6mo ago

Bonobos recognize when humans are ignorant, try to help

arstechnica.com

14 comments

We're gonna need a lot of bonobos...
My brother told me this story of the raccoons living in his backyard. The mother had figured out how to defeat a new supposedly raccoon-proof garbage can and lined up the cubs to demonstrate. The first two watched with rapt attention while a third had a kind of dazed look. The mother then came back and smacked him in the head before showing them again. That seems like a pretty good indication to me that she had a good grasp of the mental state of her cubs?
- Could be just that the third one mouthed off, but you couldn't understand it. Or maybe the mom's trainer was giving secret hand signals from a hidden location.
My dog certainly has a theory of my mind, she's always out in front guessing where I'll go and happiest when she gets it right, or suggesting ideas when it seems I lack one.
- Yeah. This stuff where animals don’t know what’s going on, and it’s a surprising breakthrough when we find out they do, must come from people who either don’t know up from down or have never interacted with animals.
  Unlike us, they have to survive on their own and so they can’t afford to be clueless about stuff. We have the fancy fancy brain, but they’ve still got all the standard stuff for understanding the world.
  
  Team the medias indicators that science has just discovered it. Is crap. Its more science has just proved or documented something ot has suspected for a long while.
  Anyone with a dog knows they have such ideas and thoughts. But recognising it via anecdotal evidence and actually proving it in a way that stands up to challenge are 2 very different things.
  Unfortunately modern media really dose not benifit fro pointing that out.

14 comments