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Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

The base perspective of these types of 'discoveries' always seems to come with an underlying belief or assertion that our natural world is incapable and dumb. Why do these scientists assume the worst as a starting point?

What makes these types of discoveries become headlines? I don't get it.

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Experimental science is all based around ruling out the null hypothesis. For that it needs to be falsifiable.

The hypothesis 'the dog can differentiate between A and B' is very hard to falsify. Because the dog could differentiate, but choose to not act. You would need a fairly complete understanding of the dogs mental workings, and scanners to study them.

On the other hand, 'the dog can't differentiate between A and B' is much easier to falsify. If you repeat an experiment a sufficient amount of times and the dog consistently has different behavior between A and B, you can rule this null hypothesis out.

That is the real reason we always 'assume the worst'. Because 'assume the worst' is the easiest to scientifically rule out.

EDIT: I would suggest this video by Veritasium, which also touches on this, at a very fundamental level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKA4w2O61Xo.

That's an excellent explanation!

What part of the scientific method would you have them invoke to start from the assertion that the natural world is very intelligent while crafting experiments?

When I accidentally stepped on my dogs paw as a teen, the dog looked hurt and disappointed. The same dog barked at my sister when she tried to stick a pencil up his nose.

Did the dog differentiate the scenarios based on intent or did it recognize my apologetic behaviour as non threatening? Or was it because my interactions with the dog were almost always positive while my sisters were not? Or simply because a pencil up the nose might have hurt a lot? Or because it was a hunting dog and we had hunted together multiple times? Was the dog actually disappointed in me or had they evolved to fake that by adjusting their eyebrows to this situation? Or did I project that emotion?

> Did the dog differentiate the scenarios based on intent or did it recognize my apologetic behaviour as non threatening?

Apologetic behavior is a pretty good post-facto signal of intent! Humans also rely on it with each other. So I'm not sure that relying on sort of secondary signals like that is a real problem for the theory that dogs can read and care about human intent.

Science is based on these kind of assumptions. "Assume nothing."

It's a game of stepping stones. It does however say a lot about the state of today's science - that is - how far we've come. We haven't come very far.

But, like the parent said, the scientists aren't assuming nothing, they're assuming the natural world is dumb.

Edit: I'm not sure why this is so controversial. The essence is: every experiment starts with an assumption.

It's the opposite : you assume that the natural world is smart, but they don't assume anything, they just test the hypothesis that dogs are smart, and in this way validate part of your assumption.

I think it's a better way to deal with things, as your assumption might not hold scrutiny very well : what is natural world ? Are worms part of it ? What about rocks ? Can we deduce from there that worms and rocks are able to distinguish intentional from non intentional actions ?

If you have ever written a game KI or something alike:

the most simple algorithms (few lines of code) can perceive the observer into thinking there is advanced KI at work.

Same might be the case with natural intelligence.

What does KI mean?

It means AI in German (Künstliche Intelligenz).

I never made that art / artificial connection before, but in retrospect it's obvious.

Finding wordroots is fun and sometimes illuminating.

The first sentence of the abstract is "When dogs interact with humans, they often show appropriate reactions to human intentional action. But it is unclear from these everyday observations whether the dogs simply respond to the action outcomes or whether they are able to discriminate between different categories of actions"

They don't assume they are dumb, they just don't assume anything, as they should.

Really? Because it seems to me that they suspected the opposite - that animals are intelligent - and they designed an experiment to attempt to prove it.

What other assumption can you start with?

Assuming the natural world is dumb is simple, consistent, and easy to explain.

If you start with the assumption the natural world is “smart”, what does that even mean? Does it mean that we should assume dog can do calculus, but choose not to? Or that dogs are capable of complex communication, but also choose not to?

Saying the natural world is “smart” is a pretty meaningless statement. How smart is “smart”, everyone will have a different opinion, so you can’t use it as the basis for discovery or discussion.

However everyone understands what the natural world being dumb means. From there you can start the journey of proving step-by-step where the smarts are.

I don’t think that the assumption is that the natural world is dumb. The scientific discovery process aims to highlight new insights to help us make a better and useful description of the world. Implying that the starting point is "dumb" is incorrect. The starting point is a blank page, that will be filled by the research, whatever they find out.

I understand what your trying to say. But I don’t agree with words you’ve used.

We don’t assume nothing, that’s clearly not true. A basic assumption we make is that the natural world is capable of perceiving us and responding to our actions.

The question we’re normally testing is how complex the process between perception and response is. As general rule we assume that process is extremely simple (“dumb”), and work to understand how complex (“smart”) it actually is.

For example, in this paper the scientists didn’t start by proving the dogs were capable of observing the humans and responding to their actions. That was a given. What was tested was how complex the dogs perception and decision making process was.

Using words like “dumb” and “smart” are extremely crude. But it’s the words used by GP and OP.

But it isn't "assume nothing", because it's just a different assumption. Science doesn't treat each new human person as if they were not conscious. Science works off reasonable inferences all the time. We reasonably assume that a full-looking bag is full, that big objects are heavy, that snakes are dangerous.

I think it is reasonable to assume that domesticated animals are at least somewhat intelligent. After all, they convinced us to shelter, protect and feed them!

There is an even simpler answer to your question than the ones other, very good, comments are pointing out. All of the scientists who unquestioningly believed that dogs could tell the difference didn't do this study. All of the scientists who unquestioningly believed dogs couldn't, didn't do this study. All studies are done by whichever members of the scientist population don't believe the affirmative or the negative.

I don’t think this is right either.

All studies are done by scientists who are desperate to get published and have their work referenced.

Even a cursory glance at that corner of funny-cute-etc-animals YouTube videos will convince that animals, especially mammals, have at least very complex internal and social lives.

This study isn't treating dogs as if they were not conscious or intelligent.

It's isolating a particular aspect of intelligence to determine if it exists in a particular fashion. In this case, the question of if and how dogs are aware of human agency. This is a very interesting question.

The exact same falsifying process is used with studies about humans. Using these processes we've significantly changed our understanding of human cognition in the last century so it seems like it's working!

No one's suggesting that dogs or people aren't intelligent. The question is exactly how this intelligence functions, because there are many ways to reach a particular conclusion.

The first three sentences of the abstract contradict your comment; the scientists started with a question, not an assumption.

>When dogs interact with humans, they often show appropriate reactions to human intentional action. But it is unclear from these everyday observations whether the dogs simply respond to the action outcomes or whether they are able to discriminate between different categories of actions. Are dogs able to distinguish intentional human actions from unintentional ones, even when the action outcomes are the same?

It is newsworthy because new evidence has been found.

I suppose because until you actually show that something is the case, experimentally, it's just guess work either way. The world is full of different kinds of people. You, for instance, obviously see dogs as intelligent mammals. But there's also the person who buys a puppy for their 8 year old, and sees it as a fluffy clockwork toy that eats and shits. Not only do they not bother to wonder if it's sentient or intelligent, they actively suppress those thoughts because they are inconvenient thoughts. Those thoughts mean you have to care how the thing 'feels'.

Because of Descartes, who felt animals were just meat machines lacking consciousness, a bundle of reflexes as it were.

This longish essay is a good introduction to the philosophical history behind your question: https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/Descartes_versus_Cudwor...

One of the reasons is that for many centuries the Western thought was deeply influenced by Christian thought as formed mainly by Thomas Aquinas. According to him, animals are devoid of "the life of reason" with all consequences (basically, we can do what we want with them). It turned out, animals can feel, can be happy and unhappy, and can understand much more than we had imagined. This not a result of our intuition, but years of research. Nevertheless, the harm has been done, and animals have been cruelly abused because of the underlying belief that they don't feel (or, even if they do, it is ethically neutral). It's 2021 and there are several companies still testing their products on cosmetics, for example. At least natural fur is not a thing anymore.

it also doesnt help that on page 1 of the most popular religion it basically says that humans have dominion over all the animals on earth, or some sort of slosh to that effect

It’s worth noting that Aquinas was using ‘reason’ in a quite narrow and specific sense (very roughly, the ability to think about things as such via concepts). His position was not inconsistent with dogs having emotions or various forms of what we’d call intelligence.

On the other hand, in medieval and early modern Europe non-wild animals that did bad things were often given full trials with a judge, jury, prosecutor, defense [1]. That seems to suggest a view that animals were more than just unreasoning beasts.

[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/02/medieval-animal-tri...

Human exceptionalism is deeply ingrained in most people: We aren't animals after all.

We _are_ exceptional in quite a few areas. Our communication skills are unmatched anywhere in the animal kingdom and even the best animals fail at anything higher than primary school math. We also constantly see animals failing to adapt to the modern world with things like cars, screens and sometimes even glass.

So I do think it's newsworthy that animals are able to parse complex human action and intent.

Humans are good at human things. I think the mistake is equating human things to exceptionalism or intelligence.

I agree. We can all be exceptional in our own ways.

Sharks are exceptionally good at maintaining their species (self cloning for large animals is amazing). Dogs (and wolves) have exceptional senses of smell. The hearts of most bird species are exceptionally better than those of mere mammals.

However, when it comes to the characteristics where we think humans are exceptional, I’ll only allow another animal to take the top spot if they start an argument.

To date, no animal has even started the argument… much less won it.

Humans are literally animals.

The commenter's point was, I think, sarcastic; the average member of the public thinks of themselves as qualitively different from animals, and indeed our ethical systems are built around that.

I am hesitant to add yet another response as you already have a few very good ones. However . . .

My wife and I like to call the studies that prove the obvious, "no shit studies," because they really aren't surprising. In this specific context, very few scientists doubt that animals have emotions and intelligence. The thing is, you still have to do the experiment to know for certain. It happens fairly regularly that we discover things that seem obvious are actually wrong.

> Why do these scientists assume the worst as a starting point?

You just described the Karl Popper criterion. [0] It's the most rigorous way of doing science. The same also kind of exists in law with the innocent "till proven guilty"

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

They’re not assuming that the natural world is stupid. They’re doing what good scientists do, which is to not take for granted that human interpretations of the world are universal/true/even make any kind of sense from the social standpoint of other mammals.

people didn’t even think animals felt pain until the 1980s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_animals#History

Similar timeline on babies. But I think it's important to distinguish "scientists" from "people" in this case. My mom witnessed my brother's circumcision, on the day of his birth. She knew without a doubt that he was in immense pain, which the doctor flatly denied. Similarly, people who work with animals have known that they feel pain since time immemorial.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies

> As recently as 1999, it was commonly stated that babies could not feel pain until they were a year old,

how would it even be possible to reach that conclusion?

Dogma needed it to be true so it was true.

This is one of these things that most people who deal with animals (so - almost everybody) knew for millenia but philosophers debated over cause it's interesting and you can show off how smart you are and quote classics.

You will have a very hard time taming an animal if you think it feels no pain.

No... That's not true. You're off by over one hundred years for the Western world. The UK passed the Cruelty to Animals act in 1876

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruelty_to_Animals_Act,_1876

The act states that:

> "Researchers would be prosecuted for cruelty, unless they conformed to its provisions, which required that an experiment involving the infliction of pain upon animals to only be conducted when "the proposed experiments are absolutely necessary for the due instruction of the persons [so they may go on to use the instruction] to save or prolong human life"

It also contains punishments for not giving animals anesthestia, which is a ridiculous waste of resources if "people didn't even think animals felt pain until the 1980s."

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