[...]
“How the hell is your cat supposed to know that you’re yelling at him because you want him to stop scratching the couch?”
[...]
"When your cat does the thing you want her do to, reward her with a treat, or affection."
If we accept that cats can't learn from negative reinforcement, why would we think that positive reinforcement would work?
And punishment works quite differently from reinforcement to begin with; it is typically less effective for far better socialized species such as humans and dogs, too.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning#Consequenc...
People mix this up all the time, and it gives me an eye twitch. Psych 101 people, cmon.
Domestic cats have been domesticated for a long time. Cats which live with humans (or even other cats - they do naturally form colonies) adopt a number of pro-social behaviours to interact with us.
They are in fact very adept at reading social cues - but conversely they are not pack-animals. They don't have the same instinctive need to identify a hierarchy of command, so much as "mess with" and "don't mess with".
That sounds like lamarckism. Or do you suggest that cats were selectively bred for their social behaviour? I find it dubious.
You should check your detector.
Cats happened about the same time agriculture did. They were attracted to the rodents, and less rodents meant we were happier - and they were happier with a reliable food source. At the beginning it might have helped to not be afraid of humans, but we probably didn't mess with them too much because they were helping us out with all the mice in our grains.
So the difference in behavior is clear, not just from a social species standpoint, but from the domestication path:
The European Wolf was domesticated to dogs as a hunting partner; the African Wildcat was domesticated to kill the rodents that devoured our foodstuffs. For the few few thousand years that was probably enough - they didn't have to make friends with us, just keep our food safe.
Earliest cat domestication evidence is 9,500 years old; earliest dog domestication evidence is about 36,000 years old.
They've still got quite a ways to go ;) Now if we could just start breeding them for social/intelligence instead of how weird and fluffy we can make them. Hard to morally advocate for breeding when the shelter/feral population is so damn high, though. (I feel the same way about dogs, though, tbh).
Increase of reproductive success is not an evolutionary pressure and is irrelevant in the context of the comment I was replying to.
And increase of reproductive success of a very similar population puts all kinds of evolutionary pressure on the less-advantaged population, as they compete for the same things. But more to the point, regardless of the exact words that your parent poster used, they clearly did not mean a very narrow definition of evolutionary pressure.
[Edit] Changed negative reinforcement to punishment, rbehrends was correct when he pointed out that negative reinforcement is something different.
Positive and negative reinforcement patterns are not opposites, they're entirely separate processes.
(Cat owner here.)
For a dog, yelling is a punishment on its own, because they understand what the tone of voice means. A cat will just think "hmm, the human got louder - I wonder why?" If you're trying to punish a cat for things, you either need a physical stimulus they don't like (spray bottle, for example) or a social cue they understand (hissing is moderately effective, though that's more of a warning than a punishment).
I thought the same thing. I hate that any comment on a HN post adds to it's score. I would like this comment counted as a negative. This article is terrible.