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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

One of the struggles with researching octopus intelligence is that they’re basically untrainable. They’ll do what you want them to if they’re interested but it’s quite difficult to get them to be consistently interested.

In other words, it was probably fun for the octopus too.

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> One of the struggles with researching octopus intelligence is that they’re basically untrainable. They’ll do what you want them to if they’re interested but it’s quite difficult to get them to be consistently interested.

One of my dogs is the same. She knows exactly what you want her to do, but if there is no rewards involved, it's impossible. But as soon as you hold a snack in your hand, anything and more is possible.

Maybe the scientists haven't found a good enough snack to give them?

Sounds a lot like my daughter. And me if I think about it :/

Doing whatever she wants is a feature, not a bug :)

Boredom is likely a very good indicator of high cognitive capabilities.

It seems quite plausible that "boredom" is a mechanism that is required (or at least useful) for building high cognitive capabilities.

I don't exactly believe in it. I think one can only be bored by external forces, or some irrationality.

External Forces of Boredom would be a nice band name.

Punchline: album after album filled with 12 copies of the same 8 minute drone song.

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