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.
I would never venture to guess what goes on in the mind of another non-human creature. I can’t agree
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
