Number 16 (spider)
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I think about this a lot in the context of conversations about intelligence. If spiders can have complex behaviors hard-coded, humans certainly do too. (In other words, the Tabula Rasa theory is wrong.) The ability to learn language and emotion are certainly two examples. We are pretty good at certain things (learning language, picking up social cues) and relatively bad at others (calculating an 18% tip).
So if you’re going to measure “intelligence” the first thing you’ll need to do is choose what to measure. What questions do you ask? You might be inclined to pick things we humans think are important. But then that’s not an objective universal measurement, at best it’s yardstick for human cognitive abilities.
Primates are on another level compared to most other animals, and humans are definitely outliers, but learned behaviour is far from unique to humans.
Good book about precisely this (and in agreement with your statement) is cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker's 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
⸻
1. This is a theory I came up with as a high school student in the 80s so my choices of programming languages reflect that.
2. Insert obligatory Turing-completeness disclaimer here.
I'm from Western Australia and spent a lot of time in its deserts in my youth.
I have a very distinct memory of walking out among the spinifex as a child, needing to pee. Its hot, my bare feet are burning, the ground is unforgiving and I already have spinifex'ed ankles, so naturally I tread as carefully as I can, trying to avoid the sand and the spikes, only walking on the slightly less heated organic mats that surround some of the spinifex, a kind of carpet of twigs and leaves, gathered in pockets by the wind.
The natural urge is rising, and I stop paying attention and get a bit of pace, as relief must be had. I see a particularly appealing area, covered by this organic dust, and I leap over to it, get my body parts aligned, and begin the process of relief.
A few seconds into it, I feel something moving. The entire mat that I was standing on, is in fact, a field of trap doors. Maybe a hundred of them. They begin to open.
I have never levitated as hard and as fast in my life.
So my Tabula Rasa has given me this lesson: don't go into the spinifex to pee. Ever.
https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2018/05/fourtee...
When I was at school a million years ago "smart" kids were ones who learned to read fast, did numbers well, and had good memory recall.
Then along came computers, which had perfect memory, did numbers really well. So "intelligent machines?"
Obviously not, so we tweaked our measure of intelligence. Perhaps to include writing well, or learning quickly. Which, um, computers now do.
But we still view the computers as "not intelligent" but I'm not sure what measure we'll use now. Something to do with art or music? Hmm, no, wait, that's no good either....
(PS schools still mostly measure numbers and memory....)
We could focus on whether the student has actually understood the topic and is not just able to produce nice sounding words and some quotes about it.
More generally, how do you measure ‘actual understanding’, if not by judging the student's output?
Where did I say to not do that?
And someone who can produce a convincing essay usually has understood the topic (unless he copy pasted it). And when there are doubts, one can ask that student specific questions.
You asserted that the student should “not just [be] able to produce nice sounding words”. What do you suggest output is if not words (nice sounding or not)?
> And someone who can produce a convincing essay usually has understood the topic (unless he copy pasted it).
Then, what is the difference between a convincing essay (‘nice sounding words’) produced by a human, and similar words produced by an LLM?
After all, even today, students are passing ChatGPT’s work off as their own. Does this then demonstrate understanding by the student or by ChatGPT?
> And when there are doubts, one can ask that student specific questions.
If an LLM can answer specific questions about a subject, does this demonstrate true understanding? If not, why not?
If it could, I would say there is understanding. But in every area where I have expertise, I see LLMs failing my questions. Just like a bad student would, who memorized textbooks, but did not connect or process the knowledge in any way.
It seems that intelligence is a term that we apply to people who consistently excel at the mental tasks assigned to them, no matter what those tasks entail.
Sometimes the word “intelligent” is used by someone who sells IQ tests.
Sometimes the word is used by someone who sells the idea of a computer that can think like a human.
I don’t know if people in general struggle or care about the definition.
The simple rulesets which lead to complex outcomes in nature is amazing to me.
obviously their neural networks are limited in size and therefor complexity has to remain somewhat simple relatively to larger animals).
Depends what you mean by complex... All creatures get born with an idea how to get food. Human babies have never seen breast or anyone sucking breast, yet they can go through the process pretty much immediately. That's a very clever movement / sensation following combination, but it's there from the beginning.
The "will suck at anything" instinct is IMHO a fall-back mechanism if for some reason a female breast is not available.
>During pregnancy, the nipple has become more pigmented 68 and is easy for the newborn infant to discover (Fig. 1C). We have observed that soon after birth, the areola expands and takes a bulb-like shape (Fig. 1G). The Montgomery glands also become more pronounced (Fig. 1G). The scent of areolar secretions has been linked to behavioural responses, such as head turning 69 and directional crawling in newborn infants 70. This release of the breast odour by the Montgomery glands is known to help the newborn infant find the nipple 17, 27, 69. The newborn infant recognises the scent of the mother's breast from the amniotic fluid 71, touches the breast and transmits the taste of the breast to the mouth (hand-to-breast-mouth movements) 17. This stimulates rooting and crawling movements in the newborn infant to reach the nipple. The connection between the taste of amniotic fluid and the scent of the breast from the Montgomery glands highlights a biological survival mechanism – a pathway of flavour with lifelong consequences. (Fig. 3) (17, 71-80) When knowing of this sensitive odour-dependent mechanism, it might be wise not to interfere with unfamiliar hands.[0]
Do we really have evidence for this rather than observation and communication from parents to offspring. I'm deeply skeptical.
I don't know if the parent comment represented the expert consensus correctly, but if they did, I wouldn't automatically be skeptical of it.
That evidence is compelling and well-reviewed. But that evidence is also countered with other evidence: the debate isn't settled. But it's undoubtedly clear that a part of our intelligence and other personality traits are inherited: coded into our DNA. What's not settled, is how much.
That does not follow. It's a logical fallacy. ('Spiders can have eight legs, so humans certainly do too.')
free will wouldn't even change that, since it's presumably also given by our genes.
Michael Levin has been discovering lately that biology is more complicated than we thought. His YT videos are mind-boggling. Flatworm genetics are a dog's breakfast that the cells work around by means nobody understands.
The same as how a bird can be scared on snakes. Interestingly native birds in Australia aren’t scared of humans.
I don't have fear of spiders (was surprised by how many people do fear spiders). When I was young, I "hosted" a bunch of them under my table. Thinking of it, I think most people have their fears transmitted through their mothers. My mom certainly didn't fear spiders but she hated their "dirty" webs.
For example I do have a strong reaction to cockroaches till this day; a harmless insect that my mother fear. I can't even look at the beast. My cousin do not and conversely do fear spiders.
They used a gentic algorithm to evolve the network, its connections and activation functions (per node).
It got quite good.
Perhaps not that surprising that one can encode a lot in the graph structure itself, and given how DNA is quite good at dictating complex organs, I don't see why something similar couldn't be at work for insects and mammals alike. After all, nobody taught the newborn kangaroo babies how to crawl up into the pouch of their mom either.
In Pinker's book The Blank Slate" in particular.
We are born blank of our mother tongue, but are wired to acquire one. Not wired with the skill itself, but with the propensity to acquire it. Both nature and nurture are deeply important to the outcome.
Though, both of these things are almost stereotypical [1]
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/vnmmuo/whe...
- fascination with fire, - love of tools, - teenage interest in weapons.
I have to admire the level of professionalism it takes to not give a single mealworm to a spider you have been watching for forty years.
"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." - Heraclitus
"Number 16" is valuable, in that it communicates the fact that the specimen involved is one of a set of at least 16 individual data points. "Brenda" doesn't communicate anything much more than, perhaps, the researcher is bored with their work and wants to have fun instead of doing real science. Besides which, this is a human name, so is it referring to a human or a spider?
Scientific rigour is important. Fanciful notions of cultural joviality, less so.
Anyway, only humans use names. Is "Brenda" a human or a spider? Sure, you can answer this now - but can you answer it in another 10 years?
It also doesn't tell us that it's one of at least 16 data points. From the article we only know that it was the 16th spider they recorded as being present but we don't know that any of the other 15 made it into the study. The fact that you're reading something we don't know into it from the name #16 actually highlights a failing in this system for me. Surely if it matters to you then you'll be reading the study which will these details explicitly.
what if the spider doesn't die shortly after? You'll have no way of knowing if the spider would have died of hunger without your intervention
It doesn't matter, though; none of your results will be different either way.
But probably worth forcing your way through the poor writing, character building and storytelling to get those cool ideas out of it.
It’s a good book to have read, but not to read, I guess. Sadly, the second one squanders an even more interesting concept, and isn’t worth reading.
This was my impression of K. J. Parker's work. (I read the Scavenger trilogy of his.)
Intricate idea, uninteresting writing.
I always thought and still think it's a great book. It may miss some writer's instruments to make it "a good book" in the classical sense, but to me it wasn't missing at all.
If anyone here neglects this book due to being a "sci-fi booksthat HN recommends", please give it a try!
Since you seem to have a higher bar than many, what are some examples of sci-fi books that you think are actually good books?
The fact that he would not recognize me after talking together every week for a decade felt slightly odd.
But what broke the camel's straw was after one morning he assaulted his own wife coming back with groceries thinking she was an intruder.
Living 50 years together and not remembering her at all was awful.
Broke her and his heart too when he had to be taken to a proper elderly care facility as he was too dangerous (70+ but still very fit and strong) to his own family. Obviously, luck wanted that he was lucid when they were taking him out the house. He was aware of what was happening and why for few minutes. But when it came to say goodbye it felt like Shutter Island finale, you couldn't say whether he was now faking a few moments later or if he was doing it because aware of his condition and danger.
Reminded me of The Onion's "Expert Wasted Entire Life Studying Anteaters":
"Imagining the psychology of aliens evolved from ambush predators"
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/16a9m2h/ima...
I wonder how long it would have lived without the wasps' interference.
Huge respect. Always amazed by scientists sticking with studies like that.
We know that some turtles, sharks and whales can live way more than a century if not multiple centuries, but we don't know that because we have been following them from centuries.
There's a tortoise living on the Seychelle's governor garden since 1882 and has outlived every single governor yet.
We have a picture of it dating 1886: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Jonathan...
Is this just a fancy way to say that the tortoise is alive, and whoever was governor in 1882 is dead?
Which makes the “yet” weird, but I suppose it admits the possibility that the office might be restored before the tortoise dies, and the tortoise might not outlive the potential future governor.
That just feels like a long time to be a spider.
The interesting point here to me is that it was not killed before. This suggests that it was able to fend off the wasps attacks for fourty years. I assume that hen died it was too weak (too old) to fight back. Another possibility is that it had moult recently and was too soft to defend itself.
Insects die soon because adult wings can't moult twice. Spiders don't have wings so they can moult indefinitely and became much much older than insects --but-- is easy to predict that (unlike jellyfishes), spiders can't live forever
We can be 100% sure of this empirically. We even could predict mathematically the life time span of each species, also if we would want it (again, in my opinion).
Research article reporting the spider's death by Leanda Denise Mason, Grant Wardell-Johnson and Barbara York Main
https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=http%3A%2F%...