Hacker News Reader

Comment by mxfh | Hacker News Reader

There already exists an automated exploit for this behavior:

Joshua Klein's Crow Machine: https://www.josh.is/crow-machine/

I stopped being mesmerized by TED talks after reading http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-CORRE... . I was further disappointed that the Ted talk webpage was not updated after that development.

Er. So does it work or not on wild crows? This article implies that the study on wild crows hadn't been done.

How does TED fits in all of this?

A TED talk about this project helped popularize this particular example of crow intelligence. http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of...

Darn it... I just watched that the other day and was truly amazed.

It was all lies, then? Or mostly lies?

I told myself a year or two ago that I was going to stop watching TED talks because of their misinformation problems, and this was the first one I had watched since. Fool me once...

I think there is a big difference between gift and payment.

Your article is on skinnerian conditioning to train crows to pay for peanuts.

In this article the crows got peanuts whether they gave gifts or not. They just decided to give gifts. No training occured.

Perhaps in the mind of the crows, they are giving gifts as a reward. In effect, training the human (in the article).

That is mind-blowing, and makes me want to reevaluate the concept of gift giving.

There's a famous quote attributed to the Inuit that Marcel Mauss mentions in The Gift: "Gifts make slaves like whips make dogs." Both halves of that statement are provocative.

So can we consider our paychecks to be gifts then?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_8hPcnGeCI

That only proves how smart crows are, they can both participate in an economy and operate on a gifting basis.

Clearly, they're the same crows.

Paying crows peanuts to 'find' money has to be the best business plan ever. This could be bigger than Apple.

Crowsourcing!

"We have discovered an intelligent being ... we must TROLL IT!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com