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Comment by mo_42 | Hacker News Reader

Your second description involves many aspects of human culture. No matter how smart cows are, they'll never think this way.

Then, a big difference of humans compared to other animals is accumulation. We create stuff (buildings, language, knowledge, ...) that further generations will use. To really compare, I'd say, we have to take that away.

Let's assume some people decide to go back into the forest. They go there with nothing and teach their children only the necessary skills to live in the forest. After some generations, a scientist discovers them.

How would we compare them to humans and other animals like the great apes? How would they score on common IQ tests?

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> They go there with nothing and teach their children only the necessary skills to live in the forest.

To live in the forest like humans do? Because then they would absolutely teach them language, and show them how to make fire and use sticks and stones.

> How would they score on common IQ tests?

Common human IQ tests? Very badly, they would probably not do much with the paper other than maybe take it with them for fire starter, and would just wander out of the room.

On an IQ test you could conduct with great apes? Like various physical puzzles which hide treats? Very well presumably. They would have dexterous hands and great eyesight and problem solving skills, and oral traditions.

Are you honestly trying to say humans living in a primitive society would be comparable to most other animals (not even "intelligent" ones such as chimps)?

The cognitive dissonance in that statement is blinding. Even in the pre-agrarian hunter-gather millennia of human existence, human societies the world over independently figured out housing, carried the knowledge for fire and the wheel, had intensely complex (relative to every other species on the planet) communication and social skills. They all came up with ways to develop knives, arrows, cooking+eating utensils, protective clothing, complex hunting strategies, etc.

Like, yeah...they didn't have computers in front of them, but all of the inate skills that allows modern humans to conceptualize, build, repair and utilize those things existed just as inately in them. You could teach one of them about things piece by piece...you'll never be able to do that with even a chimp, let alone a cow.

> Are you honestly trying to say humans living in a primitive society would be comparable to most other animals (not even "intelligent" ones such as chimps)?

No, I'm not trying to say that. I'm trying to express my belief that the gap between the intelligence of humans and other animals is much smaller. Looking closely at chimp communities or dolphins shows that they also have complex communication patterns. Even trees in a forest communicate. So this is also an expression modesty because humans don't understand yet too much about communication of other creatures.

But you're misframing the point. No one is saying animals (or even simpler living life) can't communicate or do basic reasoning.

You're claiming that humans, without modern society, are somehow in the same realm of intelligence of even the next "smartest" animal (chimps), despite the fact that human intelligence is blatantly orders of magnitude higher just from mere observability let alone deep comparison of neural activity, reasoned and logical thought, and social interaction.

Especially if you start breaking things down into slime molds, ant colonies, plant interactions and somehow conflate relatively simplistic and predictable pattern-based behaviors to high-order reasoning and abstract thought that humans inately possess.

Is that to say human thought is non-deterministic and unpredictable? No, I'm not making that argument. I'm saying that the levels of abstraction and complexity is so much higher that it's blatantly fallacious and misleading to compare them.

The datapoints are sparse, but are “wild-childs” an order of magnitude more intelligent than the animals they bonded with?

I personally think human communities and societies emerge into a super-intelligence while single individual remain distinctly bland or unimpressive, provided the community leaves some room for the unusual to potentially thrive and find their niche.

Again, this is just pettyfogging.

An individual human is clearly and blatantly observably more intelligent and capable than an individual chimp.

The fact that y'all are speaking in such abstracts is telling in its own right. No one is saying animals are incapable nor that they don't possess plenty of abilities humans lack, however in the specific fields of strict intelligent thought processes (reason, abstraction and logic) and social interaction; it's not even a comparison.

The vast majority of animals can't even recognize themselves in a mirror let alone conceptualize other planets, atomic structures, mechanical processes and forces, mathematics, abstract concepts, create social contracts, etc.

It's just....ridiculous to even be having a discussion on this. It's honestly akin to discussing vaccines with a COVID denier.

> The vast majority of animals can't even recognize themselves in a mirror let alone conceptualize other planets, atomic structures, mechanical processes and forces, mathematics, abstract concepts, create social contracts, etc.

This is true, but it takes a great deal of creativity and awareness of a species, to create a “mirror-test” that applies to said species.

The naive mirror test is flawed. That’s not say most species will pass; just that it was laughably bad experiments that are being revisited.

> It's just....ridiculous to even be having a discussion on this. It's honestly akin to discussing vaccines with a COVID denier.

Why is it ridiculous? Nobody is saying humans aren’t smarter.

You’re looking at the end results of societies to prove that we’re orders of magnitude smarter; but take away our ability to write and record knowledge for the next generation: What are we left with? How scalable and robust are oral-tradition cultures?

Also note that none of the things you’ve mentioned came naturally to humans: It took many millennia of trial and error to build up and even so it takes the threat of homelessness starvation for the majority to give a shit and learn this stuff.

Instead, I’d argue it takes a great deal of self-awareness and humility to tease out what gives us the leg up over other species, even if it makes some uncomfortable.

> You’re looking at the end results of societies to prove that we’re orders of magnitude smarter; but take away our ability to write and record knowledge for the next generation: What are we left with? How scalable and robust are oral-tradition cultures?

Very, considering we started at the exact same point as all of those other "equally" intelligent creatures.

So yes, it's ridiculous.

How so?

We have human societies that never moved past hunter/gatherer; or basic agriculture. Or perhaps reverted back.

Does that imply that they’re somehow less intelligent? And so, by an order of magnitude?

I don’t expect anyone to change your mind—that much is clear—but for someone like me it’s an interesting question because it gets to the heart of what it means to be intelligent; aware; and driven.

Even the standard “man is the measure of all things” has more nuance than at first glance.

I mean, they have isolated tribes that have seen limited outside contact even today. In the absence of outside contact, their culture is not as bland as in your example. Perhaps the formation of culture, religious beliefs, and higher levels of thought is one of the aspects that do make humans special.

As to the IQ tests, they can't ethically run them on uncontacted people. There have been many studies on indigenous people's that include a focus on intelligence. However, a major factor that usually comes up is that the format of standard IQ tests tend to be biased against indigenous people due to things like language issues.

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