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Chimpanzees Beat out Children in Reasoning Test
caffeinemessiah writes "The New York Times has a story on how chimpanzees seem to exhibit a better understanding of cause and effect than human children. While training chimps to perform a routine task with redundant steps, the chimps were able to figure out and eliminate the redundant steps, while the human children routinely performed them despite their evident uselessness. It says something about the way we learn compared to chimps and should be interesting to cognitive scientists and those interested in computational learning theory, at the least."
Chimps will always be chimps.
Lucky bastards.
there's more than one way to do me.
FP?
The NYT hates Slashdot, so click the link, a few times, but gimme a good one with no stoopud signup teaser!
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
oh, and First Post(though i've probably failed it, i have Karma to burn so do whatever to me)
/. is overrun by bed-wetting elitist nerds
let it be known, for anything other than servers, a *nix OS sucks
I'd like to see another experiment done. Suppose, hypothetically, that a chimp showed a human child how to solve a puzzle, inserting unnecessary steps. Would the human skip steps more often if taught by a chimp than by another human? If so, it would show that what matters is if the species of the teacher and student are the same, not the what species the student belongs to.
Simon's Rock College
the people i tend to find most intelligent when i am trying to teach them something are those who notice all the little details of how i do whatever i'm doing...of course, those intelligent people also generally figure out the reason behind the different steps i take to a solution...but the first step is noticing. i'd speculate that the chimps don't even notice all those extra steps they're being shown....
Human babies have a prolonged childhood. Whereas a chimpanzee may be considered an adult by age three, humans may not even reach (emotional) adulthood until well into their 30s. So it seems a little disingenuous to compare chimpanzees to human babies when the rates of growth and maturity are so different.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
I'm sure doesn't compile.
While training chimps to perform a routine task with redundant steps, the chimps were able to figure out and eliminate the redundant steps, while the human children routinely performed them despite their evident uselessness
:-)
Ever work for the Military? As much as I respect those serving you have to wonder about some of the regs they have to live by. If you've worked as a contractor (or served) then you know what I mean
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
The last time I was in Wal*Mart these 4 kids were going completely apeshit knocking things over, causing other shoppers problems, making a ton of noise... and their mother kept trying to reason with them and kept telling them what was going to happen if they didn't behave.
NOW... if those lil fuckers had been mine, I would have damn well made sure they understood cause and effect. See, this is what we get when our schools aren't allowed to whoop ass anymore. I'm certain these mongrels would have scored higher than some chimp.
Fully developed chimps beat underdeveloped humans at reasoning?
I'm shocked. Shocked!
It's amazing that this conclusion required ANY sort of study to arrive at. All one need do is to look at how HUMANS are eradicating the rain forests, pouring all kinds of gasses into the atmosphere, and extinctifying untold number of species of plants and animals every year...
Then look at what the Chimps do...or don't do to their environment.
Seems like they have a pretty fucking good idea of cause and effect to me. They want to live, so they co-exist with their environment and don't shit where they eat... Us on the other hand... well let's just say that people are still somewhat confused about hurricanes and melting ice caps, etc...
Perhaps the children thought they could not deviate from the pattern and become more efficient; while chimps may not have had that thought.
Somewhat of a jump; with respect to the conclusion.
Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist. I could be very wrong.
Are the chimps the same age as the children? Would adult humans copy the same extra steps that the kids would? Do adult chimps do different steps then younger chimps?
Perhaps this is more of a survival trait in humans than a superiority in chimps. Growing up, there were a lot of things I needed to know HOW to do which were too complex for me to understand WHY at the time. Too, I emulate my parents' culture, often without a conscious reason, perhaps because their culture has allowed them to succeed.
When my windows box crashes, I reboot it, without knowing why. I could probably eliminate some steps between boot, crash, and reboot too...
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Speaking as an American, I think you're an asshole.
Maybe the children were from Kansas. The rules of science are null and void in Kansas.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
since we teach kids process rather than critical thinking. If you want to teach your 2-year-old to tie his shoes, to you teach a series of steps to be followed, rather than an understanding of what qualities a knot must have to hold. I suppose this may be because kids can't handle critical thinking, but this test can't prove it.
"The New York Times has a story on how chimpanzees seem to exhibit a better understanding of cause and effect than human children."
[Human]
Cause: Illegally downloading content.
Effect: Effect? What effect? I never would have bought it anyway.
[Chimpanzee]
Cause: Illegally downloading content.
Effect: I better stop doing this. It might come back and hurt me later.
Were these those little fat kids you see with Wrestlemania t-shirts and sporting buzzcuts (sometimes with corresponding mullets) and big goofy beaver teeth who pick their nose and giggle at the boogers, but their Southern accents are heard even in said laughter?
They're called Americans. Go to any mall and you see tons of them.
I've taught middle school science for seven years now, I'm not surprised in the least by these findings... Students as a whole do not know how to think logically, and schools as a whole aren't doing a good job of teaching them (not that they'd pay attention anyway)...
RW
Maybe the children were from Kansas. The rules of science are null and void in Kansas.
;)
Maybe the "chimps" were in fact disenfranchised Kansans?
I don't think this study shows learning processes as much as the poster says it does.
I think the real key here is communication and culture. The Chimps were 'shown' how to open the box to retrieve the food. The children were also 'shown', and told that they could do whatever they thought neccicary to retreive it.
I would think that upbringing and communication would have a big impact on what the kids will do. Lots of times, when an 'adult' shows a child how to do something, they will take that as the 'correct' way to do it, and not deviate from that - because if there was another way to do it, why would the 'adult' show them incorrectly? Kids that have been taught or had the experiance to question authority would be more likely IMO to skip unneeded steps.
However, a chimp most likely does not have this 'follow what the adult says' mentality, so it seems obvious that they would do whatever is the easiest to get the desired result.
Stupid comment engine...I meant "I'm sure " without the spaces in the tags doesn't compile.
People are stuoid. Chimps are probably also smarter than adults. I for one welcome our new simian overlords - they couldn't possibly do a worse job than any government.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
It would be interesting to know how much experience the children in this study had had with some form of negative reinforcement for not following a parent/teacher/etc.'s given method exactly.
I believe this study.
Why didn't they compare cats and humans? At 10 weeks kittens can already jump up on tables and wreck things - the kid is just slobbering on the floor. Does this teach us interesting things about how things learn?
No, it teaches us that there are some real morons at the university level wasting money that could be going to a WORTHY project.
This reminds me of the study a few years back when the attempted to discover why hot pizza burns the roof of your mouth.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
How old were the chimpances in comparison with the kids?
and no, I am not registering...
errera hunamum ets
That the saying a trained chimp could do this job as reffering to a boring assembly line job is in fact not true. While a monkey/ape could be trained to do simple assembly work it could not do it for the 8 hour shifts that humans can without going insane.
Sure it is nice if you can see the redundancy in your actions but it doesn't seem to allow chimps to keep growing. Childeren may be more limited then chimps but something must work better since adults are clearly superior to chimps. Unless of course you go for the hitchhiker guide explanation of humans experimenting on chimps.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... how to eliminate reduncancy.
While training chimps to perform a routine task with redundant steps, the chimps were able to figure out and eliminate the redundant steps, while the human children routinely performed them despite their evident uselessness.
If you and 999,999 of your smelly coworkers were in the same room with the incessant chatter of keystrokes, and the occassional poo gob flying through your personal space, you'd figure out that "To be, or not to be" doesn't need to be typed over and over.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
But isn't it more efficient to write "a lot" without the space?
Similarly, phonetic spelling is more efficient, once u r used 2 reading it that way.
OMG, humans are regressing into chimps!
Could this be a certain amount of social conditioning on the matter. I had heard stories on how North-American children will form into lines naturally because they learned to do so in school, while some countries on the African continent, this is a rare occurrence. In many ways following direction is doing what is expected from a child when given direction from an adult?
I've seen fairly irrelevant procedures in many tasks that exist for safety reasons. Weapons handling in the military is certainly an example of this and when it comes to such matters its not simple imitation. These involve a LOT of practice to get it just right and even then you have to keep it up to really maintain efficient drill on a weapon.
These tasks were simpler by far, however many would accept that the person showing the step is doing so for a reason. Trust is probably something that affects how we learn as well?
The study says they're from a Scottish nursury school.
that it's cruel to experiment on monkeys. You wouldn't put a child in a cage and perform medical experiments, right? Yeah, I know it's not a perfect analogy, but I'm not sure in who's favor.
Its has to do with sociopsychology- not learning.
Children are told to do things all the time- they are punished if they don't do them exactly as asked. Kids are encouraged to conform and do what they are asked.
It has very little to do with learning or the ability to think abstractly and more with whether we are discouraged from thinking abstractly by our society. If we all thought for ourselves in the US we would be in much better shape. However a good portion of people let the church do their thinking.
I don't know about PHP, but imitating code including unnecessary steps works great in Python. Whenever I want to do something in Python, I start by copying some chenks of vaguely related Python code, and then modify them. I bet those chimps would start with an empty Emacs buffer and try to just write a program from scratch, and they'd have to keep looking up syntax and library calls in the manual all the time.
I hear that they are also superior at flinging shit
brothel - what?
the fucking captcha word was "brothel"!
I'd guess (haven't read the article - doh) that is socialization and authoritarian behavior not problem solving - the human is exhibiting socialization behavior and listening to authority - I was told to do it this way, so I'll do it how I was told.
LetterRip
Children are often taught to do useless things by adults and punished for not doing them just as they are told. Chimps, on the other hand, are not taught like this. Is it much of a surprise that a child, trained from birth to do what you tell it, will do what you tell it?
I find that this is further proof that man did not evolve from any species of ape or monkey. We deevolved.
... chimp labor is where it's at!
Efficient, and they work for peanuts, bannanas, apples, etc...
"It says something about the way we learn compared to chimps and should be interesting to cognitive scientists and those interested in computational learning theory, at the least."
This seems to me to be the important point, rather than the besting of human children that is currently the focus of comments. Do we learn by doing less efficiently than they do? Do they learn by following examples less efficiently than we do?
I appreciate the posting of this sort of article link - thinking is a science for all.
-- If an artist saw things as they truly are, they would cease to be an artist.
And why are animals used for this testing? Isn't a main justification that they are incapable of reasoning? Here's a link with info on the effort to keep primates out of labs.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Funny, that's how I write code.
Err ... Oh dear.
The children did the task exactly as it was described because the scientists were authority figures and their parents trained them that way. The chimps don't give a damn.
This view of authority is, however, a double-edged sword and could be dangerous.
Le français vous intéresse?
I'm way short of being an expert on the subject but I believe young humans only developed "concept of self" etc at around the 3 to 4yo mark. There's a lot that starts to click around this age.
I suspect that if it was chimps v's 5 year olds the results might have been a bit different.
Cheers
Stevo
Forget the truth. Science is fact.
I never know what scientific results to believe, so I tend to believe the ones that make sense. This theory of human learning makes a lot of sense. We tend to imitate each other even in bizarre behaviors. Remember Furbies? How 'bout our need for voting booths, because our votes may be biased by seeing someone else punch a card the same way? We often don't even think when we imitate something; people can go their whole lives without doing anything original. The human body has a lot of obsolete features, like appendixes. Evolution just doesn't keep up with culture, so though we can wish that people weren't a bunch of copycats, it's hard to expect humans to override a feature of their minds that was once very useful. Expecting originality is a relatively modern innovation. "the dictionary says heretic: a holder of unconventional beliefs. do you know anyone who is not a heretic? i don't." (Paraphrase Don Marquis, "Archy the Cockroach")
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...you teach creationism as science. You get a bunch of kids that think someone saying "let there be light" created the universe in 6 day. Cause and effect. Then you wonder why they can't tell that dropping the hammer on their foot doesn't make it rain marshmellows.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
...I read the article title as "Chimpanzees Beat Children in Reasoning Test".
I didn't know what sort of a reasoning test involved children and simians to engage in fisticuffs, but I was all for it.
hi mom!
Maybe children do this because they have been trained to be able to conform. Or perhaps humans are even biologically better at conforming to social standards. Could be because of better impulse control or something.
As much as I, an individualist, hate to admit it, sometimes conformity can make a group function more efficiently and can be useful trait.
So perhaps this behavior shows that humans are not dumber than but instead are more socially capable than chimps.
More than anything, I'd say that this shows how indoctrinated people are into following orders. When even a monkey knows that some of what it is told to do is absolutely pointless, and a human doesn't, I find that a little bit scary. Are we slowly losing our ability to think critically, is it being bred out of us, or are we just taught to ignore reason any obey?
I am scientifically inaccurate.
[Disclaimer: I have no credentials in behavioural psychology, aside from what I have learned by reading and by experience as an amateur trainer and caregiver for several dogs, including two German Shepherds.]
Practically from birth, humans are conditioned to imitate each other, so perhaps it's no surprise that the children absorbed and retained the "ritual" portions of the tasks. Psychologists call it operant conditioning: when you reward a certain kind of behaviour, it tends to occur more often; if you don't, then it tends to extinguish. I wonder if chimps are more goal-oriented because their sense of reward is more focused on the final result rather than following a number of ritualized steps, at least initially. In short, perhaps young children are more conditioned to imitate, as well as being more capable of doing so.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Seriously, _what_the_fuck_ is the deal with these grammar Nazi's. If someone can reasonably understand the basic point of what I am trying to say, I do not give a flying fuck if I violated every single one of your precious little English Grammar rules.
[quote]
There is no English word "alot". It's "a lot". Two words, 'a' and 'lot'.
Thanks,
Concerned English-Lover
[/quote]
No English Profs at Slashdot, indeed.
seems to me that this is less an insight into the limitations of critical thinking in human children as it is a refutation of what we've commonly thought about chimps. i'm not up on current chimp cog-sci, but since critical and creative thinking is always thought to be a hallmark of h. sapiens (even with reference to other direct ancestors of ours like h. neanderthalensis), it's pretty common to think of chimps as lacking in the creative problem solving department.
hell, the whole idea of humans as the "toolmaking ape" was based on just this sort of idea of what separates us from our living relatives--even though we've seen chimps in the wild using sticks or rocks as tools, the common explanation for that isn't spontaneous critical thinking or innovation, but a skill learned from parents (specifically the mother). so if this experiment does indicate that chimps are capable of at least minimally creative problem solving, this kind of forces us to redefine our notion of what makes us, as a species unique.
that said, i have my doubts as to what this experiment actually demonstrates as to chimp cognitive abilities. seems to me that even if they simplified the task mimed for them, they were still essentially learning by imitation. show me chimps spontaneously picking up a pencil to jimmy the box open, and that's a whole different story.
/. is what happens when geeks talk. get used to it.
Still not quite working.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
thats what we like to call a nerdcliff!
"Old man yells at systemd"
$ook = new Banana.GiveMeBanana();
my $stomach = _FULL_;
my $sound = loudContentedScreech();
throwFeces();
?>
I am scientifically inaccurate.
You mean to say... in Kansas chimps evolve from YOU?
Maybe baby chimps have more to gain, by impressing adult humans than baby humans do.
/me : i know ppl like that /CW : what, that do wasteful repatative things like read /. /me : no , short and hairy with long arms /CW : whack ..
The average smart guy: The procedure always works, why change it (if I don't understand it)? Let's leave the improvement/innovation to the "really smart" guys. The smart ass guy: I don't understand some steps at all, but I think they are stupid and I shall skip them.
oh, wait...whoops!
Humans are wired to follow the requirements set by the Authority. The Authority is assumed to have a reason for those steps, even if its not apparent.
The thing is, if the process was set up by an expert, the non-obvious steps often do have importance. The guy on the assembly line drills a hole where he's told because that's what he was told to do. The fact that the hole is later an anchoring point for a strut is Somebody Else's Problem.
You might say the repetition of the steps designated by Authority is the foundation of our industrial and technological society. It enables cooperative labor without the individuals having to first understand the entire big picture.
Put another way, it means a team of human beings is greater than the sum of its members. A team of chimps isn't.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Stupid engine again...I meant (open php) LOL WTF !!!!111 (close php) wouldn't compile.
Chimps don't write PHP code.
You're right. The code in Perl.
...and more to do with how we teach. As children, most of us are taught to do without questioning, and are often punished for doing things out of order or improvising.
Anyone else remember a schoolroom "exercise" in which you would only win if you read last instruction in a long list before starting? Kids who "fail" to read the rules through are instructed to stand up and embarass themselves. I doubt the chimp has ever had that sort of experience, but I personally took this "test" at least 4 times in primary school.
Think back and consider how many times you've been given an F for not following procedures. Remember how many times you've gotten a right answer but used the "wrong" method of reaching it? We teach our kids to follow directions because allowing them to build their own thought processes is too messy. But at least now we have some inkling of what mental blockage we're putting on the children this way.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
While you're at it:
"There is no English word "alot". ****Its**** "a lot" two words, 'a' and 'lot'."
You should have said "it's" not "its". As in "it is" not as in "belonging to".
When you plan to shoot down some one else's grammar, take a second to double check your own.
Hello anonymous coward. We now live in a modern and reasonable society where child abuse is generally frowned upon.
garble
Your point is? That's "it's" as in "it is". Me thinks you were trying to use "its" to indicate possession which would have no meaning. (and no, I did not make the grandparent post).
Not to say that social conformity is always a good thing, but is a significant reason why humans dominate the planet, for better or worse. And earlier posts noting that this study was done on (probably upper-middle-class) American children are defintely apt - the results probably would be quite different if the prize was food and the humans were malnourished third world children - i.e. people who have not benefited so much from the glories of civilization.
My chimp is smarter than your honor student.
Could just be the kids just did as told because humans in general (and especially children) follow orders unless they have a good reason not too. In fact, I bet that you would see the same results with adults if you didn't tell them that they could change the process.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The study says they're from a Scottish nursury school.
Ginger kids. Should've guessed...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Who the fuck gives a shit? STFU. Thanks, You're an Asshat. PS alot alot alot alot alot alot alot alot alot Bitch.
Seriously man, did Rasmus Lerdorf systematically kill off every one of your remaining family members, or something?
Seriously man. These are all CyricZ PHP trolls from THIS MONTH. I skipped a good 10 that were all on the "PHP5 Recipes" thread, for sanity's sake.
According to TFA, the childern were told they could remove the reward in any way they wanted.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Has it occurred to you that it's not the lack of vocal cords that prevents chimps from communicationg with us?
my password really is 'stinkypants'
I wonder if these scientists have ever heard of "play". Chimps probably dont wave magic wands or dress up either. Why not? Because these activities are higher, rather than lower, intelligent/emulative activities. I think that this study actually proves the opposite of what the scientists claim: you show a monkey food, and he ignores everything you do and goes straight for it. You put a pretty sticker in a box (something that a child has no hardwired biological need for), tap it, frob it, and leave the toy with a bunch of kids. Whats to motivate them to go straight for the sticker. Wow, now what. Its much funner to play "the box ritual", and the emulative behavior shows that the kids are MORE DEVELOPED!!!
:)
Maybe the article should be "Monkeys Smarter than Scientists"
It's a shame they don't have all their archives online; the only links I could find to Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid seem to be missing some funny pictures and captions.
I have not read the details of the study, but perhaps we are culturally conditioned to do as we are instructed and chimps aren't. See: Milgram
the 'preview' button is only a redundant step if you're not a chimp..
my password really is 'stinkypants'
If smarter, why didn't they skip steps with the black box? The logic is the same, "see process step A, B, C, results". Lazy chimps? Could be, it sees the reward and does not even think about the steps anymore "must have it!". I'd like to see this test done when a child shows another child the process, adults are authority figures as mentioned before. Many children may just repeat extra steps because that's the way it is done. These kinds of things help nothing and often lead to further confusion instead. (IMO)
These type of findings suggest to me, as a sociologist, the importance of socialization. The comments here suggesting that human children had more of tendency to obey authority and thus followed the steps more closely is a good sociological counterargument. It would be interesting to do the same tests cross-culturally. I bet you'd find differences, and you could test the authority hypothesis as well (eg: comparing authoritarian vs more relaxed cultures). More speculatively though, I think it would be reasonable to maintain the assumption that the basic learning processes in humans and chimps (and other animals for that matter) are basically the same, but in the human case, extensively modified by the fact that we are socialized (eg: taught specific ways of thinking and behaving). At a basic physiological level, our cognitive abilities are a result of our evolutionary endowment, but the course of their development is guided by socialization. Our culture emphasizes the individual(especially the biological individual) so much that we tend to look for genetic or evolutionary explanations for cognitive abilities such as reasoning. If more people took a sociological approach, maybe we would take our schools more seriouly (as a society) and have more people actually develop the abilities nature gave them.
Now ask a chimp to have a vocabulary of 10,000 words.
Maria Montessori's major insight was that there are "sensitive periods" for various developments -- an age to walk, an age for toilet independence, an age to talk, an age to learn practical life skills, an age to acquire knowledge, an age to self-consciously play a role in human society, and an age to develop a profession. If a person does not learn and develop a skill during the sensitive period, that person will struggle with that skill until death.
Three and four year olds aren't ready to reason. Teach them to read, to sew, and to cook instead.
Geez some people get a stick up their ass over these experiments. The whole point of the experiment wasn't to show that chimps are as smart as humans, but to prove some animals not a thick as we would like to think they are.
I don't see what the problem is, aside from some dogmatic religious mumbo-jumbo that makes people actually believe they are outside the realm of the world which created them.
Fact is, most people are worthless wastes of molecules. In fact, I have encountered many people who I could hardly describe as sentient despite the fact that they could talk.
POKE 36879,8
Eureka! This explains everything that is wrong with humanity.
How egregiously ironic that the saying "monkey see, monkey do" is actually just us projecting our own nature onto that of the ape. And it's sad that we would seem to owe our superiority over them to the same behavior that gives us stupid fads, the whole concept of marketing, religions big and small, and a populace that likes to have its opinions spoonfed by pop culture icons, politicians, and religious leaders.
Human see, human do. Human no think-ee, just bang the keys, maybe you'll write Shakespeare but probably you'll just spout regurgitated drivel.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Obligatory Trek-like quote
"Dammit Jim... I'm a doctor, not a english professor."
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
I bet you got it bad for calling the police on him.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
Oh ya! Imagine the bumper stickers and Saturday Night Live skits to come from this! Two high school graduates, the valedictorian get's passed up for a scholarship to Big U School for a monkey. I want to see a monkey and Kansas educator work out the problem of evolution, as well. My money is on knuckle dragging Lucy.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
First, the chimps were given two shots to open up the box. Now i'm not sure how this could have impacted the results, but if this is to be a "scientific" test shouldn't the two groups receive basically the same instruction. I think this deviation was unnecessary and quite possibly altered the results. At the end of the day maybe human children would react differently if they had more time playing with what was basically the same puzzle. Or more importantly, maybe the human children would be able to determine that it was the same puzzle and end around the more complicated steps.
Second, i think there may be a huge problem with having humans interact with adults (maybe the poster that suggested having the chimps teach the kids was on to something). The fact is that kids are usually taught to obey adults. Not just imitate them, but listen and follow instructions -- think teachers. While not all kids do this, 3 and 4 year olds arn't always the most overtly confrontational. The kids here may not have been usuing their minds, nor imitating, but obeying. Sure the kids were told they could do whatever they wanted, but the same person just told them how to do it. (some evidence of this is that the child of the reporter reacted differently with the two different teachers). I think an interesting counter study would be to observe the reaction by kids with ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) -- problems with authority -- as those kids would seem to be less likely to obey and may, under these constraints, give a better insight in to how the human mind works.
I dont think it has as much to do with the way we learn. It is probably due to the fact that we just train our children to be obedient and follow adult's directions without any doubt or second guessing.
(and no, I did not make the grandparent post)
That's (as in "That is") quite obvious. Take a look -- 'twas your grandparent who used "its."
Love,
the Grammar Nazi (and no, not you, grandparent, or great-grandparent)
clearly the chimps were home schooled
while the children are already showing signs of
the mental destruction that goes on in our
public schools...
Finally, a scientific explanation for Christianity and bureaucracy. :-P
Maybe Bush is a genius after all! http://www.bushorchimp.com/
Visit my website! Click the ads! Yay!
Shouldn't have surprised anyone. Human children work 80+ years to get to the point when they can just hang around, eat bananas and relax. Chimps just go directly to that stage.
While politically incorrect, perpetuating unfair stereotypes about our homosapien cousins, it was damn funny.
Of course you're not an English professor.
No, no.. I'm not being serious.
Chimps don't go around publishing dumbass conclusions based on Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacies.
Sendou Wave Kick!!
Live long and proper.
I don't think you can compare them to humans, simply because they're two completely different beings. While this study claims to provide evidence that chimps may logic better than children, they lack what children have an abundance of, which is creativity. You give a child a paintbrush, they will draw whatever their mind wants... there's a creativity factor in there. You give a paintbrush to a chimp, and he'll eat it.
All i can say about this is that in Steven Pinker's book, 'The Language Instinct' he reckons:
some (behavioural) linguists said they got a bunch of chimps to communicate using sign language. the chimps were using sentences, combining words to build more abstract concepts etc.
they were doing this to try and disprove the ideas of Chomsky and Pinker and people that language is a builtin ability unique and essential to the human brain.
like what you seem to be suggesting above, that chimps lack the ability to make the requisite sounds for speech, but nothing else in the way of thought or language skills.
but:
Pinker and his cohorts reckoned the chimps were not really using language, they imitated some key words, but didn't originate their own, the researchers were very lax about what they accepted as a sign, etc.
they of course had their own agenda to push
but if anyone did do some proper communicating with chimps, i don't know about it.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
damn. this is so Racist... i mean er Speciesist
This is telling us more about how we've conditioned our children to think.
Do what the teacher tells you.
Because some kids can't comprehend that sometimes you have to listen and other times you have to think it out for yourself we condition all of our kids to listen unconditionally. It does much for leveling the playing field for the slow learners but it also benefits pedophiles.
LK
No. The problem is lazy-ass parents, one way or the other. Too lazy to apply appropriate discipline consistently, relentlessly, inevitably. You state the bad behavior, you state the consequences, and you apply the consequences. You also explain good behavior, point it out and reward it. But that's hard work. It's so much easier a) let the little terrors run wild, or b) smack them about.
Spanking, the rod, and the belt are tools of dickweeds who don't care enough about parenting to learn how to do it right. And the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. My six year old's grammar, spelling and punctuation is better than yours. So are his manners.
Think about it - usually, when an ape wants to obtain food, it only needs to complete a couple of steps to achieve that goal, and the reward is immediate. But with tool-using humans, it may involve sharpening a rock, cutting a big stick, jamming the rock in the end of the stick, and then hunting for food and killing it with the tool. Even if the manufacture of the spear immediately precedes hunting for the animal, the reward is still not instant, and it may even be beneficial to manufacture several spears the day before.
Children see the manufacture of these tools, and the manufacture of the spear becomes the apparent goal, not the killing of the animal. Since the benefit of each step in terms of its effect on the fitness of the tool isn't immediately apparent, it's more advantageous to imitate all of the steps until one gains the higher insight needed to modify the tool's design. There may thus have been a pressure to select for children who were good at imitation when the immediate reward was simply the completion of the task and not the reward that comes from later using the tool.
And when you think about it, nearly everything we do today (aside from fairly passive activities like watching TV, sleeping, taking a dump) doesn't have an immediate reward, yet we usually feel good about completing a task whose actual benefit isn't immediate.
The original article can be found here for those who don't want to subscribe to the NY Times or use bugmenot.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
The results of this test don't surprise me. It seems logical that people in that stage of life would mimic instead of understanding. Those that attempted to understand first the things that are important instead of mimicing family where probably more likely to be killed off. Our minds can change gears as we get a better understanding of the world. Chimps on the other hands may have different needs as they age. It doesn't seem like it has anything to do with intelligence.
I, for one, welcome our new chimpanzee overlords
Now, don't we all feel better that we've got that out of our system, children?
Hmm... humans doing unneccessary steps despite their uselessness.
Sounds a lot like some of the jobs I am given to do...
*ducks*
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Chimps can comprehend the effect of quantum entanglement on cause and effect better than human children? I'm really not surprised that human children can't quite comprehend Alain Aspect's experiment showing that effect can come before a cause (transmission of entanglement faster than the speed of light), but I'm really quite surprised that chimps can comprehend it. Maybe they've got someone better than my physics teacher to explain it to them...
what does this teach me?
Chimps are smart.. or kids are dumb?
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Appently the article writer doesnt completely understant cause and effect. He linked to an article thay requires me to sign up, the effect is I bitch about it and make a joke.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Now every time we hear how stupid people are - this should be the new low bar. Move over Darwin awards, here comes "stupid enough to be on British reality TV show" - Everyone, say it out loud!
ps: imagine the kids in the study 10 years later. "Yeah, that was me, but I swear the chimps were coached better."
Oh, wait....
PS: In actual fact, the notions of "cause" and "effect" are philosophically very hazy. Ask yourself someday, whether guns kill people or people kill people (or ingrained structures of social inequity kill people, for that matter).
Who told the chimps to do EXACTLY as they were told? Thats how/what we teach our children. Maybe they could have "taught" the chimps before hand, and whupped the chimps about the head with a chalk board rubber if they failed a step, this would even up the results.
And what's your point? This study highlighted some profound (and somewhat surprising) differences between humans and one of our closest relatives. Such differences may have some bearing on how humans evolved the ability to develop a complex, linguistic culture based on rigorous imitation. You wouldn't be against learning about evolution, would you?
I know, I know; when you say WORTHY project, you probably mean something dire like cancer or AIDS research. And I wholeheartedly agree that those are worthy projects needing generous funding. But science is science. This study adds to what we know about stuff. That's justification in and of itself. And who's to say this research won't tell us something new about mirror neurons (probably necessary for imitation) and, by extension, autism, hm?
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
Well, if you're on a vendetta there's no point doing it half-assed I guess.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
throwFeces(); // OOK OOK OOK AAH AAH AAH! OOK!
Finally! Well-written, useful comments!
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
It is the lack of a descended larynx.
But hey, why quibble?
A blog about stuff.
... religion.
I don't think the result is all that suprising. Children infer a cultural context to what they are shown, while the chimps don't. There are a lot of things we do for cultural reasons, even though they are inefficent.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Am I the only one who seems to notice people getting dumber as time goes on? From what I can tell, our species is intellectually devolving. I know of very few people who are willing to reconsider their views (not talking about religion or politics), which means that learning stops right there. And further, whenever I take a moment to reconsider my views, people immediately assume that I have lost an arguement. I remember a time when people thought. That time is passed.
So we now all knows what the step 2 is 3. Profit ! Yay! So are half of slashdot chimps and we are in a kind of experiement of something?
Sucks. We already know this. There's a famous experiment in which two equal sized glasses were filled with an equal amount of fluid and the children were asked, which has more? Then, right in front of their eyes, they poured one container into a tall, thin glass, and one container into a short and fat glass. The children were then asked, "which has more liquid?" The children overwhelmingly selected the tall, thin glass. It is no secret that human brain development is a long and gradual process comparative to every other species of animal. I wouldn't have been suprised had the test reported that a lawn mower had a better grasp of cause and effect than a human child, I would only be curious as to how the test came to this conclusion.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
We can outsource the code monkey positions...
At first glance I thought it said "Chimpanzees beat up children." Asshole chimps.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
The chimps did even better when compared to parents.
they skip what they think is redundant steps.
how many people here have had to train someone to follow a procedure and somehow that procedure gets whittled down to the least number of steps that will get the job done.
Not when you are watching but when you are not.
I for one, welcome our banana devouring overlords. ... Argh come on, you knew it was going to happen. :)
Well of course the chimps won, against American children....
....
;-)
In related news, Bush was re-elected &
Greek Geek.
Don't leave us hangin, man; did they learn why?
We don't skip steps because we are taught not to.
When I was a kid, I saw past lots of redundant steps while doing my arithmetic. Each time I tried to skip a step (such as omitting writing down redundant digits when multiplying by 1 or 0 or 10), it was marked wrong. So I learned not to that.
"I am a graduate of Starfleet Academy; I know many things."
-- Worf (The Darkness and the Light)
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
Well, if you got enough of them they could do it.
A blog about stuff.
"I don't need to be lectured by you...I was out saving the galaxy when your grandfather was in diapers...besides I think the galaxy owes me one..."
- Kirk to Picard, "Star Trek: Generations"
DOH! I knew I should have proof read my post first...
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
Oh, never mind. That's perl syntax. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I can just imagine what Dr. Zaius would have to say about this: Human see, human do.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Human kids are taught to "do as your told". By their parents and by their teachers (probably not relevant for a four years old, though). Everything is done to stop children from having critical thoughts. Ever been asked to do something you felt was "redundant steps", and asked why, just to be told "because I say so"?
I bet the chimp never was told to do something a specific way "because it's how we do things around here", when it's obviously a silly way of doing it. A chimp who found an easier way to do something would be some kind of hero. A first grade math pupil who found out how to use a calculator would be in trouble.
Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. "Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought," Mr. Lyons said.
Since the children performed worse at reasoning and better at imitating, imitation is suddenly proposed to be the more sophisticated behaviour.
This is perfectly along the lines with claiming that being able to do math or play chess is proof of high intelligence - until a simple computer can do it.
..this is the reason only humans are able to use SAP.
Cause and effect is a survival behaviour. It is learnt later by humans because humans are nurtured for far longer. Other organisms come to the world with pre-programmed instinctive behaviour and are less flexible. They might be better placed to understand and learn cause and effect sooner as part of this.
Watching sheep and children in the paddock out the back, I have noticed that a lamb a few days old has already learnt that an electric fence is not something worth scratch against and will probably not get zapped again in their next few years of life. The children, on the other hand, get zapped so often you'd think it was their primary power source. The lamb won't likely learn to ride a bike or read.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
given your mistaken premise for the test, I'd say the chimps passed.
Children with Autism often have trouble imitating, so I would be curious to see this experiment repeated using them as subjects. I wonder if they would show the same focus on the end result that the chimps did.
Another thing is; did these lab chimps merely assume that they were expected to "perform" in order to receive the prize? Certainly they had been used in dozens of other experiments over the course of their lives. It was obvious to them that the bolt moving and stick tapping was not necessary to open the box but maybe they were unsure if it was necessary to perform those actions for the food to show up in the box based on their earlier experiences. What would happen if one chimp were thoroughly trained to go through all the extra actions and then put in with wild chimps. Would the wild chimps imitate all the extraneous stuff or would they think "what a stupid monkey! There was food in the box why not just open it and get the food?"
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
-or-
Children better for the mindless workforce than chimps.
or else!
Dollars to doughnuts says that Congress will soon attempt to pass legislation to ban publication of scientific studies like this. They'll slap on some stupid name like the "Falwell / O'Reilly / Phelps Morality Act of 2006" but make no mistake, they will try to do it. There is a growing conservative movement in the US that is demonizing science as being immoral, which would be fine by me if the proponents of this movement would stop using things like computers (the fact that they use them demonstrates their hypocrisy, no?)
There, you see?
I wondered about that when I read that article because it didn't mention this.
A kid at the age up to four or five is usually much more playfull then when they get older. I know from my own kids that until five they play quite differentely. At the age of five it usually starts that they get more interested in their surroundings and also start to think about more abstract concepts like numbers, characters, alhpabet and such things.
So I wonder wether this test could be explained that the kids were just playfull and it is no surprise, because we know that kids like to imitate grown ups at this age.
So what mental age where the chimps? If they were in a similar stage as an adult would have been then the result might be expected. After all, when kids grow up, they do less and less imitating and start do to it their own way. So the question is: was the chimps mental age comparable to the kids age?
This discovery shakes some of our most long-standing and dearly held assumptions about the nature of the universe:
In contrast to conventional wisod, apparently now an infinite number of typewriter-wielding chimps will in fact produce the complete abridged works of Shakespeare.
sudo ergo sum
another side sign of the decline of the american public education system.
are well below the average of industrialized nations.
Maybe it's just that the child wanted to repeat the full task (to get the adults approval), and the chimp wanted to repeat the result (to get rewarded because of reaching it). It might be as simple as that.
so in the next war Bush will just give the $250bn straight to Halliburton but Rummy will be confused where the planning and diversion stage went ?
For my first son when he was less than a 7 days old, I held him upright on my lap. I then said "up" lifting him up, followeed by "down" and gently lowered him After a few days, and before he was 7 days old, I noticed that he tensed his leg muscles when I said "up" and relaxed his leg muscles when I said "down".
I also did the same with my third son, with similar results.
This shows that very young children can both understand simple words, and also actively attempt to cooperate appropriately!
Never underestimate children, nor judge someone's intelligence by how well they can verbally express themselves.
-Nivag
Coming soon... all new, cheap and reliable outsourcing partners. The chimp champs.
Chimps are hardly "considered an adult by age three". Chimps don't even have the ability to hold on to their mother until about 6 months, they don't leave thier mother's back until age 3 and don't leave their mother's side until around age 7. They don't start puberty until age 7-10 and can't reproduce until age 12 or 13. Their lifespan in captivity is 60 years - in the wild around 40. Every single one of those developmental milestones are pretty damn close to the human equivalents.
I agree, it would be nice to know how old the Chimps were - the article just said "young chimps" - but to claim bias based on your set of "facts" is wrong.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
"Human kids better at following directions than chimps"
"Oh very clever Worf. Eat any good books lately?"
-Q
This is no suprise to me. Looking at some of the kids in the area where I live I've suspected for a long time that they were a few rungs further down the evolutionary ladder than monkeys.
To err is human. To forgive is not company policy.
My youngest son could clearly reason when less than 18 months old.
I observed him at about 15 months, when he went to use his radio, and it didn't work. He checked it was switched on at the radio, and the volume was set up okay. He checked it was switched on at the wall. He checked that the electrical cord was plugged into the wall, and also the radio. He stood still for about a minute, and then pushed the cord plug more firmly in the radio, and the radio started working!
This was not the sequence of events that is simple imitation. He first checked the obvious, then thought about what else could be checked.
A few months earlier I watched him over several weeks figure out all the things required for water to come out of the hose pipe. Not sure of the exact order, but gradually he realised that the hose pipe need to be connected to the tap, the nozzle had to be turned the right way, and the tap had to be on.
While he is a bright child (he is now 8 years old, and in the top maths group in his class), I am sure many other children must be able to reason things out, just that people may not have been so observant, or at least not published their findings widely enough.
-Nivag
There aren't many people who have ever originated their own words. I don't recall ever creating a new word.
No, I think you're misunderestimating yourself...
"I do not smirk. But if I did, this would be a good opportunity."
-Worf
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
I have a 19 month old and a two month old. My oldest can't say a single word but his level of comprehension has continually suprised I and my wife. For example, his grandmother was over watching him and had let her little ankle biter dog out into the backyard to pee. The dog was standing at the door looking in. Not expecting him to actaully comprehend she said to him "can you please let the dog in?". She was pleasantly suprised when he walked right over to the sliding glass door, unlocked it, walked outside behind the dog, pushed the dog into the house from behind, walked back in, closed the door and locked it.
:)
Another time, I was hanging something on the wall and had a set of screws on the table. I wasn't paying attention and he took the screws down and started playing with them. Before I knew it the screws were everywhere. I found all but one of them, but I needed the missing one. Desperate to find the screw, I held it in front of him and asked "Can you help me find the screw?". He immediately started pacing around the room, scanning the floor intently - until his attention was broken. He didn't find the scew, but it was obvious that he "got it".
Days after our youngest was born, I was changing his diaper one day and my oldest was in the room watching. Just for the hell of it I asked him, "Can you hand me a diaper?" I had never asked him to get me anything before, but he immediately ran over to the diaper bag and grabbe me a diaper. It was the wrong size diaper, but.....
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
This gives a new meaning to "spank the monkey"
Come on now, those researchers are just duplicating the studies conducted by mice many centuries ago.
Now get on with something important earth men,
like discovering new flavors of cheese.
1) make children stupid by removing science, inserting intelligent design nonsense
2) test stupid children against chimps, show chimps clearly better at reasoning
3) conclude that chimps are smarter, therefore better adapted, than children, hence children are not evolved from apes, hence Darwinism is nonsense.
We'll put those chimps through the U.S. educational system. Then we'll see how well they do on those tests.
Chimps don't need to carry around this enormous amount of culture. The following-rituals-instinct probably increases the chance on survival and reproduction within a human society.
I'm a chimpanzee you insensitive clod!
While training chimps to perform a routine task with redundant steps,
They had to work with Microsoft Office?
SCNR
Do not be alarmed. This is only a test.
Chimp mommies probably don't tell their young to 'be a good boy and do everything the kind mister asks you, ok tommy?'
also, tv makes kids dumb
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
I know that that sounds entroniant, perhaps even bleavisome, but it had to be said.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Another possibility that springs to mind is that human chldren are actually "experienced" with high-tech gadgetry of the modern age, and so don't make the assumptions the chimps do.
The study said the chimps, when they saw the clear box and the fact the bolt did not appear to do anything, went straight for the food. But that's purely mechanical thinking. Human children have probably seen all sorts of devices that mechanically don't seem important but due to electronics actually produce a "magical" effect. It would be interesting to see what would happen if said bolt actually DID prevent them from opening the box, even though it didn't see to. My bet is a bunch of the chimps would have trouble at first because they (falsely) assumed it had no purpose. Human children probably figure it's there for a reason, even if that reason is not immediately obvious to them. Indeed, the bolt may have second or third-order effects -- maybe it doesn't stop you from getting the food, but if you don't move it, your mom will cry. That sort of thing.
Bruce
Chimpanzees, the closest releatives to humans are kept in cages and experimented on in scientific labs. Many are intentionally infected with AIDS by scientists doing AIDS research.
Now it appears they have better ability to reason than children.
Will this reopen the debate on the ethics of using these animals?
the chimps were able to figure out and eliminate the redundant steps,
Yes, thats very interesting. It suggests that immitating seemingly useless tasks or following the exact directions without applying reasoning prematurely, has some evolutionary advantage, compared to just focusing on immediate rewards.
Assuming that they actually applied reason and it was not a result of just learning by hit and trial, it shows that adult chimps must have lost the ability to just "play through" the game, and focused on the reward instead. In fact grown up humans also show this behaviour.
The ability to perform tasks in a noval way comes from delibrately not reasoning in the old way, and sometimes follow redundant or even wrong steps, before coming up with a totally new way.
God created man in his own image, but somehow he evolved into a hairless monkey.
Experiments prove that Gophers are more intelligent than human fetuses...
And the point of the headline?
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
.. that all properties we have can be assigned to single genes.
Such as the anti-drought gene from cacti which can be put into wheat, so GMO wheat can be grown in the desert.
We all know mouse and dolphings are smarter than us, but now chimps? were will this all end? Humans think they are smarter than dolphins for they have things like money, and digital watches. Dolphins think they are smarter for the exact same reasons.
Dont talk to me about life!
"You guys that are saying that, you don't have the side of research on you."
There is NO consensus on this subject. Please stop trying to make it appear as if there is. You made many statements in your post which are unproven opinions. I doubt there will ever be a consensus on the subject, people just respond too differently to stimulus.
Punishment is effective for changing behaviors (notice I said "punishment" not "beating") and frankly, any attempt to argue otherwise should be immediately dismissed. But like any tool, it has a place, and using it incorrectly will lead to problems.
Lastly, I noticed that throughout your post you used inflammatory rhetoric to indicate corporal punsihment, such as "violence" and "beating". I doubt you'll find anyone credible who advocates beating a child, so lay off the hyperbole. It's a clear indicator of someone whose point is weak, and your isn't so weak that you need to resort to word games.
Bad programming habits begin at an early age.
I think this comes back to how we raise our children... (Well actually how you raise your children since I'm still one...)
I think that the whole "don't question, just accept" way of thinking is totally absurd.
Do you have any idea how annoying it is to hear "because I said so" or "What do you mean 'Why?' It just is!" from an adult?
What's worse are the "I'll tell you when you're older", "You wouldn't understand", and "You don't want to know that"...
My personal favorite is "It doesn't matter"...
My parents were great; they avoided these types of thought-quashing over-used "no-answers", but many of my teachers (even the good ones) at the elementary school level (USA) got so sick of me (it wasn't just me, but I did ask a lot of questions) asking questions that they decided that 'It doesn't matter' what I want to know, it only matters what the curriculum says to teach (another whole rant), that if the explanation wasn't simple, that they should make something up.
I'm not trying to brag, but even in 1st grade, I was really good at math. I have 3 math teaches in my family, and that helped a bit, but teachers often tell 'little lies' because it doesn't really matter... Do you have any idea how many recesses I sat trying to figure out why you couldn't divide by a fraction or decimal?! I certainly didn't know for sure what you would get, but it only makes sense that if you have 8 marbles and you put them into 2 piles you have 4 in each pile (8/2=4) and then you put them into 1 pile, you would have 8 in each pile (8/1=8) and if you were to keep cutting the number of piles in half, the number of marbles would double, which is true (8/(1/2)=16), but no first grade teacher is going to try to explain the fact that multiplication and division are the same thing when the teacher just spent days trying to teach the kids not to confuse them.
I'm going to go off on [another] tangent... the teachers don't call them little lies; they call them white lies. Does anybody who uses that term have any idea how incredibly racist that is?! It implies that black lies (big lies) are very bad; while white lies aren't so bad...I don't think I need to elaborate any further...
When I started writing this, I was going to give an example from each grade, but now that I'm done with that, and re-read it, I've decided not to bother as 99% of readers will have given up by now...
The other problem with the way kids are taught to reason is you* spend so much time telling kids to do it 'the right way'... in reality, kids are told to do it your way. They are told that their way is always wrong.
-You have to color in the lines. Why? Because I said so.
Is there any reason to make kids color in the lines? Can you think of one? Yes? Why do most parents/teachers/etc. refuse to explain it to their children? Is coloring in the lines a life-skill? No, but it does help to teach motor skills. There are other reasons, but that's the only one that makes any sense to me...
Isn't it more efficient to just scribble?
Isn't it actually stifling creativity to teach kids that you have to color each object one color?
-Walk in a straight line between classes. (Not sure if they do this most places, or if it's just a regional thing)
I can't count the number of times I questioned it in the first year or two, but after being yelled at because I asked so many times, I just kind of accepted it.
(Just for the record, 'It doesn't matter' isn't an acceptable answer when a kid asks a question multiple times. Obviously if they keep asking the question, it matters to them)
Again, I was going to ramble for a bit longer, but I think I've ranted on the school system and on conformity enough for one post...
I've felt (just having recently gotten out of school) that each passing year schools become more like prisons, and that students are being taught the wrong thing--i.e., going through the motions instead of thinking critically.
I think it says something about the social atmosphere of the environment that children learn in--are they being taught to not question the norm, or are they afraid to do so?
This study reflects more on our society than it does on intelligence.
The education system is designed to create good corporate cogs — people who do what they're told, how they're told to do it. Failure to follow the explicitly-given path is "bad" in human society, and creativity is largely frowned upon as a deviant behavior.
Okay, so I'm being a bit harsh, and probably a bit melodramatic. Yet we spend enormous amounts of effort on human process (particularly in computing) and very little on creativity. Companies complain that they can't find people who "think outside the box", yet are uncomfortable with people who do show inspiration and creativity.
Admitedly, we don't need creative burger flippers, and process can be invaluable. Somewhere, though, we've lost a balance between being cogs in a machine and random parts in a pile.
All about me
Should be obligatory by now:
I for one welcome our new chimp overlords!
"Sarcasm is for *winners*, Alan." - Charlie Harper (Two and a Half Men)
These weren't Neocon children, perchance?
-- thinkyhead software and media
How do you coax a chimp into teaching a human child? How do you coax the child into agreeing to "learn from a monkey"? Hell, how do you convince the parents?
"We'll pay your child $10 an hour to learn how to shuck corn from this chimpanzee."
That'd be one hell of a reality show.
Perhaps its just the social scheme at play here. The children see the adults as superiors and therefore trust them to make the right decisions, therefore making them less likely to skip steps. The chimps, very plausibly, have their own social order. This doesn't seem to me to prove as much about learning ability as they let on.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
Do the chimps worry about disappointing thier parents if they miss a step? Are they worried about being disobedient?
I'll admit that I didn't RTFA, but as a parent one thing I have come to understand - expecially when they are young, kids are more afraid of disappointing you than death, taxes and making things more efficient.
So used to being told what to do, they are unable to think for themselves.
Eat this food, sleep on this bed, drive this car, look like this.
The only time free thinking comes into play is when there is competition or when one is trying to achieve something.
The rest of the time the herd mentality rules the moment......
Rick B.
"As they say in my country, the only thing that separates us from the animals are mindless superstition and pointless ritual."
--Latka Gravas in "Taxi"
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
i used to be as smart as a monkey, now i'm as dumb as a chimp.
or something like that
Ha! you obviously have not had a two year old girl in your house!!
Example: My daughter wants to open a tube of toothpaste with a flip top on it. I let her figure it out. She starts prying at the seam between the cap and tube with her thumbnail. Not a bad choice. However, the cap is designed with an indentation to get leverage with the side of your thumb to push it open, saving your precious thumbnail from getting mangled. I let my daughter bang her head on the problem for about a minute, then I convince her to let me show her a 'better way' by pushing on the indentation. SHe observed and understood the procedure but decided that her way was better and went back to it. Eventually, she got it open and submitted that as proof that her way is just as good. Recently she started employing the method that I showed her. Probably after she felt enough time had passed that I couldn't take credit for showing her.
Sometimes learning can be influenced by personality more than species.
Stop the use of force!
My German Shepherd is smarter than your chimp.
What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable gipsy obscenity?
...how's their trig?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Chimp-1: "I figured it out just in a minute that there were so many redundant steps involved in getting that banana, right after looking at the setup for the first time. And knew what the experimenters wanted to see"
Chimp-2: "Then why did you take 4 weeks and 200 trials to show the results ???. They think that we are retarded "
Chimp-1: "What do you mean why? Do you know of any better way to get a month of banana supply for free? "
God created man in his own image, but somehow he evolved into a hairless monkey.
"and no, I did not make the grandparent post"
Nor apparently did you read it.
It turns out that the children were all members of the Bush family. Only one of those currently is as smart as a chimp.
In United States of America Chimps beat you!
(horrible i know)
...welcome our new chimpanzee overlords.
...it had to be said.
...and probably already has.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Considering how much research has gone into research on primates, it's almost funny that it's taken researchers this long to come up with this conclusion. Full grown chimps compared to human children. Ok, so a fully developed chimp is better at some things than a human child. Children need time to grow up. If a young chimp were to beat a human child, THEN there would be something interesting to report.
A gorilla is stronger than just about any human out there. An ape can fall from a much higher distance than a human without getting seriously hurt. The list of things goes on where humans arn't necessarily the best at everything. When it comes to brain development, it may take a bit of time for a human to develop, but look at the differences between an adult of each species, not between adults and children of different species.
It's not behavioural conditioning, it is genetic . In the "nature vs. nurture" controversy, this is a big win for "nature".
Perhaps ruminating over inefficiencies serves to provide deeper development of the brain. There are so many things going on in a developing brain that we would be hard pressed to definitively say 'it is more beneficial to have a brain that can eliminate inefficient options early on', because we don't understand enough about it.
Equally plausible is the idea that repetition of a wider array of options serves to program the brain more deeply with an understanding about how the world works that goes beyond the task at hand. This could be the source of our curiosity and propensity to be inventive that goes beyond what we see in the animal world. Perhaps this could be expressed simply as the idea that humans play more than animals do - animals approach things from a practical standpoint and humans do many things that, on the surface at least, seem impractical - but provide dividends in terms of understanding later.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Babies don't usually get any tangible reward simply for saying a word or two. They may get some attention, but they could get that far more effectively just by crying. You should never do that. When a baby is starting to speak, you should ignore it most of the time it cries, and give him reward in attention when he speaks; that way, it'll develop speech faster.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
If you don't do that, they will not start talking for many months. I know of a toddler that started talking at almost 2yo (as opposed to 8-18 months) because everytime the said "ah" and pointed to something, his parents gave it to him.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
If you read the article all the way to the, you know, END, you'll find that the chimps did not do "better" than the humans. What they discovered is that we've been mistaken in assuming that figuring out someone's goal is "more advanced" learning than simply imitating them. This is true for simple cases, such as in the experiment where you just have to open a box. But it's not true for more advanced tasks, such as learning to build or use a complex tool. For complicated behaviors, simply knowing the goal is not enough to generate the steps necessary to reach the goal.
Human children remain in what is often call the critical period far longer than other primates. It is during this period that humans are best able to pick up language. But, during the critical period the brain is not so good at standard reasoning. So human children have a hard time out reasoning mentally mature chimps.
...the reason it's so hard to change that policy in your company. No one knows why they do it, or if it actually produces results, but it's the way it's always been done, so....
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
I actually wrote a research paper over the evolution of language for my senior seminar, so the discussion of ape vs. human intelligence came up a lot. Unfortunately I'm at work so I'll have to work from memory here :).
Yes, apes can learn words and can be taught to communicate on a very basic level. However, the prime difference is that humans can grasp advanced grammar and syntax, while primates cannot.
Additionally, if language is not present, humans will create their own, as evidence in the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language
Here's a brief summary: In the 70s Nicaragua established a special needs school, where ~50 deaf children (previously isolated from any other deaf children) came together. The teachers tried to teach the children finger spelling, but since the children had no concept of spoken language, it was an exercise in futility. Meanwhile, the children were quickly developing their own form of sign language, and the teachers, desparate from the students' inability to learn the fingerspelling, and their own inability to understand the children, asked for outside help from Judy Kegl. Kegl discovered that they had their own language, and that it was evolving from one group of children to the next, into a full-fledged primary sign language.
Damn Dirty Apes
"Please do not assume that because you are ignorant of such scales that they do not exist.
Such scales are defined as "anything that animals don't do is human"."
In your previous post, your assertion was that "but we have no framework or usefull scale of measuring such things." and now it "anything that animals don't do is human". Which is it? Do they not exist as you first asserted, or do you simply dismiss them because you disagree with them as you are currently asserting?
"Genie didn't develop language and never learned, even with instruction and therapy, grammar beyond what signing chimpanzees can demonstrate, not that her case is scientific in any way."
NO. Please do not read MY link, then attempt to comment on it as though you knew anything about it. Your previous assertion was that a case such a Genie does not exist, and now that I've shown you it does, you're rewriting your arguments AGAIN in a vain attempt to be right instead of learning you were wrong. Stop doing that.
"There is no standard for measuring intelligence."
We are not now, nor were we ever talking about intelligence. We are talking about language, and your insistence on equating the two is mildly amusing, in a "this guy is making this shit up as he goes along" type of way.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
A personal attack is committed when a person substitutes abusive remarks for evidence when attacking another person's claim or claims. This line of "reasoning" is fallacious because the attack is directed at the person making the claim and not the claim itself. The truth value of a claim is independent of the person making the claim. After all, no matter how repugnant an individual might be, he or she can still make true claims.
Not all ad Hominems are fallacious. In some cases, an individual's characteristics can have a bearing on the question of the veracity of her claims. For example, if someone is shown to be a pathological liar, then what he says can be considered to be unreliable. However, such attacks are weak, since even pathological liars might speak the truth on occasion.
In general, it is best to focus one's attention on the content of the claim and not on who made the claim. It is the content that determines the truth of the claim and not the characteristics of the person making the claim.
Cool.
Now my job will be outsourced "UNDERSEAS"
* rolls eyes *
However, I saw a documentary once where ants detonated a nuclear device underground in order to use the resultant radiation to increase their size tremendously.
Unfortunately, it produced in them non-beneficial behavioural changes, including a prevalence for attacking white women, and an inability to outthink a small military strike team lead by, for some reason, a handsome scientist.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Wonder what these kids' nutritional status was?
/w only declared-amount mixed-tocopherol E and extra magnesium, only ever natural/organic single-ingredient unprocessed food, and also only grass-fed meats/eggs and ocean-caught fish [for natural omega 3 balance]). Mother should do all of this from at least 3 months before impregnation.
An interesting followup would be to use kids given proper nutrition since birth (plenty of vitamins
IMO any planned mother who doesn't at least have omega 3 (brain building material) balance right needs punched in the face by a robot. Flu'll kill anyone who doesn't do things right anyways though so I figure all will be good soon enough.
This also could be a sign that children think much more about a task than do chimps. I remember in high school math learning how to do things with all these extra steps that made no sense until I started learning more advanced math concepts and then understood those extra steps to be extremely important.
But if I wasn't able to comprehend that there may be more to what I'm doing than what I currently understand--if I didn't have the ability to know that I might not know everything, then I would have skipped them, never learned them, and had a bitch of a time later.
FWIW, I taught my daughter simple signs before she could speak. We figured if she could communicate the basics (food/hungry, drink/thirsty, more, finished, etc.) to us without just screaming until we figured it which she wanted, we'd all be a lot happier. So, is this pavlovian conditioning? i.e. "Make this sign, you get the 'treat'." You could look at it that way, but really, she became a much more mellow child once she learned how to communicate with us. She was happier, we were happier, it was better for everyone all around. We kept up with it as long as she was interested in learning new words/signs, progressing through "help", "up", etc. She even made up a few of her own: "snowball", and "napkin" were ones I remember her coming up with. But nothing lit her eyes up like when I taught her the sign for "baby". Here was a way she could refer to herself, and that knowledge clicked in her like nothing I've ever seen before or since. It's hard to describe, really.
But back to the "allegedly" lower primates: Koko, the gorilla who was taught sign language, is pretty well documented as coming up with words on her own, and expressing emotions we humans would consider "deep". Longing for a baby, for example. Is there anything inherently keeping other primates from the same "accomplishments"? I don't think so. Their natural ways probably don't require a lot of deeper communication, i.e. they don't need to express, "I say, is that a tiger sneaking up on us from behind that tree?" It's sufficient for their purposes to have an expression for "DANGER!" Koko, having lived in an environment where deeper communication was encouraged, apparently has a lot more to say...
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
May be the chimps would eliminate that as a usless setp.
Something tells me that there are no chimp bullies. I can't imagine a crowd of chimps mercilessly prodding and laughing at a single scrawny chimp until he or she backs into the corner cowering and pouting.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
You can certainly teach primates to make short sign sequences, though it doesn't seem that they have the same complex recursive structure as natural language sentences (7 signs is about the longest ape sentence that has been observed, and it's not clear that long strings of signs in ape signing have very much structure). My point was that you don't need to teach babies their native language. They learn incredibly complex syntactic, semantic and phonological facts about their native language without any instruction whatsoever (and in fact while ignoring any explicit instruction given by adults). Consider the following fact of English. You can say either "I picked up the book" or "I picked the book up", but while you can say "I picked it up", you can't say "I picked up it". That is the sort of complex syntactic fact which babies master without any instruction whatsoever -- unless you're a syntactician, you probably never even noticed that particular fact of English syntax.
You also have to be beware of the extent to which signs can be overinterpreted. We don't know that Koko was saying that she wanted a baby. She may have been saying something far simpler.
It's implausible to assert that primates in the wild don't "need" complex communication. If that is the case, why did humans evolve it? We were, after all, primates living in a very similar environment to the one in which chimpanzees and other apes live. It is clearly useful to have complex communication in virtually any social environment, but it is apparently beyond the cognitive abilities of apes unless they are specially trained (and even then their communication is not especially complex).
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.
Shorter-lived animals develop faster. No kidding. You can house-train a dog by 1 or 2 months old. When your lifespan is only about 10 years, you can't waste two or three of them on learning where to defecate.
Chimps develop faster than humans because they DIE SOONER. They also live in a more hostile environment, and aren't afforded the 18 or 20 years of care and coddling that humans are.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
....I think I see the primate partiality!
In order to make a valid comparison it is necessary to compare like with like - viz the human children have been taught (not hard wired!) from birth to "do as you are told" adults, peers and parents constantly make children do "uneccessary" things (eat with knife and fork) (wash hands) (dont swear) etc. The chimps are not subject to this.
La wife, not el wife
The addition of comments places this chimp not only above children, but many of my colleagues as well.
One might be tempted to take with a grain of salt an interpretation of the results of this study that fails to explain why the report wasn't written by the chimpanzees conducting the experiment.
The experiment has to be with Baby chimps vs baby humans. Children of all animals(and men) attempt to blindly imitate their parents and logically understand it later. So the comparison is not accurate.
I call bullshit. Based on the context, the parent is right; to make some into thing else is to "em"-whatever it is, and the word 'cromulent' in same paragraph is taken from an episode of Black Adder in which Samuel Johnson is touting his new invention, the Dictionary, housing all the words in the English language. Black Adder says something about how that's very cromulent and several other made-up adjectives,just to fuck with Johnson.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
...chimps don't read Slashdot!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
...human _American_ children? Did they test kids from anywhere _else_? And if not, why? I have a feeling they'd reach much different results in, say, Asia...or Canada.
And before I get flamed into next month, American, born and raised. So just get over it, I know my people.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Could we concentrate more on educating my 15 year old to a decent level, and less on educating some damn monkey? @#$%ing humans.
I for one welcome our new chimpanzee overlords.
You claim: "There's a lot of evidence that how ever much people may try to teach babies to speak, babies ignore them."
I won't try to claim that that evidence doesn't exist, or that is was unscientifically gathered, or misinterpreted. I don't need to.
To counter a general claim that children don't learn from being "taught" language all I need is one counterexample.
I have seen (multiple times) my 4-year-old explain to my toddler new words and how to say others words and seen the toddler immediately listen, imitate and use with understanding, and not forget later.
I realize that you may have to conduct your own observations in order to know for yourself.
Just because my toddler ignores ME when I try to teach, doesn't mean she can't be taught.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Just don't get him started on KDE or 'ad hominem attacks'
So, I don't believe Chimps are smarter than humans. From an early age human children are trained to do useless, rediculous stuff. Early on, children learn to do these things to please the adults. So, when they are trained to do somthing in this study, they do it just as they have been instructed to. While, chimps having the advantage of not being raised by humans, are free to focus on the percieved end goal.