Where is Tank Man now? I bet he’s a celebrated civil rights icon who freely walks the streets, right? I did see some reporting suggesting he was executed by firing squad but that can’t be right.

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.

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.

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.

That’s insane. And it seems perhaps like an ugly case of integration gone wrong. Are you able to Use the website and add a bookmark to the website onto your phone’s home screen or something?

That might bypass any app-based logins.

Apparently it’s feeling the Lemmy hug of death: https://archive.is/Z9Udy

It also took me a second but I got there

That is the only reason here.

That’s not a bad thing though. It means their profitability is aligned with preferences of their customers rather than a kind of “managed dissatisfaction” business model.