The more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be (2003) | Hacker News Reader

The more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be (2003)

theguardian.com

87 pointscraneca020 comments

"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."

I was about to post exactly this. :-)

"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"

I can't wait for the day that we are able to give a dolphin a brainwave controlled arm prosthetic and some building material/tools. I feel they're just as smart as humans but we just brush them off as stupid because they haven't built anything. But I man what do you really expect from them? They have flippers for hands and minimal resources to build anything.

That's a future just crazy enough to happen: forget about AI singularities. Just augment the other intelligent beings that inhabit the Earth. The aliens were here all along.

Of course they might be a bit peeved when they find recipes for themselves on the Internet.

Meanwhile, the more dolphins study man, the dumber we turn out to be.

You have to wonder, if they had hands and arms instead of flippers, they might have built civilizations like humans have.

Looking forward, these cross-coastal cities and villages, and even underwater towns, may come. We each have our part to play, humans with tech, dolphins with point.

Perhaps they built the civilizations, realized the pointlessness, went back to frolicking in the water and ended up with flippers from lack of use.

My roundabout point is, why do they have to build civilizations? Because we humans think that's the pinnacle of advancement? Perhaps the dolphins have a difference in opinion. Perhaps they're debating this very idea over some delicious herring: "do you think humans are intelligent?"

"Mmm, could be. But they keep scurrying around building pointless crap, so I don't know."

"Yeah, good point. More herring, darling?"

Naw, the irony is that we think that we are studying the dolphins while, actually, the dolphins are studying us and we still have not yet caught on to that! We're the ones in the zoo cage! And the dolphins are so smart that they can study and understand us without use of hands, computers, cameras, etc.

Would it be interesting science or newsworthy if dolphins ended up being bad at something? Isn't this just a form of selection bias?

Way back in 2010, Dr. Heywood Floyd had a dolphin "pet" in his home by the sea. Some people say he could talk to the dolphins, but I think that's just silly, something out of a movie.

I heard his son was fluent in dolphin language.

We should stop studying them before they get brighter than us and overthrow humanity.

That is such a (I don't know word to express my feelings...) "offensive"?, "humano-centric"? "hubris filled"? title. And exemplifies and perpetuates humankind's atrocious relationship with our fellow earthlings.

Dolphins are not turning out to be brighter. They were/are as bright as they always have been. Humans are the ones changing, losing a bit more of our ignorance and hubris.

This is still so pervasive that most people don't even recognize that as an "issue". Just like people hundreds of years ago wouldn't be phazed by the title "Negroid race is turning out to not be savage sub-humans after all".

The article is saying they're turning out to be brighter than we thought.

I said title and not article for a reason.

The title says the same thing.

"The more we study dolphins, the brighter they turn out to be" is obviously not saying our study causes them to become more intelligent.

I read the title as "The more we study dolphins, the brighter we realize they are." Perhaps it's a regional usage that's encouraging a different interpretation for you.

I think the term you're looking for is "anthropocentrism" [0], though I don't see how you can construe this article to take an anthropocentric point of view.

If anything, it's implicitly acknowledging that we're not as exceptional as we'd like to think.

The title doesn't even indicate that the dolphins' brightness is changing, but rather that we're increasingly perceiving them as bright.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocentrism

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