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!"

Comments

Monkey prostitutes

[Firethorn]

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.

Re:Monkey prostitutes

[zotz]

"I think it simply goes to show how similar day traders are to monkeys."

"He also devised two games that showed monkeys could end up feeling as if they'd won or lost, even though they'd actually broken even. Their seemingly irrational preference for the "winning" game had Chen questioning how useful the monkeys would be as a touchstone for studying human behavior. Then he found that a similar study of day traders conducted by another researcher resulted in the same psychological preference. Even when they came out even, the day traders irrationally preferred to feel they won, rather than lost money."

I don't think it is irrational at all. If I can play two games where the money outcome for each is that I break even, but one leaves me feeling good and one leaves me feeling down, it is comepletely rational under those circumstances to prefer to play the game where I at least feel good when I am done playing.

Now, it might indeed be irrational to prefer a game where I lost a lot and felt like I won to one where I won a lot but felt like I lost. I could of course just be chalking the losses up to entertainment expenses.

all the best,

drew

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=zotzbro
UFOs, Paper Planes, and underwater smoke rings...

Re:There's only been half a book so far..

[moosesocks]

I concur. Freakonomics stripped a bit too much of the science away in an attempt to make the book accessible.

Naked Economics tries to do the same thing as Freakonomics, but achieves a much higher degree of success. Freakonomics was dumbed down to an almost insulting level, and many of the examples provided felt somewhat outlandish. Naked Economics does a much better job of distilling economic theory down to plain english, and picks much more relevant examples. I also found it to be a pretty entertaining read:

"The sultan of Brunei earned billions of dollars in oil revenues in the 1970s. Suppose he had stuffed that cash under his mattress and left it there. He would have had several problems. First, it is very difficult to sleep with billions of dollars stuffed under the mattress. . ."

(Yes.... I did pull that quote from one of the Amazon reviews, but it's a rather accurate representation of the text)

Bonobo prostitution

[dargaud]

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...

Or maybe

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:Or maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly you simply are stereotyping cats. And you are being silly for the sake of making a joke but I have to correct you.

a cat does not inherently act that way, humans promote that behaivoir in them. I have had 5 cats in my lifetime as well as trained 4 more for friends because of how cats act from my rearing.

Cats if raised correctly will tolerate anything and can learn that humans are harmless and will not hurt me. Instilling this fact (you can even instill this fact into the cats mind of a dog if you have the dog trained correctly)

All of the cats I have raide or trained sleep normal human hours. they did not go "catting" all night but slept on the bed with the humans. They would come when called, even play fetch. they would not bite or scratch a human even with extended petting them backwards and intentionally annoying them. They would put their mouth on you but not bite down. I have also trained 3 cats recently to respond to commands like sit, lie down, and to speak.

cats can be trained, cats also can be incredibly social, have human sleep patterns and actually do eat a balanced diet, they want mostly protein which is right for a carnivore.

Only cats that are left to roam and not trained act the way yours does.

BTW, thay are not attracted to keyboards and books ,they are attracted to human attention. they actually crave it if they are the only cat, if you have multiple cats you only have cats that dont need humans for their interaction. They are social, and if you train them right are dwonright vocal and will not shut up at times. Hell our current cat asks the dog if it will feed it. The last kitten I trained was convinced the full sized rough collie was so harmless it was trying to play with it like another kitten and the two slept together on a regular basis if the kitten was banished from the bedroom. (it was exceptionally smart and knew that under the covers was hands to be pet with and would find a way under the covers to locate those hands or to simply sleep curled up against a human or two for warmth. Kind of freaks you out to roll over and feel a furball where you dont expect it.)

cats are very trainable, anda if trained right from a young age, amaze the uneducated masses that think that cats all act a certian way. They dont, only untrained cats left to act like antisocial misfits do.

you train your dog, Why dont you train your cat? Posting Anon to not get flooded with requests. My training services are availabe online and I will not train any kitten older than 7 weeks. YOU HAVE TO start early and for 2-3 months. and no I will not give out my secrets, I make big bucks at this.

Yes, but TRAINED

[Moraelin]

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

Re:Yes, but TRAINED

[Moraelin]

sorry to break your party but EVERYTHING you know and do as a human comes from the TRAINING you received... a school for humans works on the same basic principles as a school for dogs, gorillas, etc .. the only diff is that humans seem to have a way better capacity to assimilate that training .. or it's just that the methods are better suited for them.

Sorry to break it to you, but if all that school left you with is a bunch of pavlovian reflexes, like a school for dogs would, then you probably shouldn't be a human to start with. I will assume you were just going for a figure of speech, instead.

A characteristic of humans is that you can also think about it later, and change that training. You can later realize stuff like, to use that old joke as an example, "wth, mom's cutting off the end of the pot roast was only because she didn't have a bigger pot. I have one, so I can change that recipe." Or you can move to another country/group/whatever and realize stuff like, "oh, here it's impolite to blow your nose at the dinner table, like dad kept doing, let's refrain from doing it." You don't continue doing it for the rest of your life, like a trained dog would.

The difference basically is that you also have the intellect to understand _why_ something is done, _when_ it's done, and when _not_ to do it. It's not just stimulus-reaction reflexes based on pure association. You have the mental power to realize when an existing reflex is stupid, and force yourself to stop or develop a better one.

Well, or _should_ have the mental power. Maybe I'm assuming too much ;)

That's how all human progress happened too. Some guy had been dragging stuff around all his life, and then comes up with the idea of rolling bigger stuff on logs. Some other guy had been pushing stuff on logs, and notices he doesn't really need the whole log: the end discs will do. Voila, you have wheels now.

And to get back to the economy: some guy had been dealing with gold coins all his life, then he figures out that you don't need to actually carry the coin, a note saying "this is worth X ounces of gold" will do the trick just nicely. Voila, now you have paper money.

_That_ is the point. While an animal might just blindly apply a reflex again and again, a human can choose which reflexes to apply and which not. There is usually some rationale and logic behind whether you do something or not. Whereas training an animal to mechanically do the same thing, doesn't really tell you much about the humans. As long as the monkeys just apply some trained reflexes, as opposed to having a reason for it, you can't really say, "heh, day traders act just like monkeys." That's only because you trained the monkeys to imitate it. No more, no less.

Re:they are like us

[eennaarbrak]

Just because we're genetically similar does not mean we have the same cognitive abilities. Which makes the fact that traders behave like monkeys so much more interesting.

For a nice expose on the myths of animal "training", take a look at "Do Animals Think?" by Clive Wynne (Easy search on Amazon). In a nutshell, there is no conclusive evidence that animals can "learn" beyond what is required for their natural environment. There is a big difference between Snake! Everyone watch out! and Hmm, I see a dangerous snake, maybe I should tell my rival that there is a nice juicy banana over there!

Re:I've read the book...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh noes! You left out how the top 20% of wage earners pay 80% of the taxes, and how the top 50% pay 96.03% of the taxes.

Also notice how well the middle class has been doing all the years...after all, that's who the top 1% are paying their money to.

In other words, no shit. Every citizen can't have a multimillion-doller corporation, be a CEO, etc.

Would you rather us all be equally broke and unhappy, or just the ones who choose to be that way?

Re:Humans are not trained?

[porcupine8]

Human pick up language naturally, without being explicitly taught. All humans (without a severe neurological disorder) do this automatically and are fluent to a nearly-adult level by the age of 5, without instruction. Yes, it is common in Western societies to "teach" kids new vocabulary, but there are cultures where this is not done. Also, correcting 2-5 year olds' grammar generally has no effect on their usage - they're just going to make certain mistakes until they get to the right stage, and then they'll stop, regardless of parents' attempts to correct them.

Apes, on the other hand, do not pick up language unless specifically taught. With explicit training, they can learn a limited vocabulary (100-200 words total, which is how many human 4-year-olds learn every couple weeks), but they can't master grammar with any amount of training. There is no denying that the human process of language acquisition is a process that is different from many other types of learning and that our primate cousins cannot replicate.

Yes, they have their own methods of communication, and we have as much trouble (if not more, since they're not training us) learning theirs as they do ours. But human language and grammar works differently from any other "animal language" studied.

Re:I've read the book...

[Luyseyal]

Right... so the top 1% should be paying 95% of the taxes. :p

Back in the real world, we nearly have a flat tax already.

-l