Skip Navigation
Science @lemmy.ml
frozenspinach @lemmy.ml

We can all agree that humans are smarter than crows, right?

I went through my bookmarks and found an old hacker news discussion thread where people are going in circles with some quite sincerely insisting that crows are more intelligent or every bit as intelligent as humans and that it's a kind of specieism and arrogance to suggest humans are more intelligent.

I felt like I was losing my mind reading that thread, which I think is why I bookmarked it.

I get appreciating the remarkable intelligence of animals and understanding their capabilities and the application of different forms of intelligence in different contexts. And the importance of having humility when it comes to understanding human intelligence and how a lot of our productive capacity comes from standing on the shoulder of giants. But take all of those caveats and add them all together and none of them I think at the end of the day amount to the idea that we should be uncertain about whether humans are more intelligent than crows.

I think there's a trap here of vortex of excessive humility that seems like a virtuous principle, but ends up missing the forest for the trees and putting people in the preposterous position of insisting that there's nothing special about humans building jumbo jets or being able to run hospitals compared to crows who apparently in the right circumstances could if they wanted to.

So I'm not crazy, right? Can reasonable people agree that humans are more intelligent than crows? And if that question sounds like a crazy question to ask in the first place, I'm glad you agree. But check out the Hacker News thread and try not to lose your mind.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24583981

32 comments

  • Some Humans are more intelligent as Crows, without a doubt.

  • For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

    Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

    • "They were too stupid to have invented guns?"

      Well then, why hadn't they?

      Because... some cultures... find... different things important.... like basket-weaving or crafts...

      WKUK, Wikipedia

  • There are some things that crows can do that we can’t that require brainpower. They’re not included in our definition of intelligence, but that’s only because we base that off of what we are capable of.

    When we talk about athleticism, we rarely talk about neck rotation, but if we wanted an unbiased comparison with an owl, we’d probably have to start.

    Similarly, we’d likely need to start assessing the ability to differentiate, recognize, and remember individuals of different species based on seeing their faces once, if we wanted to be at all fair to crows. They can do that to us pretty consistently, and we are capable of very little in that area. I’ve spent many hours looking at my beloved cat, but if another black, green eyed cat of the same size and with the same level of snout snuck in through my window, I’d need to count toes or rely on sound/behavior cues to tell them apart (though I feel weirdly guilty admitting that).

    I think we’re probably smarter than crows are (and definitely, if we use the current definition of “smart”), but I also think they’re probably better suited to the core skill that drives our intelligence, pattern recognition. I suspect that they’d also be better than llms are now, if we could figure out a proper interface for them, but I don’t think they’d enjoy that very much.

  • I don't have any credentials that make this an informed opinion.

    With that disclaimer, have you ever trained dogs?

    You hear things being said like a dog is as smart as a toddler, and it's supposed to indicate that the dog is really smart.

    Have you ever trained toddlers? They aren't as smart as most dogs.

    But smart how? Problem solving? Language acquisition? Logic?

    Intelligence isn't one thing. It's a complex of systems that allow an entity to navigate and hopefully thrive in a given environment. Part of that isn't even conscious. It comes from how our brains deal with memory, and there's only so much you can do about it.

    In any real sense that matters, no; crows aren't are smart as humans. But it's only a matter of degrees of complexity from the various articles and documentaries about the little buggers. They seem to think in similar ways, just not with the same capacity in any given way. Like, they seem to understand the basics of comparison of numbers, but they don't do math.

    But they do learn new things amazingly fast. Faster than some humans I've known. A lot actually. That's one part of intelligence. A big part.

    I genuinely believe that if environmental conditions ever favored them developing a similar kind of intelligence as we have, they wouldn't take that many millennia to be taking on basic algebra. They're one of the animals that seem like a candidate to do what humans have done, evolving brain power to be maximized as a survival trait. A lot of what humans are, physically, is in support of the kind of thinking we can do.

    Like I said, I don't have a background that qualifies me to speak with authority about this kind of thing. But I do have the type of intelligence that could. Crows don't, so I'll take that as a win ;)

  • Don't mistake inability with lack of intelligence.

    Crows haven't had the need to evolve the same way we did. They can fly and thus don't need jumbojets and such.

    There's plenty of animals that show signs of extremely high intelligence. But if you're measuring an animals intelligence by it's ability to build a functional nuclear reactor, it will fail miserably. As would most humans for that matter.

    Which is why we measure intelligence with problem solving skills. And Crows have shown themselves remarkable at problem solving.

    Like utilizing waterdisplacement to reach water, Cars to crack nuts and even basic bartering skills to trade trinkets for food with other species (like humans).

    Crows, in general, are very smart. Not all humans are.

    • Don’t mistake inability with lack of intelligence.

      Do you think that that's what's going on when someone says that humans are more intelligent than crows?

      This is what's so puzzling to me. I could spend paragraph after paragraph saying, crows have adapted to a specific niche, that they demonstrate their intelligence in unique ways. That human problem solving has benefited from a specific evolutionary history that's involved fine motor manipulation and vocalization and social hierarchies and intergenerational sharing of knowledge. I could say things about how the development of specific forms of intelligence is in response to evolutionary pressures rather than the specific intentional choice; that the intelligence we see is intelligence as applied to specific domains. I can say that the apex of complex demonstrations of human intelligence, whether it's via the coordination and scientific understanding and planning necessary for great feats of engineering, the depth of social and emotional sensitivity demonstrated by the greatest of human poets or social and political thinkers, etc etc are not things that should be credited to your average Joe. I can talk in romanticized wonder about the beauty of the animal world.

      I can wade into that process of making caveats and appreciations and so on and still come out the other side not having lost sight of the fact that humans are indeed more intelligent than crows.

      But some people wade into that same vortex of humility, and apparently become hypnotized and never recover. I almost want to call it the Crow Quicksand.

      This is what I mean about that seductive vortex of intellectual humility causing us to lose sight of the big picture.

      • How much of that do you think is inherent intelligence and how much is nurture?

        We spend years helping and teaching our offspring the most basic of functions and how to communicate. We've taught other species very basic communication skills as well, like Coco the gorilla. Hell, my own dog knew how to tell me when he had to pee. And that's nurture, but it does speak to a certain potential.

        I'm no expert on this subject. But I'm not closed off to the possibility that other species might be inherently more intelligent than us. As intelligence is mostly measured in ones ability to learn through observation and trial and error. And crows happen to display quite an aptitude for this that I don't know if we can even call it niche.

  • That's a philosophical question at the heart: how can you estimate anything like intelligence with neither collaboration nor a common understanding of intelligence?

    That's the gust of it from my understanding: cows show patterns that we interpret as intelligence on w human level. Everything after that is by its nature is human centric.

    Personally I'm with you but it's impossible to disprove the existence of intelligence on any other scale they doesn't include human motivation. (I.e. the cow has s higher intelligence than any human but we don't know any way to force or motivate it to show it in a way that we could understand.)

    It's easier to grasp as a sci-fi concept for me: what happens if aliens come to earth but we cannot figure out their behavior, motivation, tech or thought. And they don't (want to) manage to close the gap. How could we assess intelligence beyond the tech we see? Perhaps they just found it after all.

    • I'm not sure I agree that we have no such thing as a common understanding of intelligence nor that we should view the kind of intelligence we're familiar with in humans as distinctly belonging to humans, such that it's just a matter of not being able to decode or decipher other forms of intelligence.

      I also think it can be pretty clear when we can see demonstrations of, say, deployed sophistication in engineering capacity, such as what people seem to think they're observing with extreme capabilities of alien spacecrafts executing impossible right angle turns or other such things. (whether those videos are true or not). And not everything is like that surely, but clearly we can imagine what it's like to conceive of intelligences better or worse than our own, at least with specific enough examples targeted on just illustrating that particular point, which demonstrates an important principle that these things are discernible in at least some cases.

      I do think it's very true that we have to be careful in the assumptions we make about intelligence because the way an octopus is intelligence is indeed different from the way a predator in the savannah is different and similar.

      But I think it's getting a little too lost in the sauce to think that it means we can't understand what it would be like for there to be a demonstration of distinctly advanced intelligences, and for that matter, the very project of appreciating animal intelligence absolutely culminates in the takeaway of appreciating the special and unique intelligence of certain animals like dolphins or crows, or elephants. The very process of being careful in assessing and understanding the intelligence of other creatures sometimes absolutely does involve us selecting out ones that seem to stand above and beyond.

      However much is true of the differences of intelligence to domain specificity, the cumulative forms of intelligence and the depth of it that humans are capable of demonstrating eclipses such questions.

32 comments