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Comment by mft_ | Hacker News Reader

> The animals had positive emotions when nursing, reuniting with family, cuddling with litter mates and running freely. Negative emotions came from situations involving social isolation, fights, castration and waiting in a slaughterhouse.

Not to be negative about the research, but I’m pretty sure I could have surmised the pigs’ emotional state in many of these situations (castration?!) without the benefit of a translator!

But I hope it’s successful, and they then develop beyond just positive vs. negative.

And then do cats. Please.

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> Not to be negative about the research, but I’m pretty sure I could have surmised the pigs’ emotional state in many of these situations (castration?!) without the benefit of a translator!

That's the point. The obvious emotional states are necessary in order to correctly label the data for training. The interesting part is to then use the trained model to identify emotional states in situations where it isn't so obvious.

If you train on obvious cases its not going to be a guarantee that your model is robust on less obvious cases.

Garbage in garbage out. How do we know the emotional states are what they are? Better to use as label something objectively measurable but costly to observe like some internal brain or chemical state of the pigs.

How about just named after the situations they were observed in? Then when you give it a new pig sound, the model can classify it and we can decide how to respond to "slaughterhouse=0.8, castration=0.2" or whatever.

I'm especially suspicious of fighting being negative. Humans can get pleasure from fighting. Why not pigs?

I think the most important thing is that people/scientists are slowly acknowledging that animals can have emotions and aren't just machines. I hope this acknowledgment will help improving conditions for animals in farms.

I think anyone who has worked on the topic or had any experience with animals knows that, to varying degrees, animals can be happy or sad/distressed. Most people simply don't know about or would rather ignore the realities of industrial meat production.

I don’t disagree with you, but to the parents point, there’s a pretty long philosophical -> scientific history which held that animals didn’t have emotions

Is there? My understanding is that the widely held belief was that they didn't have fine grained emotions that were comparable to our own. So far this research doesn't change that, but might lay the ground work for exploring that further.

There is definitely a long history of thinking of humans as something separate from animals. We tend to define intelligence and sentience by the traits humans are showing and only slowly it becomes mainstream to realize that animals also can have complex behaviors and communication, not in the human way but still complex.

Descartes described animals as being basically machines without sensation, and I recall many college debates with a Kantian prof who towed a similar line (probs rhetorically, defending the text). More examples of this probably exist, the extent to which there were widely held beliefs pro or against I’m unsure. I don’t mean to be hand wavy maliciously, I just have distinct memories of some of these zany ideas from an almost degree in modern Phil

While I appreciate the sentiment pigs IMO are the wrong animals to start.

Pigs are supposed to be cheap and people aren’t supposed to care if we kill them, they become food, and maybe someday as carriers for human organs for transplant. Same with animals like chickens, just raise them and eat them. Seems pointless to focus on the emotions of these creatures. Better to start with animals like dogs and cats that are more meaningful to societies.

Pigs are highly emotional and smart. We could easily be eating dogs and keeping pigs as pets if society evolved differently.

"People aren't supposed to care" because that would have the catastrophic impact of pigs that are being farmed potentially living happier lives, and perhaps more people not eating them?

Because I don't think pigs are "supposed" to be slaughter fodder any more than <insert oppressed human class> is supposed to be enslaved/genocided/paid less/made into soap.

That’s the point. Pigs are very smart and emotional and people absolutely should care how they are being held. A lot of industrial farming is basically enormous cruelty and people should care.

And how are we going to reconcile that with the fact we will still want to eat pigs or use them for other purposes against their will?

A good start would be to treat them better while they are alive. It makes a difference whether their whole life is hell or whether they have a good life and only one bad day when they get killed.

Sure, any creature should get a good life if we can give it to them, but how do we achieve that at scale?

I mean for this to work I’m assuming they started with assuming positive and negative emotions in situations that are more obvious.

Not like they pointed a computer at a list of squeals and got some sort of actual 100% base truth emotion data out.

My cat stands at closed doors and tries different pitches, tones to figure out which one will get someone to open a door.

You are never getting a cat voice translator. They are only talking for our sake.

Simple: meow -> fuck off.

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