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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2112 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 26, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The article that @George_E_Hale linked suggests that scientists think it’s only a handful of individual orcas that are responsible for all the attacks, and that they might be motivated by revenge after a sailing boat caused injury to one. It’s pretty interesting. I doubt it’s a ‘humans are bad’ meme, as yet they don’t seem interested in killing humans themselves even though they easily could.

There’s a lot of research into studying the way other intelligent animals communicate, but much less on actually attempting to communicate with them. Many scientists consider it unethical even to try. There should be a far greater public investment into seeing whether complex communication with cognitively advanced animals like dolphins/orcas, elephants and octopuses is possible. Primatologists do this, but only because with great apes the similarities with us are so undeniable.

Now that LLMs have shown how banal a lot of human cognition is, there is a strong case that a ‘strong dividing line’ between us and other smart animals might be more of a blur, and lesser but still intelligent species could well be capable of reasoning about the world in ways we’ve largely dismissed or ignored.

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