On the cute side, I've been watching videos by people who keep reptiles, and tegus are the lizard equivalent of dogs. They actually like human company.
I feel like the Western experience with rescue animals in general has been pretty mixed. So many of these animals are *so messed up*, will never get better, will cause significant problems in your life...and require jumping through an incredible number of undignified hoops.
As it so often does, our comedy has provided the first objective review of the situation, in this case in the form of an unintentional dialogue between Bill Burr and Louis CK.
1. Bill Burr's bit on his struggles to socialize/train his rescue dog.
2. Louis CK's bit on what an incredible pain/problem rescue dogs can be.
3. Bill Burr's bit in a subsequent special on how he finally had to give up and give away his rescue dog.
I don't want to conclude that animals shouldn't be rescued, but it's not exactly something I would feel comfortable recommending to a friend trying to decide between a reputable breeder and the Humane Society kennels.
I find the wild differences (not just total quantity but qualitative) in dog intelligence endlessly fascinating, and I honor your willingness to admit that some dogs just...aren't all there, whatever other virtues they may possess.
I just adopted cats for the first time (after getting some for free as a kid and then having a cat adopt us later) and it's a really crazy number of hoops to jump, including signed waivers from the landlord and contacts for *references*(?!) and agreements to never let the cats outside ever again and notify the shelter if you move states. We ended up with two sweet older cats with not too many behavioral issues (one pees for distance while standing in the box and likes chewing thin plastic), but both needed medication.
They're mostly normal cats, but I'm convinced that one of them doesn't have strong object permanence. She walks out of the room where we're sitting, then starts crying a minute later trying to figure out where we are.
Are fast dogs not very bright? My impression of Afghans I've known is that they are scatterbrained. A half century ago, Sports Illustrated had a funny article about a greyhound race track that tried an Afghan race. Only one dog managed to stay focused enough to complete the race and he refused to stop and kept running until exhausted.
I should observe before going into Afghan (dog) intelligence specifically that a lot of the time, "intelligence" testing in dogs gets inflated with "obedience" testing. As someone else pointed out in relation to reptiles in this thread, it's often the case that disobedience isn't stupidity, it's just a total lack of interest in doing as the human commands.
Speaking of Afghan hounds, they're bred to hunt independently in alpine terrain and are apparently incredibly good at that - but consequently, there isn't an iota of interest in anything like modern obedience training in their DNA.
I would suggest it's a safe bet that any breed that's been around for centuries does *something* very well, but it's also worth observing that modern breed conformation has often taken very functional breeds to obscene places. Check out this article and look at how much more...practical that Afghan hound looks in that black and white photo.
It is an important distinction. Beagles have been placed almost at the bottom of the pack when it comes to "intelligence" by a lot of dog breeders, but our beagle is quite smart. She just doesn't care about following orders. She wants food, and she can be trained to do just about anything as long as you have food in your hand. Once the food is gone, she has little interest.
"I feel like the Western experience with rescue animals in general has been pretty mixed"
I don't know about western, but the US seems to have a norm of cats never going outside. In Europe , it's easier for cats achieve whatever mix of indoors and outdoors life that they want ... so semi feral cats appear occasionally to feed, and go off on another adventure. But a cat that's kept indoors can easily feel imprisoned, with subsequent behavioural problems.
Nice review, but I just want to note the difference in meaning between "training to beat the chimp as hard as they could" and "training as hard as they could to beat the chimp."
Picture a Rocky-style montage with lab-coated scientists furiously practicing memory games and doing push-ups on one side, and the chimp lazily eating bananas on the other.
I find that anecdote extraordinary in terms of being a revealing insight into the deeper psychological motivations and feelings of our own species when we do cognition comparisons. As a species, we place extreme value on our ability to think, and while we're often quite sanguine about "granting" other species a victory in non-cognitive realms like how many colors they can see or how high they can jump, I think many of us (perhaps all of us to a certain extent) are emotionally uncomfortable with granting another species a victory in the realm of cognitive capacity.
Not all of us. I was brought up amongst animals of several different kinds and it has been a life-long source of frustration and discomfort that other humans cannot, or will not, recognise the cognitive abilities of animals.
At most the difference between them and us is one of the degree of cognition. Each species has its own 'magic well' of specific abilities that it draws upon, but recognisable cognition is much more common than humans - as indeed you note - seem willing to concede.
Obviously it's too late for the other entries this year, but I really enjoyed the 'Pairs Well With' section (and its title!) and would love to see others follow suit.
Formatting issue: The subheading starting 'The Importance of Methodology' repeats the '1.' counter, presumably an artefact of converting the document into Substack's system. There's also a space missing in 'Full disclosure, almosteverything I know'.
Is there any chance we could get a google form for voting on these as we read them, similar to what you've done for the non-finalists? I feel like by the end of this contest there is no way I'm going to remember any sort of ranking from previous reviews, but if you ask me to rate them immediately after reading them, you would probably end up with a much better indicator of true ranking.
I'm trying to get around that by keeping a running list and updating the rankings with new entries:
Previously I had _Progress and Poverty_ tied with _On the Natural Faculties_ and both well ahead of _Order Without Law_. I enjoyed this review, but I don’t know if I can say I liked it more than either of the front runners.
New ranking:
1st. Progress and Poverty / On the Natural Faculties (tied)
3rd Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
4th Order Without Law
Even though this isn’t my favorite, I just want to mention I’ve attended lectures by Frans and interacted with him socially on a couple occasions. He’s a wonderful speaker, super duper smart, and quite fun to talk with. Its possible I’m over correcting to avoid showing bias since I don’t have much of a personal relationship with Galen or George.
This is one of my favorite non-fiction books, and I really can't encourage people enough to read it for themselves. It is a genuine joy to read for its own sake, especially the animal anecdotes - it's not one of those tedious-but-wise non-fiction books where you're better off saving your time and just banking a summary, even one as detailed as this.
Great review. I would also strongly endorse de Waal's book called "Chimpanzee Politics". It is the brilliant review of social organization and power dynamics of a group of chimps. I used to keep a copy of it in my office and tell everyone that it was the only business book that I would recommend everyone reads (though it was not necessarily a "how to" manual). A side benefit is that it also sheds light on the whole Trump phenomenon.
Seconded, and I would also add, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe, which contains a spectacularly moving passage about the rocket program's work with chimpanzees, written in Wolfe's signature style (deceptively dispassionate?).
This may be controversial and I hope it doesn't break ACX's spirit of conviviality, but it did occur to me after reading this book that there may be an empathy divide, and therefore a potential progressive/conservative divide, in how likely we are to assign intelligence to the observed behavior of a non-human animal.
I suspect, without claiming to be certain, that those with low empathy are more likely to assume that a given animal is just a brute who responded to stimuli mechanistically unless it's decisively proven otherwise, whereas those with more empathy are more likely to start from the premise that the animal is "like me" until decisively proven otherwise.
How reliably does that response get triggered for different sorts of animals? My understanding is that a lot of typical 'cute animal' traits are designed to trigger human associations with babies (wide eyes, high pitched vocalisation) so it wouldn't be surprising if similar things were at play here. But if seeing a rhino in pain or a crab in pain also triggered the same empathy response then that suggests something different is going on.
Are 'low empathy' and 'high/more empathy' technical terms with a defined meaning? Because at first glance it seems to me that empathy is naturally higher-dimensional than that: an individual could have a high degree of emotional understanding/concern towards Group A but a low degree of emotional understanding/concern towards Group B (think in-groups and out-groups, races, classes etc.).
It's intuitive to me that someone's degree of emotional understanding/concern towards other humans could easily be independent of their degree towards non-humans.
Although there's some pretty interesting science on empathy, I'm not going to claim to be arguing directly from it in this case - I'm really just expressing personal thoughts.
I think you're correct that it's possible for an individual's empathy levels to wildly differ between comparator groups based on life experience, but I would suggest that different individuals have different baseline empathy levels (regarding childhood nature/nurture, choose whichever you prefer or whichever cocktail).
For example, even without having a gay friend or any particular practical reason to empathize with the gay rights movement, Individual A may intuitively empathize that "their love is like my love" and support gay marriage, whereas Individual B may instinctively be somewhere between indifferent and disgusted by the thought, until their son comes out to them, which pushes their low baseline empathy to a situational peak on that topic and solely on that topic to a place similar to where Individual A reached without experience intervening.
P.S. I'm not necessarily claiming empathy is even objectively good. Sometimes I think it can mislead, and De Waal is pretty unsparing of early ethnologists who were perhaps led astray by high baseline (or high situational) empathy with the animals they were studying.
I just don't find it obvious that there should be a natural baseline that applies across groups. I think your gay son example is better explained by (1) Individual B having a higher degree of concern for/understanding of their son (2) a difference in how A and B categorize people, with B more naturally casting gay non-family-members as a group that B doesn't have much concern for/understanding of.
My impression is that the people who most tended to see animals as just brutes who respond to stimuli mechanistically were philosophically-minded intellectuals. Since the Ancient Greeks, many philosophers have been concerned with theories of human uniqueness, which sometimes tends to make them theorize that animals couldn't be like whatever it is they theorize makes humans human.
The behaviorists weren't exactly like that, but they had a code of scientific self-discipline that discouraged them from noting the individuality in animals. Everybody gives the old behaviorists grief these days, but they rather impressively exhausted their approach's potential.
E.g., B.F. Skinner's successor at running Harvard's rat lab, Richard J. Herrnstein, got bored with behaviorism in mid career and switched to the study of human phenomena, with results that still get people worked up. The only other scientists I can recall who ever admitted to reaching the limits of what their field of study could teach were Kang and Kodos:
Could I recommend adding the "The Bird Way" (https://amzn.to/3nceCfM) to your "pairs well with" at the end? :) It's what I thought of most while reading your review.
> like the primate research team that learned a chimpanzee in Japan performed significantly better than humans on a specific memory-related task and responded by training to beat the chimp as hard as they could.
Holy crap I first read this as meaning that the researchers had punished the chimp for performing better than them, by subjecting it to a beating (having first trained themselves to maximize the pain they could inflict).
If there had been Japanese primatologists from 1931-1945, they would have done that. (The Japanese trained their WWII fighter pilots by constantly beating them.)
I've been posting this everywhere this week, but I just listened to this podcast interview by Ezra Klein of Alison Gopnik. If you think of children and other humans as animals whose consciousness we only partially inhabit, and want to understand the intelligence of, it pairs very nicely with this: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-alison-gopnik-transcript.html
I don't know how it fairs for the reviewing process, but the first paragraph made me decide I didn't wouldn't read the review, because I'd much rather read the book. Well done?
> until fairly recently, and in some corners still today, we have had very smart people reasoning about thought as fundamentally being linguistic and nature, while some large chunk, maybe as many as ~15% of people just don't think in words.
Don't confuse the report for the reality. I suggest that exactly 100% of people do not think in words. That's not to say they have no internal monologue. But the monologue is an automatic process triggered by the thought, and the thought, having happened first, would be unaffected if the monologue were suppressed or absent.
I agree. I *seem* to think in words most of the time, but if I try to transcribe my thoughts it doesn't work. There's often stuff that I was thinking that, shortly thereafter, I have trouble putting into words.
Can you say more on this? Or a link? I wanted to ask how people, who think in words, think about a cam shaft. Personally I find it hard to think about stuff without a pencil in my hand so I can scribble some pictures. (Well that's when thinking of physical things.)
I can have a conversation with myself in the mirror, so apparently I'm part of the ~85% with an internal monologue. Now I want to hear from someone without the monologue.
Michael, do you have a good way in mind of distinguishing between "thought/thinking" and "words triggered by thought/thinking"? The potential supporting example that comes to mind (purely from self-reported introspection) is that I frequently find myself hung up on the phrasing in my head, even though I "know what I mean" - I keep spinning on getting the wording of the internal monologue "right". As a potential counter-example, I have had plenty of instances where I cannot advance further in my reasoning unless I write something down, look at what I wrote, and start responding to that. Being able to work out what's going with both seems to require a good definition of what "thinking" is which I currently lack, so I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I sometimes think in words, but more often I have the thought first and then figure out how to put it in words. That's obviously the case when I know what I want to say but can't remember the relevant word — I think increasingly common as I get older.
I find it hard to believe that there are any people who think only in words.
I‘d like to point out that the additionally recommended book „The Hidden Life of Trees“ seems to be not without controversy. Years ago I felt intrigued by the thesis but finally refrained from reading it as a number of reviewers from the science community criticised it as being not particularly substantiated (and mixing fact, opinion and romantic metapher). I don’t remember too much detail. Just be on the lookout when reading it.
"One area where he sides with the skeptics is in asking for an end to inter-species intelligence contests and trying to grapple with big, messy topics like "self-awareness" or "consciousness". He points out that we don't even have good definitions for these concepts in humans, so why should we expect to apply them to other animals? "
The sentence "we don't have a good definition of consciousness" is outdated. This field has made enormous progress in the last ~15 years, and I think we have an answer on what consciousness is, though the answer is much more boring than philosophers anticipated. (Especially people who mix it up with self-awareness or meta-cognition.)
The key idea is that we have lots of different situations where people give firm answers to the question "did you see the picture on the screen?", and it depends on details whether the answer is "Yes." or "Which picture? The screen was all black!". Like whether the picture was shown 100 ms earlier or later. One can basically read of "Yes"-answers from an EEG because they correspond to totally different neural patterns: an avalanche of activity, a P3 wave, a brain-wide synchronization of activity, etc. Since we have quite a diverse set of situations/experiments (really! you would be surprised!) that show consistently the same patterns, we can read of from the outside whether something is perceived consciously.
And yes, animals like dogs, birds, dolphins etc are conscious according to that test, and babies are, too. As are some locked-in patients, but not others.
"for much of the twentieth century, many biologists went too far and would deny any human-like characteristics to animals"
That was the reigning view when I started reading National Geographic for Kids in 1966. For example, we were told that only humans used tools. Thus, it was a huge deal to 7-year-olds like me that Jane Goodall reported that her chimps used crude tools. Jane Goodall was an official Scientist, so she wasn't to be ignored.
As I grew older, I noticed that with just about anything we were told that Science had proven animals couldn't do, that somebody somewhere had an anecdote of an animal they'd known doing it. But anecdotes were not Science.
Today, in the Youtube Era, we of course have an absolutely immense body of evidence of individual animals doing all sorts of wild things that the Behaviorist Era denied they could do.
I second the recommendation of "War in Human Civilization". "The Horse the Wheel and Language", on the other hand, taught me more about the erosion of horse teeth than I ever wanted to know.
If chimpanzees were smarter than us, then we'd be the endangered species in their zoos.
Another book recommendation - for more about cephalopod cognition, Other Minds by Peter Godfrey Smith. There's a bunch of philosophy mixed in, but I found the descriptions of octopus behavior more interesting, and the thesis that since octopi are the smart animals that are least closely related to us, they're the closest we can get (for now?) to studying aliens.
There are also some claims that make me wonder if there is or will be a replication crisis in animal behavior studies similar to the one in the social sciences.
Big props for the structure and organization of the review (especially the "Pairs well with" section). While more stodgy and rigid than the woven masterworks from Scott and Reviewer #2, this is a structure that could actually be emulated and used as a guideline by others less skilled in the art. Given you're a finalist pulled from an already aggressively self-selected pool, that's...probably most people.
If I were ever to write a book review, I'd definitely be eyeing this format as my starting template. Unless the later entries source up something even better :)
Great choice of subject matter. I took a class on ethology in college (our main text was King Solomon's Ring by Lorenz, which I highly recommend) and had a similar reaction of "wow, here's this fascinating and distinctive field of science that I had no idea existed, what's up with that." I wasn't super-satisfied with the presentation, though. I wish there was more discussion of what we've actually learned from ethology and less of the meta-learnings, and the sections on predictive processing and other books felt a bit pointless. Still, the content was interesting and the writing, though somewhat dry by ACX standards, was quite clear. Thanks!
Another potential addition to the "Pairs Well With" section would be almost anything by Desmond Morris; but especially his *watching series, such as Catwatching. Contrasting his in-depth observational approach with the more rigorous discussion in this book is fun and interesting.
By the way, the “authors” tag is apparently wrong in Substack’s metadata, based on how this post shows up on a link-sharing site. Does Substack have a way to change it for guest posts? Maybe someone needs to file a feature request?
You said: Apes seem to learn sign language. This isn't quite accurate.
For a deep dive into all the attempts (pretty much all failed and falsified) to teach apes sign language, see Robert Sapolsky's lecture on trying to teach other animals language. https://youtu.be/SIOQgY1tqrU?t=4711
The tiny-narrator-guy-in-our-heads dichotomy isn't real. It'd be an impossibly slow way of processing the world if we had to put everything we sense into sentences. It's sometimes this, sometimes that.
I am super curious which species are notorious for that - the part of my brain that enjoys horror movies is fully engaged by that.
This is the most terrifying thing I read in a long while.
On the cute side, I've been watching videos by people who keep reptiles, and tegus are the lizard equivalent of dogs. They actually like human company.
Thank you so much for this comment! Very enjoyable and informative.
I feel like the Western experience with rescue animals in general has been pretty mixed. So many of these animals are *so messed up*, will never get better, will cause significant problems in your life...and require jumping through an incredible number of undignified hoops.
As it so often does, our comedy has provided the first objective review of the situation, in this case in the form of an unintentional dialogue between Bill Burr and Louis CK.
1. Bill Burr's bit on his struggles to socialize/train his rescue dog.
2. Louis CK's bit on what an incredible pain/problem rescue dogs can be.
3. Bill Burr's bit in a subsequent special on how he finally had to give up and give away his rescue dog.
I don't want to conclude that animals shouldn't be rescued, but it's not exactly something I would feel comfortable recommending to a friend trying to decide between a reputable breeder and the Humane Society kennels.
I find the wild differences (not just total quantity but qualitative) in dog intelligence endlessly fascinating, and I honor your willingness to admit that some dogs just...aren't all there, whatever other virtues they may possess.
I just adopted cats for the first time (after getting some for free as a kid and then having a cat adopt us later) and it's a really crazy number of hoops to jump, including signed waivers from the landlord and contacts for *references*(?!) and agreements to never let the cats outside ever again and notify the shelter if you move states. We ended up with two sweet older cats with not too many behavioral issues (one pees for distance while standing in the box and likes chewing thin plastic), but both needed medication.
They're mostly normal cats, but I'm convinced that one of them doesn't have strong object permanence. She walks out of the room where we're sitting, then starts crying a minute later trying to figure out where we are.
Are fast dogs not very bright? My impression of Afghans I've known is that they are scatterbrained. A half century ago, Sports Illustrated had a funny article about a greyhound race track that tried an Afghan race. Only one dog managed to stay focused enough to complete the race and he refused to stop and kept running until exhausted.
I should observe before going into Afghan (dog) intelligence specifically that a lot of the time, "intelligence" testing in dogs gets inflated with "obedience" testing. As someone else pointed out in relation to reptiles in this thread, it's often the case that disobedience isn't stupidity, it's just a total lack of interest in doing as the human commands.
Speaking of Afghan hounds, they're bred to hunt independently in alpine terrain and are apparently incredibly good at that - but consequently, there isn't an iota of interest in anything like modern obedience training in their DNA.
I would suggest it's a safe bet that any breed that's been around for centuries does *something* very well, but it's also worth observing that modern breed conformation has often taken very functional breeds to obscene places. Check out this article and look at how much more...practical that Afghan hound looks in that black and white photo.
https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/en/reports/context-culture/from-tazi-to-afghan-hound-from-hunters-friend-to-silken-haired-pet/
It is an important distinction. Beagles have been placed almost at the bottom of the pack when it comes to "intelligence" by a lot of dog breeders, but our beagle is quite smart. She just doesn't care about following orders. She wants food, and she can be trained to do just about anything as long as you have food in your hand. Once the food is gone, she has little interest.
"I feel like the Western experience with rescue animals in general has been pretty mixed"
I don't know about western, but the US seems to have a norm of cats never going outside. In Europe , it's easier for cats achieve whatever mix of indoors and outdoors life that they want ... so semi feral cats appear occasionally to feed, and go off on another adventure. But a cat that's kept indoors can easily feel imprisoned, with subsequent behavioural problems.
Cats are an invasive species in the US. They're a threat to native wildlife, especially birds.
Nice review, but I just want to note the difference in meaning between "training to beat the chimp as hard as they could" and "training as hard as they could to beat the chimp."
Picture a Rocky-style montage with lab-coated scientists furiously practicing memory games and doing push-ups on one side, and the chimp lazily eating bananas on the other.
I find that anecdote extraordinary in terms of being a revealing insight into the deeper psychological motivations and feelings of our own species when we do cognition comparisons. As a species, we place extreme value on our ability to think, and while we're often quite sanguine about "granting" other species a victory in non-cognitive realms like how many colors they can see or how high they can jump, I think many of us (perhaps all of us to a certain extent) are emotionally uncomfortable with granting another species a victory in the realm of cognitive capacity.
Hence "singularity" worries.
Precisely!
Not all of us. I was brought up amongst animals of several different kinds and it has been a life-long source of frustration and discomfort that other humans cannot, or will not, recognise the cognitive abilities of animals.
At most the difference between them and us is one of the degree of cognition. Each species has its own 'magic well' of specific abilities that it draws upon, but recognisable cognition is much more common than humans - as indeed you note - seem willing to concede.
That sentence really threw me for a good 10 seconds. I was like "hey what the hell kinda of researchers... oh"
Obviously it's too late for the other entries this year, but I really enjoyed the 'Pairs Well With' section (and its title!) and would love to see others follow suit.
Seconded
Yah, that should be standard on all book reviews.
Formatting issue: The subheading starting 'The Importance of Methodology' repeats the '1.' counter, presumably an artefact of converting the document into Substack's system. There's also a space missing in 'Full disclosure, almosteverything I know'.
Is there any chance we could get a google form for voting on these as we read them, similar to what you've done for the non-finalists? I feel like by the end of this contest there is no way I'm going to remember any sort of ranking from previous reviews, but if you ask me to rate them immediately after reading them, you would probably end up with a much better indicator of true ranking.
Very good idea.
I'm trying to get around that by keeping a running list and updating the rankings with new entries:
Previously I had _Progress and Poverty_ tied with _On the Natural Faculties_ and both well ahead of _Order Without Law_. I enjoyed this review, but I don’t know if I can say I liked it more than either of the front runners.
New ranking:
1st. Progress and Poverty / On the Natural Faculties (tied)
3rd Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
4th Order Without Law
Even though this isn’t my favorite, I just want to mention I’ve attended lectures by Frans and interacted with him socially on a couple occasions. He’s a wonderful speaker, super duper smart, and quite fun to talk with. Its possible I’m over correcting to avoid showing bias since I don’t have much of a personal relationship with Galen or George.
If you haven’t seen it yet, this is probably his most famous lecture, on monkeys railing against inequity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg
This is one of my favorite non-fiction books, and I really can't encourage people enough to read it for themselves. It is a genuine joy to read for its own sake, especially the animal anecdotes - it's not one of those tedious-but-wise non-fiction books where you're better off saving your time and just banking a summary, even one as detailed as this.
Great review. I would also strongly endorse de Waal's book called "Chimpanzee Politics". It is the brilliant review of social organization and power dynamics of a group of chimps. I used to keep a copy of it in my office and tell everyone that it was the only business book that I would recommend everyone reads (though it was not necessarily a "how to" manual). A side benefit is that it also sheds light on the whole Trump phenomenon.
Seconded, and I would also add, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe, which contains a spectacularly moving passage about the rocket program's work with chimpanzees, written in Wolfe's signature style (deceptively dispassionate?).
This may be controversial and I hope it doesn't break ACX's spirit of conviviality, but it did occur to me after reading this book that there may be an empathy divide, and therefore a potential progressive/conservative divide, in how likely we are to assign intelligence to the observed behavior of a non-human animal.
I suspect, without claiming to be certain, that those with low empathy are more likely to assume that a given animal is just a brute who responded to stimuli mechanistically unless it's decisively proven otherwise, whereas those with more empathy are more likely to start from the premise that the animal is "like me" until decisively proven otherwise.
Also a reasonable hypothesis.
How reliably does that response get triggered for different sorts of animals? My understanding is that a lot of typical 'cute animal' traits are designed to trigger human associations with babies (wide eyes, high pitched vocalisation) so it wouldn't be surprising if similar things were at play here. But if seeing a rhino in pain or a crab in pain also triggered the same empathy response then that suggests something different is going on.
Are 'low empathy' and 'high/more empathy' technical terms with a defined meaning? Because at first glance it seems to me that empathy is naturally higher-dimensional than that: an individual could have a high degree of emotional understanding/concern towards Group A but a low degree of emotional understanding/concern towards Group B (think in-groups and out-groups, races, classes etc.).
It's intuitive to me that someone's degree of emotional understanding/concern towards other humans could easily be independent of their degree towards non-humans.
Although there's some pretty interesting science on empathy, I'm not going to claim to be arguing directly from it in this case - I'm really just expressing personal thoughts.
I think you're correct that it's possible for an individual's empathy levels to wildly differ between comparator groups based on life experience, but I would suggest that different individuals have different baseline empathy levels (regarding childhood nature/nurture, choose whichever you prefer or whichever cocktail).
For example, even without having a gay friend or any particular practical reason to empathize with the gay rights movement, Individual A may intuitively empathize that "their love is like my love" and support gay marriage, whereas Individual B may instinctively be somewhere between indifferent and disgusted by the thought, until their son comes out to them, which pushes their low baseline empathy to a situational peak on that topic and solely on that topic to a place similar to where Individual A reached without experience intervening.
P.S. I'm not necessarily claiming empathy is even objectively good. Sometimes I think it can mislead, and De Waal is pretty unsparing of early ethnologists who were perhaps led astray by high baseline (or high situational) empathy with the animals they were studying.
I just don't find it obvious that there should be a natural baseline that applies across groups. I think your gay son example is better explained by (1) Individual B having a higher degree of concern for/understanding of their son (2) a difference in how A and B categorize people, with B more naturally casting gay non-family-members as a group that B doesn't have much concern for/understanding of.
Paul Bloom makes this point - the worst cruelty usually comes from unbalanced empathy: https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/1/19/14266230/empathy-morality-ethics-psychology-compassion-paul-bloom
City dwellers are much worse at dealing with animals than rural folks are.
Rural folks tend to be more conservative than urban dwellers are.
This would suggest that conservatives are more empathetic and better able to understand animals.
My impression is that the people who most tended to see animals as just brutes who respond to stimuli mechanistically were philosophically-minded intellectuals. Since the Ancient Greeks, many philosophers have been concerned with theories of human uniqueness, which sometimes tends to make them theorize that animals couldn't be like whatever it is they theorize makes humans human.
The behaviorists weren't exactly like that, but they had a code of scientific self-discipline that discouraged them from noting the individuality in animals. Everybody gives the old behaviorists grief these days, but they rather impressively exhausted their approach's potential.
E.g., B.F. Skinner's successor at running Harvard's rat lab, Richard J. Herrnstein, got bored with behaviorism in mid career and switched to the study of human phenomena, with results that still get people worked up. The only other scientists I can recall who ever admitted to reaching the limits of what their field of study could teach were Kang and Kodos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALXZ2ElV8_U
The behaviorists weren't simple human chauvinists, they didn't even believe in anthropomorphizing humans!
Could I recommend adding the "The Bird Way" (https://amzn.to/3nceCfM) to your "pairs well with" at the end? :) It's what I thought of most while reading your review.
FWIW, Gwern wrote a bunch about Cat Sense here: https://www.gwern.net/Cat-Sense
This was really interesting, thanks for sharing!
> like the primate research team that learned a chimpanzee in Japan performed significantly better than humans on a specific memory-related task and responded by training to beat the chimp as hard as they could.
Holy crap I first read this as meaning that the researchers had punished the chimp for performing better than them, by subjecting it to a beating (having first trained themselves to maximize the pain they could inflict).
So did I.
If there had been Japanese primatologists from 1931-1945, they would have done that. (The Japanese trained their WWII fighter pilots by constantly beating them.)
Fortunately, they aren't like that anymore.
Best review yet!
This is certainly a joyful review! And it's very rare that one blog post immediately adds five books to my "to read" list.
I've been posting this everywhere this week, but I just listened to this podcast interview by Ezra Klein of Alison Gopnik. If you think of children and other humans as animals whose consciousness we only partially inhabit, and want to understand the intelligence of, it pairs very nicely with this: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-alison-gopnik-transcript.html
Excellent review, really gives me a sense of what the book is about.
I would like to apologize to all of the mice I have apparently been stressing out. I had no idea.
I don't know how it fairs for the reviewing process, but the first paragraph made me decide I didn't wouldn't read the review, because I'd much rather read the book. Well done?
Not related to the book review, but I'm posting it here so Scott sees it: The comments seem to have vanished from slatestarcodex.com since the formatting (blue header, gray background, &c.) was restored, & have been missing from unsongbook.com for several weeks at least. Under each post the comment section has "[number] responses to [article name]" but none of the comments are shown. This (https://fileleaks.com/e/wBaQVOCq58) is what the last pre-shutdown open thread (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/21/open-thread-156-5/) looks like to me now, though the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/20200622031835/https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/21/open-thread-156-5/) shows that there were a significant number of comments there.
This problem appears to be fixed now on both sites.
Watching “what about bunny”'s videos on instagram/tiktok and https://www.theycantalk.org/ is pretty eye opening
> until fairly recently, and in some corners still today, we have had very smart people reasoning about thought as fundamentally being linguistic and nature, while some large chunk, maybe as many as ~15% of people just don't think in words.
Don't confuse the report for the reality. I suggest that exactly 100% of people do not think in words. That's not to say they have no internal monologue. But the monologue is an automatic process triggered by the thought, and the thought, having happened first, would be unaffected if the monologue were suppressed or absent.
I agree. I *seem* to think in words most of the time, but if I try to transcribe my thoughts it doesn't work. There's often stuff that I was thinking that, shortly thereafter, I have trouble putting into words.
Can you say more on this? Or a link? I wanted to ask how people, who think in words, think about a cam shaft. Personally I find it hard to think about stuff without a pencil in my hand so I can scribble some pictures. (Well that's when thinking of physical things.)
Oh and great review. Book ordered.
Watching the video here,https://ryanandrewlangdon.wordpress.com/2020/01/28/today-i-learned-that-not-everyone-has-an-internal-monologue-and-it-has-ruined-my-day/
I can have a conversation with myself in the mirror, so apparently I'm part of the ~85% with an internal monologue. Now I want to hear from someone without the monologue.
Michael, do you have a good way in mind of distinguishing between "thought/thinking" and "words triggered by thought/thinking"? The potential supporting example that comes to mind (purely from self-reported introspection) is that I frequently find myself hung up on the phrasing in my head, even though I "know what I mean" - I keep spinning on getting the wording of the internal monologue "right". As a potential counter-example, I have had plenty of instances where I cannot advance further in my reasoning unless I write something down, look at what I wrote, and start responding to that. Being able to work out what's going with both seems to require a good definition of what "thinking" is which I currently lack, so I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I sometimes think in words, but more often I have the thought first and then figure out how to put it in words. That's obviously the case when I know what I want to say but can't remember the relevant word — I think increasingly common as I get older.
I find it hard to believe that there are any people who think only in words.
I‘d like to point out that the additionally recommended book „The Hidden Life of Trees“ seems to be not without controversy. Years ago I felt intrigued by the thesis but finally refrained from reading it as a number of reviewers from the science community criticised it as being not particularly substantiated (and mixing fact, opinion and romantic metapher). I don’t remember too much detail. Just be on the lookout when reading it.
"One area where he sides with the skeptics is in asking for an end to inter-species intelligence contests and trying to grapple with big, messy topics like "self-awareness" or "consciousness". He points out that we don't even have good definitions for these concepts in humans, so why should we expect to apply them to other animals? "
The sentence "we don't have a good definition of consciousness" is outdated. This field has made enormous progress in the last ~15 years, and I think we have an answer on what consciousness is, though the answer is much more boring than philosophers anticipated. (Especially people who mix it up with self-awareness or meta-cognition.)
If you think otherwise, I recommend to read "Consciousness and the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene. The wikipedia article already gives a summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_and_the_Brain .
The key idea is that we have lots of different situations where people give firm answers to the question "did you see the picture on the screen?", and it depends on details whether the answer is "Yes." or "Which picture? The screen was all black!". Like whether the picture was shown 100 ms earlier or later. One can basically read of "Yes"-answers from an EEG because they correspond to totally different neural patterns: an avalanche of activity, a P3 wave, a brain-wide synchronization of activity, etc. Since we have quite a diverse set of situations/experiments (really! you would be surprised!) that show consistently the same patterns, we can read of from the outside whether something is perceived consciously.
And yes, animals like dogs, birds, dolphins etc are conscious according to that test, and babies are, too. As are some locked-in patients, but not others.
Sounds interesting, added to my list, thanks!
"for much of the twentieth century, many biologists went too far and would deny any human-like characteristics to animals"
That was the reigning view when I started reading National Geographic for Kids in 1966. For example, we were told that only humans used tools. Thus, it was a huge deal to 7-year-olds like me that Jane Goodall reported that her chimps used crude tools. Jane Goodall was an official Scientist, so she wasn't to be ignored.
As I grew older, I noticed that with just about anything we were told that Science had proven animals couldn't do, that somebody somewhere had an anecdote of an animal they'd known doing it. But anecdotes were not Science.
Today, in the Youtube Era, we of course have an absolutely immense body of evidence of individual animals doing all sorts of wild things that the Behaviorist Era denied they could do.
I second the recommendation of "War in Human Civilization". "The Horse the Wheel and Language", on the other hand, taught me more about the erosion of horse teeth than I ever wanted to know.
If chimpanzees were smarter than us, then we'd be the endangered species in their zoos.
I thought "Cat Sense and Dog Sense" was a single book. Took me a couple searches to realize that they're two books.
Another book recommendation - for more about cephalopod cognition, Other Minds by Peter Godfrey Smith. There's a bunch of philosophy mixed in, but I found the descriptions of octopus behavior more interesting, and the thesis that since octopi are the smart animals that are least closely related to us, they're the closest we can get (for now?) to studying aliens.
There are also some claims that make me wonder if there is or will be a replication crisis in animal behavior studies similar to the one in the social sciences.
Big props for the structure and organization of the review (especially the "Pairs well with" section). While more stodgy and rigid than the woven masterworks from Scott and Reviewer #2, this is a structure that could actually be emulated and used as a guideline by others less skilled in the art. Given you're a finalist pulled from an already aggressively self-selected pool, that's...probably most people.
If I were ever to write a book review, I'd definitely be eyeing this format as my starting template. Unless the later entries source up something even better :)
Excellent read, though I could make neither heads nor tails of the section header formats and numbering.
Brief review-of-the-review:
Great choice of subject matter. I took a class on ethology in college (our main text was King Solomon's Ring by Lorenz, which I highly recommend) and had a similar reaction of "wow, here's this fascinating and distinctive field of science that I had no idea existed, what's up with that." I wasn't super-satisfied with the presentation, though. I wish there was more discussion of what we've actually learned from ethology and less of the meta-learnings, and the sections on predictive processing and other books felt a bit pointless. Still, the content was interesting and the writing, though somewhat dry by ACX standards, was quite clear. Thanks!
Another potential addition to the "Pairs Well With" section would be almost anything by Desmond Morris; but especially his *watching series, such as Catwatching. Contrasting his in-depth observational approach with the more rigorous discussion in this book is fun and interesting.
By the way, the “authors” tag is apparently wrong in Substack’s metadata, based on how this post shows up on a link-sharing site. Does Substack have a way to change it for guest posts? Maybe someone needs to file a feature request?
You said: Apes seem to learn sign language. This isn't quite accurate.
For a deep dive into all the attempts (pretty much all failed and falsified) to teach apes sign language, see Robert Sapolsky's lecture on trying to teach other animals language. https://youtu.be/SIOQgY1tqrU?t=4711
The tiny-narrator-guy-in-our-heads dichotomy isn't real. It'd be an impossibly slow way of processing the world if we had to put everything we sense into sentences. It's sometimes this, sometimes that.
Any ethical implications about this and how we treat other species?