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Comment by Caelus9 | Hacker News Reader

Watching cockatoos figure out stuff like this really makes me wonder have we been seriously underestimating bird intelligence all this time? We tend to associate tool use with primates, but parrots, corvids, and kea keep proving us wrong in the smartest ways. Honestly, maybe “avian cognition” deserves its own category of advanced problem solving. There’s probably a lot we could learn from their behavior not just about animals, but about ourselves and the systems we build.

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Avian cognition is so darn interesting. We associate the mammalian neocortex with "higher intelligence" (which is hand-wavy), but that structure arose after any common ancestor with birds.

The avian pallium is thought to be the analogue structure in birds, evolved separately.

Which is cool! Birds have separately evolved intelligence!

I've recently gone down the rabbit hole of watching pet bird videos on YouTube. The wide range of behaviors is so fascinating. They can be so affectionate, playful, mischievous, and just plain goofy.

The African grey parrots are fascinating in particular, with their ability to connect words to more abstract concepts like counting.

Even cooler, IMHO, is that invertebrates evolved intelligence (and almost identical eyes!) parallel to primate's and corvids'.

Squid, octopi, etc have cognitive abilities that sometimes overtake that of "intelligent" mammals or birds. Yet common ancestors are about as far away as is possible in animal kingdom.

(And also please remember this when ordering calamari next time ;)

Edit: I very much enjoyed this bestseller popular science book on invertebrates intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds%3A_The_Octopus%2C_...

Since reading about cephalopod intelligence, I cut calamari out of my diet cold. I quip that I have a policy against eating anything smarter than me!

Would you eat a human that was less intelligent than a cephalopod?

If they're so smart why aren't I on their plate instead? (Though I'm not a fan and don't ever go for calamari personally anyways...)

Wait are any cephalopods vegan?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_attack

I like how its mainly just a pile of old fisherman tales with very little proven recorded attacks. The Cephalopods have been haunting our nightmares for over a thousand years.

Slightly joking: but maybe "intelligence" is partly "empathy"? In my view, a truly evolved and highly intelligent species would be one that causes no harm, distress and certainly no pain or suffering to anything else.

So, to answer your question:

> If they're so smart why aren't I on their plate instead?

For the same reason I and grandparent commentor don't eat them: because we know their intelligence. If they were more intelligent that humans, that reasoning would mean they won't eat humans.

Slightly more on topic: humans often show a very narrow world view. In that many humans fail to see that there are other types of "intelligence" for example. We project our own narrow world-view onto others: "Intelligence means, you should eat anything that's less intelligent than you" (very much parafrasing, I know)

I enjoyed the novel “Remakably Bright Creatures” which had an octupus as a main character.

And then we have octopi, with their separately evolved decentralised intelligence !

A mini brain in each arm, orchestrated by the main brain.

The plural is octopuses. Octopi is not a word.

It’s a hill I’m willing to die on ;)

Both octopuses and octopodes are terrible words.

And words are made by us, you cannot tell me what's a word and what isn't.

Octopodes is correct if you want a classical (Greek, as it is) word. Octopi is an assumption of correctness by analogy of people who don't know better, like 'if you have any feedback give it to my colleague and I' - it's not all posh and correct to say 'and I', it's wrong (in that sentence).

Why I took the time to comment: I recently watched an excellent 2-part series entitled "Octopus!" on Prime Video:

https://youtu.be/u1TLQUH43Yw?si=L8Ta4RG1Kp8tkHWU

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the narrator, must have said "octopuses" a hundred times, so it's kind of burned into my brain.

Fun fact:

All words and grammar rules are made up. Entirely. As in... invented by humans. The laws of physics don't really care.

If lots of people use "octopi" (and they do) and most people understand what it means (which they do) then congrats! It is, in fact, a word. If enough people apply an "i" ending to words then that becomes itself a new grammar rule.

English, just like every other language, also has a ton of unwritten grammar rules as well as spoken word only rules.

In short: octopi is in fact a perfectly cromulent word.

> In short: octopi is in fact a perfectly cromulent word.

Webster, is that you ? /s

I can't speak for the average person but I don't think I've encountered many intelligent people who don't also recognize bird intelligence. They have a greater neuron packing density than mammals and there's plenty footage online of corvids using tools.

> have we been seriously underestimating bird intelligence all this time

another question that I keep asking myself is: are we seriously overestimating human intelligence all this time?

I think there's ample evidence that humans have some incredible things, that most animals haven't

Like inventing the artificial kind of intelligence!

I sometimes wonder whether we invented AI because we felt lonely in a universe where we - apparently by our own judgement - are the only intelligent beings.

Yes, humans invented new ways to communicate with some obvious incredible results, but how much a single human is more intelligent than a single animal? Is this difference that big as we used to believe?

Yes it absolutely is.

as the saying goes "there's an overlap between the smartest bear and dumbest tourist"

Ehhh it's definitely nuanced but we certainly haven't been dramatically overlooking anything fundamental.

The prevailing wisdom has been that a fully developed cockatoo has roughly the intelligence of a 3 year old.

A 3 year old figuring out how to use a drinking fountain wouldn't be world-breaking science, and I don't think this is either.

We have proven that they don't understand language and can simply mimic sounds. I don't think it's as deep as you are hoping.

Could they have their own language though?

Cockatoo language in nature is this:

Child: wild call

Parent: wild call back

Child: wild call back

Parent: wild call back

Child: wild call back

There are bird species with nuanced dialogue-like calls, but parrots are not him ...

And, occasionally, demonic summoning chants:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UUjJysUMTw

While their calls sound like chalk on a blackboard their body language is complex. You can communicate a lot via your actions and expressions!

African Gray parrots have been proven to understand significant amounts of language.

Their brain:body mass ratio is very high, so they've been on our intelligence radar for years, especially corvids.

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