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Monkey Business and Freakonomics
marct22 writes "Stephen J Dubner, co-writer of 'Freakonomics' said there will be a second Freakonomics book. One of the items that will be covered is capuchin monkeys' use of washers as money, buying sweets, budgeting for favored treats over lesser treats. He mentioned that one of the experiments had similar outcomes as a study of day traders. And lastly, he watched capuchin prostitution!"
If you're thinking of buying Freakonomics, don't bother. Half the book is "letters from our website".
It's one of those books you buy at the airport before a long trip only to discover that it only takes half the trip to read it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
3 week later, in prison... "I need to learn how to spell Cancun."
And lastly, he watched capuchin prostitution!
Proof positive that it's the oldest profession?
I find it interesting how monkeys can be compared to day traders. I think to goes to show how similar us humans really are to other animals. In many ways we're more a fortunate combination of traits than having truly unique traits.
I don't read AC A human right
of our monkey-shagging overlords?
1) capture monkeys
2) provide a selection of washers
3) !!sex!!
4) profit!!
In Africa, monkeys shag you!
God, Slashdot is soooo predictable these days....
And why was my capcha 'incest'? Is someone trying to make a point?
apes, especially monkeys, are very genetically related to humans, because of this it is not surprising to find that they have what we usually think are human behaviors. Gorillas for instance, can be taught to understand sign language, monkeys are known to use tools, form tightly knit groups and even make primitive weapons for killing prey. [spears] In fact, monkeys are so very much like we humans that recently it was debated as to whether to grant them human-like rights.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
If anything, Day Traders are the closest thing you can find to prostitutes.
Only difference is that prostitutes usually dress up nicer and generally have a better taste in men.
I remember watching this video about the sexual life of Bonobo apes (cousins of chimpanzee with a social life very similar to humans in many respects, in particular sex). One funny part was a young male coming to a female resting on a branch with a banana. The males makes it very clear what he wants in exchange, they do the deed and the the female eats the banana after he leaves. The funny part is that in the commentary they explain that this specific female never goes looking for food...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Good thing you're here.
Or maybe, it just shows that you can compare anything to anything, if you carefully choose only the aspects that sorta superficially support your idea, do a lot of sophistry to make them look even more supportive, and keep your fingers crossed that noone notices all else you've ignored.
Let me tell you a joke: "A researcher puts a flea on a piece of paper and yells, "JUMP!" The startled flea jumps. The researcher cuts off the flea's legs, puts it back on the piece of paper, and yells, "JUMP!" The flea doesn't jump. The researcher notes, "Fleas hear with their legs. A flea whose legs have been cut off can't hear any more.""
Or here, let me offer definitive proof that cats are nerds, or at least nerds act just like cats. Cats:
- are naturally attracted to books and keyboards. Mine always used to come curl up on the book I was reading.
- aren't very social, and don't deal well with extended periods of social interaction. (Keep petting one too long after it signalled "I've had enough," and it might just scratch.) They also actually need periods of being alone or left alone. Also, bringing a new cat home might just result in a fight over who's alpha, instead of, "hi, welcome to the team."
- except for a few modified/selected races, only "talk" when they actually have something to say and/or when all else failed. (See the widespread myth that meowing is somehow only for communicating with humans.) They're also not good at telling you what they want or why. How introverted is that?
- have a problem with authority and obeying orders. (See, "herding cats.")
- have unbalanced diets, by human standard, and would rather not eat their veggies
- have weird sleep schedules, by human standards.
- like it warm. I can just see a cat coming to the office in mountain boots and a sweater in July, if it were anthropomorphic.
- really dislike being stuffed in a suit and tie.
- really don't like showering, or being given a shower. Actually, "loathe" just about starts to describe it.
- play (with) all sorts of stuff that makes no sense for a normal human.
- never discovered complex courting rituals.
Etc. There you go. I've proven beyond all doubt that nerds act just like cats. Funny how similar we are to animals, eh?
In practice it just shows how easy it is to find _some_ animal that matches whatever you want to match, if you just look hard enough and ignore what is _really_ happening there. E.g., I've thoroughly ignored the fact that a nerd surviving on say, chocolate or pizza/chinese food only, is doing it because of taste preferences or being too lazy for anything else, while a cat is actually biologically made to be a meat-only eater. ("Obligate carnivore.") E.g., I've thoroughly ignored the fact that a cat's attraction to books isn't because it actually wants to read, and to your keyboard isn't because it wants to program. Etc.
To get back to the topic, yeah, you can compare anything from the real economy to a monkey play-economy, but it's just material to make Joe Sixpack feel better about his not understanding the real economy. Day trading especially is a complex phenomenon, including such aspects as being, basically, a form of gambling. I.e., when you see monkeys playing cards/dice/3-cups/whatever, then you'll have an essential ingredient in it. Sure, you can look at it superficially being just like monkeys and bottle caps changing hands, but that's the kind of superficial over-simplification that's outright useless except maybe as an emotional metaphor.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How can they use washers as money? I assume they're the normal kind made of base metal (not silver or gold) so anybody could mine some more zinc or steel and make more of them. Where's the intrinsic value? It's just another fiat currency like dollars except in this case the 'the man' is the zookeeper.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
I enjoyed the first freakanomics, but they guy does seem to have a big head... each chapter starts with some quote by somebody else about how great the author is.
A few things that were informative were also spun as revolutionary, such as the idea that a real estate agent or other agent in a transaction does not have the same incentives as the person they represent...
The only reason you don't see amoebas doing the same thing is because they don't have opposable thumbs.
What?
On the contrary it sounds like the female has herself a sex slave. ;)
"I think to goes to show how similar us humans really are to other animals."
;-)
Kenan Malik would disagree.
That said, there are some things I disagree with Kenan Malik myself.
In any case, his book 'man, beast and zombie' is an interesting read, which make you wonder of the intrinsical (?) differences between humans and animals (and AI's).
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Humans are a fickle species. We demand to be entertained, humored, amused. Perhaps its our irrational emotions taking control of our better judgment, but then again if we didn't have these characteristics, we would be as interesting as snails...and probably not nearly as successful.
And their cookings skills are none too developed either.
That may well be so, but that sorta misses the point that it's useless to compare a human to an animal that has been _trained_ to do something, as a way to draw conclusions about the human. E.g., sure, you can train a gorilla to understand sign language, and it sure says something about its intelligence. But then you can't go and write a book on the premise that, basically, "hey, what mutes do is exactly the same sign language as these gorillas are using! Mutes are just like gorillas!"
Basically it's bullshit to then compare a community of gorillas arificially _trained_ to do X to a community of humans who have a rationale behind doing X, as if there were no difference there. Whatever X may be.
In this case, "monkeys using washers/caps/whatever as money" conjures an image that is thoroughly misleading. It's not like those monkeys just saw a heap of washers and went, "I know, let's use those as money". They were _trained_ and coaxed to play a game they don't even understand.
Money was a hard concept to figure out even for humans. It took tens of thousands of years to figure that one out. Even if you look at the economy of, say, the Old Kingdom (an ancient Egypt period), it was based on barter. If you had some extra grain (e.g., you were a farmer) and wanted a pot, you'd go to the potter and ask, basically, "how much grain do you want for that pot?" Then the potter wanted a knife and went to the smith and asked, "can I trade you some pottery for a knife? What if I gave you some of this grain I earned too?" And so on.
Discovering money wasn't just an accidental seeing a round piece of metal and going, "oh, you know, we could use a bunch of those as money." It was a long and rocky road in itself, for example, discovering first the artificial value of jewellery and other rare luxuries. Then the fact that a golden chalice could be stored longer than a ton of grain, which would eventually rot. And only then the money wasn't just some rounded bits that could be traded, but a standardized quantity of such a valuable, non-decaying metal.
E.g., the value of the Roman Solidus, wasn't just being a round piece like a washer, but being a standardized quantity of gold. There wasn't some arbitrary assigned value to it, like when playing with washers or Monopoly money, the value was the exact value of the 4.5g of gold in it. Two pounds of Solidi weren't just an arbitrary value multiplied by the number of coins, it was the exact value of two pounds of gold.
Floating paper money with floating values are a _very_ recent invention, and it took lots of growing pains to wrap the human mind around _that_ notion. It took first assigning a value in gold, and getting people to believe that they can actually go and redeem a 100$ note for 100$ worth of gold. I.e., the value was _still_ tied to the idea of having an inherent value. It took a Great Depression to finally decouple money from an intrinsic value in precious metals, and some people _still_ can't really wrap their mind around it.
That was, in a nutshell, 40000 years after humans got out of Africa. Yep, 40k years. That's how long it took humans to arrive at the modern concept of money as just tokens.
So it's silly to believe that a bunch of monkeys would just see a bunch of worthless (for them) washers and immediately come up with the exact same concept. "Hey, we'll use these as tokens whose value is dictated by supply and demand." Nope, sorry, it's just not going to happen.
What you can have is monkeys _trained_ to play with washers in a mockery of an economy. We don't even know how much they understand there, and how much is mindless imitation and "pavlov's dog" kinda reflexes.
E.g., did someone actually figure out prostitution in all its human implications? Or more likely, a bunch of monkeys trained to give tokens to the researcher on all occasions, e.g., when they're fed, started also giving tokens as a reflex to anyone, including to the female they're mating with?
Did they really understand the concept of _buyin
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes, but, see, the trick is to know when it's just a funny metaphor which shouldn't be taken seriously. Nothing against the human species coming up with entertaining metaphors, similes and other figures of speech, but the trick is to know that that's not, in fact, an accurate model of reality.
Yes, if we couldn't dream, fantasize, whatever, we'd probably be less successful than snails. But equally if we took all phantasies to seriously, we'd be even less successful. The trick is to _not_ jump off the house just because you dream of flying.
Same here. It's ok to read about monkeys trained to enact a silly pseudo-economy game, and to be entertained by it. What I'm saying is: but please _do_ remember that it's essentially only entertainment. It may be packed in some pseudo-scientific and all revelation babble, but do come back to RL when you're done with it anyway. Realize that, once that entertainment is over, the RL economy still doesn't work like that. Judging RL economy by what silly play a bunch of trained monkeys do, is about as productive as judging RL warfare by D&D rules.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
.. is that Dubner reportedly drew twice the audience of Microsoft's CEO.
What was once true, is no longer so
and I've taken economics in college, but the kinda freakonomics people should hear more about (and do something about) is how the top 1% of the American population controls 95% of the wealth. Between 1979 and 1997, income for the middle class rose 9%m while income for the top 1% rose 140%! Now that's freaky!
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
As usual with such issues, the answer is: yes and no. Depends what you're looking at and at what level.
Yes, you can say that many individual humans are not much better than trained monkeys. But that's a different topic.
No, IMHO, you can't compare:
A) a human behaviour that evolved over 40,000 years, and based on concepts refined and formalized over all that time, to
B) a monkey behaviour that exists only because someone trained them to do that.
Even if many of the individual humans involved at point A don't really understand that evolution and those concepts, nevertheless, some smarter humans before them did. Joe Sixpack may not understand Keynesian economics in regard to, say, government spending, but Keynes did. It's not a random behaviour that came out of nowhere.
Saying, basically, "haha, human traders act like monkeys" would be valid if we were talking behaviour which the monkeys genuinely discovered on their own. Not when it's monkeys trained to reproduce a human behaviour. Then it becomes, basically, "haha, human traders act like monkeys trained to act like human traders"... err... what's the surprise or revelation there, then?
Even if you talk about the individual "trained monkey" humans, the best you can say that something is simple enough so both a human and a monkey can be trained to do. That's a valid observation.
But reducing the behaviour itself to, basically, "it's the same that monkeys do", isn't saying that much when those monkeys only do it because someone coaxed them to. It's not really monkey behaviour, it's _human_ behaviour that the monkeys have been trained to imitate. It's not really comparing human behaviour to monkey behaviour, but really human behaviour to the same human behaviour. Whop-de-do, big surprise that it ends up the same.
Even if you view humans as trained monkey, it's really comparing:
A) a human trained humans to do X, vs
B) a human trained monkeys to do X.
The real common denominator there isn't "humans act like monkeys", but the fact that a human trained both to do the same.
That is, basically, my objection.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So you are saying you emerged from the womb with complete understanding of language, mathematics, and cause-effect association? When you were a child, did you have a clear rationale explaining why you were being taught how to divide or expand your vocabulary? I think you were sent to school where you received exposure to these and other concepts repeatedly until you began accurately repeating them to your instructors. Eventually you learned how to independently form sophisticated compositions of those simple concepts, possibly through repetition, for the purpose of solving problems. This seems a lot like training to me.
Why bother.
On the contrary it sounds like the female has herself a sex slave. ;)
How is this contrary, as opposed to the exactly what the poster was saying? Perhaps you should head back to the trees yourself.
Sounds to me like the poor guy was bringing his girlfriend gifts and/or taking her out to lunch to get any action. If the bonobos were any more evolved, they'd probably have also seen him taking her to a movie ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I could really use some washers right now. I wonder if my wife would accept them?
You lost me when you decided to prattle on for a page about your friggin' cat, you nerd.
Lucky little bastages. I wish I could toss my wife some washers or food for some service. He needs to do experiments to see if a metal band around a Capuchin's ring finger stops the process of copulation. The males will give the females all of the washers and food, and the females will in turn become celibate or have intercourse with different monkeys.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
I've been trying to tell people the same thing since the book was released. I don't have any economics degrees, just ones in common sense. although, I think your last line has an extra word in it.
If you consider yourself a thinker, don't buy it.
There, thats closer. That should remove the objections other posters have.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Could this guy be deliberately setting up "experiments" to get weird results? My guess is that bizare stuff will sell more books, but is it more credible than the more traditional, boring, studies?
The titles of these books sound more catchy than the typical titles of most scientific studies, I'll say that.
What do other real economists think of these studies?
...how many times you can repurpose content and not lower its value. The monkey money thing was from their column in the New York Times Magazine (and most of the first book was just expanded from the original article in said magazine).
But they're pseudo-opposable...
It's a simple two step process.
1) I would discuss the issue. there needs to be an open dialogue with a free exchange of ideas. However this cannot be done without performing step two.
2) Reform the media in the United States. Inform the general public. Give the airwaves back to the public. There are a handful of transnational media conglomerates that control the news and entertainment in the United States. Discussing unfair wealth distribution is a complex issue, which will not increase their profit base, therefore it is not discussed in the media at large. Instead, temporal issues of little significance are crammed down peoples throats to keep people pacified and preoccupied (Super Bowl, White House scandals, bad TV) so they forget what the real issues are. And so they continue to consume consume consume.
Without mention and discussion of these important issues, Americans will continue to be played and controlled and kept stupid.
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The NY Times article on that study, from 2005, can be found here.
ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B
My first thought when I read that description was this:
1. Monkey finds money laying around.
2. Monkey brings the money home and shows it to his wife.
3. Wife is impressed and, after a little heavy petting, puts out.
4. Guy's happy, wife goes shopping.
Sounds to me as though the researcher's proved monkeys essentially get married. Nothing new there as far as I know.
You know the thing about UDP jokes? I don't care if you get it or not.
I agree with parent. There is NO place where we can discuss this issue! The big corporation own everything and we have no place to speak! If only we had some distributed medium that made the cost to publish so low that anyone could express any opinion to a large group of people with little fear of censorship. It would look something like a world wide web of communication.
*sigh*
But The Man would never allow such a thing to exist. Oh cruel world!
"...the point that it's useless to compare a human to an animal that has been _trained_ to do something..."
I agree with your point but lets not forget that humans are also "trained", the only part that is "instinctive learned" is language, writing, maths, farming, building, ect, are all taught. Our unmatched ability to manipulate symbols means thousands of generations of "trainning" can be condensed into a text book, or a comprehensive model of the known universe in a handfull of equations and a periodic table. Despite our seemingly "vast superiority" the basic behavioural featue is "the ability to manipulate symbols". I think there are many social and behavioural similarities between apes and humans, apes have enough language capability for basic conversation, they can convey simple happy/sad/angry expressions of emotion and can compose simple sentences. Not surprisingly expressions of emotion and satifaction of physical needs take up most of the conversation and the apes learn far slower than a human child.
Since the apes are capable of composing their own sentences using the correct context and not just giving a "parrot" type response or request, I think it is very useful to comapre what they are communicating to (say) what a child's response might be. I also think it's tad unfair that some scientists entirely dismiss the work of people like Jane Goodall based on the claim that her data is corrupt because she "inadvertently trained" the chimps with food and artificial situations.
Many people (including scientists) insist all animal behaviour is instinctive. Yes humans have far "superior" cognative skills when compared to any other animal, but we are still animals. Why is it taken as the default position that all animals are some sort of organic automotron except for humans? - Is this not a religious throwback to the idea that humans are endowed with a "soul"? - Is it not far more likely that emotion, cognition and language "emerge" from increasingly sophisticated brain and social structures, and that many of these "wetware features" could reasonably be expected to be similar in closely related species such as humans and the great apes?
As for monkeys prostituting themselves, if penguins do it, why not primates?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Slight errors:
3. Wife takes money.
4. Wife goes shopping.
> And lastly, he watched capuchin prostitution!
How many washers did they charge him to watch? And did he "get his money's worth"?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
this isnt redundant, its the mods not reading when it was posted.
Big deal. Five minutes of C-SPAN will show you the same thing . . .
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Uhh, just to be clear, day-traders buy and sell stocks, options, and financial instruments.
They are not selling themselves, rather, they are buying/selling a "product". No, they aren't prostitutes. More like pimps with a penchant for promotion.
These quotes tend to be based on the most outrageous assumptions possible. For example, you could make the (terrible) assumption that only financial capital matters. So, if you have a PhD and just got a job for $150,000 a year, then bought a $200,000 house for 10% down, you now have a debt of $180,000 - so your wealth is negative, and you are one of the poorest Americans. Or if you're a retiree whose pension plan provides you $20,000 per year forever, at 4% interest rate your wealth must be $500,000, so you're at the top.
So it really depends on which items you're counting and how you're counting - these are easy examples of very stupid mistakes real economists and accountants rarely make, but the point is to show you that this is easy to manipulate.
Last I heard, the richest 1% had about 32% of the national wealth - which is obviously still large. But income inequality is more important - the top 10% make about 45% of the US's income. If you've ever worked in a team, you know this is basically how it works - for any given period, about 1 out of 8 does about half the work. If you think this is a bad thing, consider "Communist" China - their income inequality, as measured by Gini index, is a bit worse than the American inequality.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
~Vexed and loving it!