Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

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> But what good is it to you, say, to know that I had a warm friendship with my grandmother's partner and that he was the only person ever to manage to teach me how to play backgammon well? I'd guess- not much.

I think you dramatically underestimate the power of people to empathize, which requires great intelligence and (yes) is vulnerable to manipulation.

When you, a virtual stranger to me, write about a "warm friendship" with an elderly person who taught you to "play backgammon well", an avalanche of emotional associations surrounding happiness, childhood, security, caring and many other things wash over me.

Which brings me to the point that communication is an intellectual, emotional, and all-encompassing phenomenon and our attempts to scientifically understand communication between sentient beings (including interspecies) is at present unequal to our ability to perceive meaningful communication is occurring.

One day our scientific understanding of primate cognition may better explain the ability of humans to communicate with non-humans. Until that time, I am among those who trust the reports of Dr. Francine Patterson, Dr. Ronald Cohn, and others who have communicated directly with Koko that Koko was capable of communicating meaningfully.

EDIT: add "scientific" to first sentence of last paragraph.

>> When you, a virtual stranger to me, write about a "warm friendship" with an elderly person who taught you to "play backgammon well", an avalanche of emotional associations surrounding happiness, childhood, security, caring and many other things wash over me.

Let me ask you then: how do you know that what I reported is true? Maybe this "warm friendship" I report, never really happened. Maybe only I experienced it as a "warm friendship". Maybe I only remember it now as such, my recollection distroted by the passage of time, or wishful thinking.

You can as easily empathise with a misreported emotion as you can with an accurately reported one. That is a bit of a problem when what you are looking for is some understanding of objective reality.

>> Which brings me to the point that communication is an intellectual, emotional, and all-encompassing phenomenon and our attempts to scientifically understand communication between sentient beings (including interspecies) is at present unequal to our ability to perceive meaningful communication is occurring.

Well, sure. But just because we don't fully understand communication doesn't mean we'll trust anything anyone says about communicating with an animal.

Like, we don't know whether there are other technological civlisations out there but that doesn't mean we'll believe all the reports of alien visitations and so on.

Regarding the authenticity of your anecdote, I was very clear to state

> I think you dramatically underestimate the power of people to empathize, which requires great intelligence and (yes) is vulnerable to manipulation.

Second, when I say I trust these reporters it's because I don't have access to more authoritative information or analyses, but I still maintain a reasonable skepticism.

That is, I defer to those presumed to be experts while acknowledging that the scientific value of the claims of said experts are in debate.

I believe the people who report meaningful communication with Koko themselves believe they are having meaningful communication. I acknowledge that the scientific understandings of communication, understanding, and cognition cannot easily be brought to bear.

Basically, I try to keep a nuanced view especially because, from what I understand, ethnological reports are considered to be important in the fields of primatology and anthropology.

EDIT: remove extraneous pronoun

>> Second, when I say I trust these reporters it's because I don't have access to more authoritative information or analyses, but I still maintain a reasonable skepticism.

I just finished reading this (one of the references in the wikipedia article):

Petitto, L. A., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1979). On the evidence for linguistic abilities in signing apes. Brain and Language, 8(2), 162-183.

Quick version: Patterson's research with Koko was poorly documented and does not stand up to scrutiny. For instance, instead of compiling a corpus of Koko's utterances she presented only individual examples. This makes it impossible to know whether an utterance reported as being in context in a specific situation was actually as claimed- because we have no idea how often Koko signed the same utterance in different contexts [the article needs Elsevier access. See my profile email if you have questions].

It is possible to find many more examples of strong criticisms of Patterson's research with Koko, as well as other similar research (Gardner and Gardner with Washoe and Terrace and Bever with Nim Chimpsky). Basically, I don't think there's anyone who thinks apes have shown any linguistic ability (well, apes except for humans, of course).

>> Regarding the authenticity of your anecdote (...)

Well, it is exactly the authenticity of my anecdote that is what a scientific analysis would need to determine. Our ability to empathise is not questioned. The question is whether we can use reports of our feelings as evidence to make claims about the nature of reality.

If I visit my ancient ancestors' ruined citadel on the Athens Akroplois, my chest might heave with emotion. But what does that tell us about my ancestors, or their building of the Akropolis (or even about whether they were my ancestors in the first place)?

What information can you get from reports of an emotional state, other than that someone reports an emotional state?

The old "our science is limited, so I will 'trust' garbage emotional arguments."

Yours is an unfortunate interpretation of what I intended to say, which may be my fault for not fully elaborating.

Our science is limited and we should apply it to the best of our ability. The dubious methodology employed by Dr. Patterson undercuts many of the scientific claims she makes.

But in the fields of primatology (and anthropology) first hand accounts ("thick description" practiced in ethnology) are considered data though not quite in the sense of quantifiable, numerical data we are used to in engineering and computer science.

The people who have direct contact with Koko and provide descriptions of their communication with Koko are documenting their empirical experience, observations that provide detail and bias.

Taking another approach, communicating with Koko is basically an organism-to-organism example of a Turing test and, from what I understand, human evaluators of Koko's communication tend to conclude Koko was communicating intelligently.

Also, labeling emotional reactions, as they pertain to communication, "garbage" is probably a mistake. Emotions are quite important in human communication, and emotions are increasingly important, for example, in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. Dismissing emotions wholesale as "garbage" is probably a scientific error.

EDIT: Add last paragraph. Revise first sentence of last paragraph.

The problem with all of this is that using these kinds of emotional reactions to evaluate research can lead to making some significant errors that can cause real harm.

As an example, facilitated communication was once touted as a way in which non-verbal autistic people could communicate with the outside world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication). The facilitators thought it worked. Parents thought it worked. It felt great to be able to talk to your kids who you could never talk to before.

The problem is, it was complete bunk. If you did any kind of actually blinded test, such as showing one picture to the facilitator and another to the subject, they would write out what the facilitator saw. The facilitators themselves weren't even aware they were doing this.

But on the basis of this completely pseudoscientific method, there had been parents who had been accused of sexual assault of their children and kicked out of their house because of it, when in reality the abuse had just been imagined by the facilitator.

Emotions are definitely important in communication, and communicating emotions with animals is definitely possible.

But there are real reasons for demanding better evidence before claiming that you are interpreting language on behalf of some other person or animal.

> quantifiable, numerical data we are used to in engineering and computer science

You make it sound like quantifiable, numerical data is a fairly niche thing, but of course it's used in pretty much every field of scientific inquiry.

Science is the practice of using the best tools we have to better understand the world around us. Subjective description of interactions with the world around us is just a very basic baseline from which to start inquiry, not something that you can say has led to meaningful results.

In this case, it doesn't even necessarily require substantial numerical data to evaluate these claims; just basic blinding procedures, like evaluating the results of Koko describing something that she saw that her handler did not, and getting some basic statistics over a number of interactions to see if they do better than chance.

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