout snuck in through my window, I’d need to count toes or rely on sound/behavior cues to tell them apart (though I feel weirdly guilty admitting that).
I think we’re probably smarter than crows are (and definitely, if we use the current definition of “smart”), but I also think they’re probably better suited to the core skill that drives our intelligence, pattern recognition. I suspect that they’d also be better than llms are now, if we could figure out a proper interface for them, but I don’t think they’d enjoy that very much.
I don’t have any credentials that make this an informed opinion.
With that disclaimer, have you ever trained dogs?
You hear things being said like a dog is as smart as a toddler, and it’s supposed to indicate that the dog is really smart.
Have you ever trained toddlers? They aren’t as smart as most dogs.
But smart how? Problem solving? Language acquisition? Logic?
Intelligence isn’t one thing. It’s a complex of systems that allow an entity to navigate and hopefully thrive in a given environment. Part of that isn’t even conscious. It comes from how our brains deal with memory, and there’s only so much you can do about it.
In any real sense that matters, no; crows aren’t are smart as humans. But it’s only a matter of degrees of complexity from the various articles and documentaries about the little buggers. They seem to think in similar ways, just not with the same capacity in any given way. Like, they seem to understand the basics of comparison of numbers, but they don’t do math.
But they do learn new things amazingly fast. Faster than some humans I’ve known. A lot actually. That’s one part of intelligence. A big part.
I genuinely believe that if environmental conditions ever favored them developing a similar kind of intelligence as we have, they wouldn’t take that many millennia to be taking on basic algebra. They’re one of the animals that seem like a candidate to do what humans have done, evolving brain power to be maximized as a survival trait. A lot of what humans are, physically, is in support of the kind of thinking we can do.
Like I said, I don’t have a background that qualifies me to speak with authority about this kind of thing. But I do have the type of intelligence that could. Crows don’t, so I’ll take that as a win ;)
If one species is constantly and for the most part reliably able to trick the other species, then it’s more intelligent than the one getting tricked.
Now Crows and Humans trick each other all the time, but (for now) humans come out (mostly) on top.
No idea about the raw idealized intelligence. However one of the biggest advantages humans have as far as societal living and advancement is language, both spoken AND written. Spoken languages are fairly niche amongst species of the world though there is evidence of many mammalian species that have at least the basics of it.
However written language is unique to humans. That alone regardless of any other measurable aspect of “intelligence,” has placed human society firmly at the top of the earthly animal kingdom.
It really depends on how you judge being smart. Imagine if you have wings instead of arms and hands, and a beak instead of a mouth. What would you be able to achieve as an organic entity? I’m not sure there’s an easy answer on this. I think some animals are smarter than humans, but they just have different bodies, so that’s not a fair comparaison to judge on what the human specy has achieved as a whole.
No fingers to count on = better at subitizing
This was a joke comment, but getting that link sent me down a rabbit hole and now I feel like I did the first time I took shrooms (like I’m so ignorant and helpless that my continued existence is an indication that the universe has some goodwill for me, because I couldn’t have survived on my own). Plants can maybe do division??? Absolutely wild. I know, technically any human who can run to catch a ball can do calculus, but it feels different when plants do it.
That’s a philosophical question at the heart: how can you estimate anything like intelligence with neither collaboration nor a common understanding of intelligence?
That’s the gust of it from my understanding: cows show patterns that we interpret as intelligence on w human level. Everything after that is by its nature is human centric.
Personally I’m with you but it’s impossible to disprove the existence of intelligence on any other scale they doesn’t include human motivation. (I.e. the cow has s higher intelligence than any human but we don’t know any way to force or motivate it to show it in a way that we could understand.)
It’s easier to grasp as a sci-fi concept for me: what happens if aliens come to earth but we cannot figure out their behavior, motivation, tech or thought. And they don’t (want to) manage to close the gap. How could we assess intelligence beyond the tech we see? Perhaps they just found it after all.
I’m not sure I agree that we have no such thing as a common understanding of intelligence nor that we should view the kind of intelligence we’re familiar with in humans as distinctly belonging to humans, such that it’s just a matter of not being able to decode or decipher other forms of intelligence.
I also think it can be pretty clear when we can see demonstrations of, say, deployed sophistication in engineering capacity, such as what people seem to think they’re observing with extreme capabilities of alien spacecrafts executing impossible right angle turns or other such things. (whether those videos are true or not). And not everything is like that surely, but clearly we can imagine what it’s like to conceive of intelligences better or worse than our own, at least with specific enough examples targeted on just illustrating that particular point, which demonstrates an important principle that these things are discernible in at least some cases.
I do think it’s very true that we have to be careful in the assumptions we make about intelligence because the way an octopus is intelligence is indeed different from the way a predator in the savannah is different and similar.
But I think it’s getting a little too lost in the sauce to think that it means we can’t understand what it would be like for there to be a demonstration of distinctly advanced intelligences, and for that matter, the very project of appreciating animal intelligence absolutely culminates in the takeaway of appreciating the special and unique intelligence of certain animals like dolphins or crows, or elephants. The very process of being careful in assessing and understanding the intelligence of other creatures sometimes absolutely does involve us selecting out ones that seem to stand above and beyond.
However much is true of the differences of intelligence to domain specificity, the cumulative forms of intelligence and the depth of it that humans are capable of demonstrating eclipses such questions.
Oh and I think that’s the root cause for your post: there can not be a common agreement of those positions because they are axiomatic, as in fundamental definitions.
If you define intelligence one way it’s very clear that humans have more of it. if you use an (aggressive, in my opinion) species agnostic definition even tied to motivation it’s at least not that clear cut.
Personally I’m more with you but I find the thought experiment fascinating. To quote Douglas Adams:
“”“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”“”
Oh and I think that’s the root cause for your post: there can not be a common agreement of those positions because they are axiomatic, as in fundamental definitions.
I think if we are stuck that way, we would really be stuck. But I think we can appreciate intelligence as dynamic and not as a question that’s tied to axiomatic definitions. You see this in related fields, e.g. we don’t have a definition of consciousness, but research is about closing in on a definition, and we are able to add to our body of knowledge in meaningful ways. There’s fascinating new studies suggesting insect consciousness is plausible, for instance. Cancer is not one single thing, but there’s still cancer research, and so on. So we sometimes know based on representative instances, e.g. whatever it is, it’s like that.
It’s convenient to frame it merely as a matter of definition, because that means there’s no overarching truth, there’s just “by human standards, THIS is intelligent but by crow standards THIS is…” But unfortunately I think cross domain comparison, or clusters of related features (family resemblance) is real enough that there’s There there, more like cancer or consciousness than relative definitions.
I did refer to your original question on how there are people who disagree on the statement that humans are more intelligent: if you treat that as a question about which axiom is in effect instead of a change of arguments or makes more sense.
You’re reference to the consciousness discussion is an awesome one btw! I would describe “closing in on a definition” as “agreeing on a common axiom”.
But that’s not happening on a forum post where people off various backgrounds and believes fight (instead of argue).
To make it clear: I’m in agreement with you, I only tried to expand what you already started by my train of thought on why that thread you linked is the way it is :)
I would never venture to guess what goes on in the mind of another non-human creature. I can’t agree
I can pretty accurately guess what going on in the mind of my dog some of the time.
