Hacker News Reader

Comment by username90 | Hacker News Reader

Humans are unique in that our rational reasoning is strong enough to reliably override or control our intuition and feelings. Remove that and we are just a normal mammal. Add that to other mammals and we could integrate them in society as full citizens.

For example, we aren't using millions of mammals to sit and label machine learning models all day. It is not because they can't create those labels, mammals are really good at a lot of tasks, it is because we can't make mammals sit and repeatedly do a task all day even when rewarded. They just lack the reasoning capacity to override their intuition to do it.

View on HN

> For example, we aren't using millions of mammals to sit and label machine learning models all day. It is not because they can't create those labels, mammals are really good at a lot of tasks, it is because we can't make mammals sit and repeatedly do a task all day even when rewarded. They just lack the reasoning capacity to override their intuition to do it.

We can. There are chimpanzees in neuroscience laboratories that perform repetitive tasks all day, every day, while they have electrodes hooked in their brain. It's actually disturbing that we submit them to this.

Here is an example: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep34685

> Procedure

> The experiment consisted of training and test sessions. We used ten versions of the pictures described above. Five pairs (1 and 32, 2 and 27, 3 and 23, 5 and 19, 8 and 15 hours) were used in the training sessions. When the chimpanzees touched the start key at the centre of the touchscreen monitor, images from one of the pairs were displayed side by side. The chimpanzees’ task was to touch the image of the fresher cabbage out of the two alternatives. Once the chimpanzees had chosen one of the two images, the stimuli disappeared. A food reward and chime were given for the correct response. A buzzer sounded when the chimpanzee made an error. Following a trial where the chimpanzee made an error, a correction trial, where only the correct image was presented, took place. The correction trials were included in the methodology to keep the chimpanzees motivated.

We could absolutely use chimpanzees to perform labeling of data for ML. But we shouldn't.

They didn't get the monkeys sit and do those for hours, just a short while per day.

> Each session consisted of 30 trials.

> The experiments took place over eight days, with the chimpanzees participating in five test sessions per day in order to cover all of the novel combinations within a day.

The study just affirms my point that it is hard to make monkeys do stuff for extended amounts of time or the experiment would have progressed much faster. The only way we have to motivate them is to give them food directly after completing a small task, and that motivation doesn't really work in the long run. You can't make them do an hour long task and then give them something.

Edit: Humans however have been shown capable to toil away with no reward whatsoever for years just to achieve some arbitrary goal or reward they believe exists. If this was just a question of degree then it shouldn't have been hard to get monkeys to do a days work with no rewards. Humans aren't a thousand times smarter than monkeys.

We can and do make nonhuman mammals sit and repeatedly do tasks all day even when rewarded. Neuroscience behavior experiments in rats, mice, and apes are exactly this.

Humans are considered much less exceptional than they were in the 1950s.

I'd say our big edge over other species is the scale of our social networks. For example, apes can have economies where they trade currency, but that economy is going to be limited to a single tribe.

> We can and do make nonhuman mammals sit and repeatedly do tasks all day even when rewarded.

I have never seen a study showing this. Where did you get this data from? You can make nonhuman mammals follow their instincts all day, but we can't extract much value from that. You can't make them do arbitrary tasks that are physically and mentally within their means all day. You can train animals to do a task once easily, but you can't train it to continue doing said task for the entire day so it can get fed by the end of the day.

You have some deep misconceptions about science, but state them with certainty anyway, and garner upvotes for this.

OK, I'm done with this forum.

But Isn't this exactly what a service dog does? I guess there's some nuance here, but I believe dogs specifically exhibit most things we assume are human only characteristics.

Where humans and dogs start to deviate is with tasks that require much more contemplation or require many steps. But dogs "in the moment" behavior seems to be shockingly similar to humans.

Dogs instincts are to help their packmates. They will do it all day long even with no rewards.

The superior but accidental rational capability of homo sapiens isn't the only significant distinction from other mammals.

(This rational capability needs much practice -- both in the group and the individual -- to become something approaching reliable.)

Although being a mammal favours the development of some co-operative behaviours (which vary according to environmental pressures), the other very unique characteristic is the theory of mind, i.e. the tendency to ascribe agency and even psychology to events and other beings.

Sophisticated co-operation, language, and patterns of social cohesion begin in this perception/assumption of agency. Sophisticated reasoning then follows as the perception/assumption of agency proves a correct guess and humans begin to think together. (Dennett's hypothesis about debugging thought.)

An unfortunate result of the theory of mind is the chaos of human delusions.

I'm not sure if that is true. To me it makes more sense that mammals just lack the rational capability to act on that information. Like, dogs clearly understands that others are thinking and feeling beings.

>For example, we aren't using millions of mammals to sit and label machine learning models all day

Aren’t we? Look at Recaptcha

All humans do decisions primary in intuition and feelings. We do have good logic, but actual on the ground decision making is not based on that.

I think reliably is stretching it, but yeah. We do plan longer term than most other animals.

Almost every human is reliable enough to go to work/school every day and do their tasks even when they don't feel like it. That is pretty darn reliable.

Edit: If you lack that level of reliability you will be diagnosed with a psychological condition of some form. So we absolutely expect humans to reliably override their feelings using rational reasoning.

A substantial fraction of humans in WEIRD societies don’t do their tasks when they don’t feel like it, and they spend most of two decades being trained to do it. Most humans are not historically that reliable. It’s incredibly difficult, verging on impossible, to turn hunter gatherers into agriculturalists. Turning agriculturalists into industrial workers is comparatively easy but still the work of decades. People really, really hate being told what to do, being micromanaged, being punctual, being ranked, doing work that feels meaningless, practically the entire suite of behaviors necessary for industrial society.

> And that was a theme that cropped up again in Professor Blumin’s class, that there were two great working class traditions that echoed through the ages, and they were

> 1) avoiding work and 2) drinking

...

> Those great satanic mills, where women and children worked in shifts at great water- or steam-driven sewing and spinning machines, stories of little kids getting their hands mangled by the machinery? One of the major reasons women and children were preferred was because they would actually show up on time every day, and stay sober around all those hand-manglers.

https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/96390732283/happy-la...

Makes you wonder if they’re actually the smart ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com