We lost tremendous amount of short term memory thus chimps can do this, we can’t | Hacker News Reader

We lost tremendous amount of short term memory thus chimps can do this, we can’t

twitter.com

15 pointsvo2maxer12 comments

I'm getting tired of these "chain of tweets each ending in a pithy scientific claim that sounds really impressive but is probably wrong for technical reasons".

I agree with your annoyance at these types of threads. The contrast in this chain is the animated discussion between the originator and various scientists including neuroscientists, primatologists, etc.

Maybe I'm not seeing the responses properly but it looks like nobody on the thread is an expert scientist. Within several tweets, the main claim of the OP was more or less put into strong doubt.

Some of those involved in the discussion:

Brad Wyble [1, 2]

[1] https://psych.la.psu.edu/directory/bpw10

[2] http://wyblelab.com/

Sharon Rodobre OBE [3, 4]

[3] https://lafeber.com/vet/redrobe/

[4] https://blooloop.com/features/twycross-zoo-sharon-redrobe-on...

Claudio Tennie [5, 6, 7]

[5] https://sites.google.com/view/claudiotennie/cv

[6] https://sites.google.com/view/claudiotennie

[7] https://uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/mathematisch-naturwisse...

Tom Roth [8]

[8] https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/staffmembers/1/tom-roth

Patrick A. Jansen [9]

[9] https://www.wur.nl/en/Persons/Patrickdr.ir.-PA-Patrick-Janse...

checked out all your links; really not seeing how an animal vet qualifies. The people I agree with are the ones on this list who are disagreeing with the original poster, and have the greatest qualifications in the area of interest (wyble and tennie).

I took your statement, “it looks like nobody on the thread is an expert scientist,” literally. It could be that I’m confused by what you mean with “expert scientist.” You qualified two from the list but questioned Sharon Redobre’s (I misspelled her name in my comment) inclusion as merely being a veterinarian. When I read her curriculum vitae [1], I can’t help but conclude that she is both, an expert in her field, primates and exotic animals, and a scientist based on the definitions I consulted [2, 3, 4].

I will not discuss the others you excluded; it would be tedious and belaboring the point.

Finally, I agree with those who refuted the original poster despite his answers to their counterpoint. Someone posted a claim that was argued with civility over the chain of comments, not unlike what happens in HN. How such a discussion is tiresome, I leave to individual preference. :-)

[1] https://uk.linkedin.com/in/sharon-redrobe-obe-11139912

[2] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/scie...

[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scientist

[4] https://sciencecouncil.org/about-science/10-types-of-scienti...

I noticed something really interesting around the 2:09 mark in the video - the chimp taps a box, and goes on to the next one very quickly, but realizes that the initial tap didn’t register properly and goes back to fix it.

I definitely commit a “mistap” error like that at least once a week on my phone / iPad. I’m not sure I can spot and fix them that quickly!

I didn't see anything in the article that supported this conclusion.

We did not evolve from chimps, we share a common ancestor, but we evolved (and continue to evolve) independently. We may have lost this ability or we may have never had it. Chimps could have developed it after branching off.

There is some discusión about how much training did the monkeys had and how much did the humans had. Which paper is has the best comparison?

Is there any evidence that this is present in the common ancestor an is not a new development of the chimpanzees/bonobos?

Cook and Wilson (2010) show data from two subjects who were trained with a regime similar to the chimp (4 blocks/day for 75 days). They substantially out-performed the chimp, which successfully completed 80% of trials vs. 93 and 96.5 percent for the humans. Paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45629789_Do_young_c...

I wouldn't want to make strong claims on the size of the difference based on an N=3, but it's certainly sufficient as an existence proof, especially since the humans are performing near ceiling.

May I point out that it's racist to call them monkeys? The correct term is "ape".

Just kidding, btw, but I recall having heard something along this.

It is not racist to call them monkeys, but it is wrong. They are apes.

[I can blame my native language that is Spanish, where the words apes and monkeys are equivalent. Anyway, in the recent times it's more common to try to use each word for the different kinds of animals like in English. It's a good excuse, but the reality is that I was wrong.]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com