> If we lived in such a world [with no persistent writing] there would be no culture; because we couldn’t transmit across many generations what we had learned in our lifetime
Except oral traditions exist and have been passed down for thousands of years without writing.
You can pass some knowledge but it's limited. The more specialized you get the fewer knowledge bearer and if something happens to them you have to start from scratch again.
But, could the tribal elders transmit orally how to create a silicon chip, how to build a car, how to do all the other things that create the world we live in today? What is the maximum amount of data that can be stored and transmitted orally?
Interesting questions to consider, what sort of social structures would maximise the amount of data retained. What would be a the size of a "tribe", what makes an elder an elder, what sort of tribes have to cooperate to create a car.
Here is another one, a single person can be though of as volatile store of information. How many people and what protocols would be needed to implement redundancy and error correction?
Not only this, but non-human social animals like whales and apes show locally unique and persistent technologies and adaptations that are usually called culture by the people studying them, all without writing.
Culture is certainly less enduring and more fragile without writing, but as long as knowledge can be transmitted from old to young by some means other than genetic encoding, it is also inevitable.
It takes one war to destroy centuries of oral tradition. Written works have this ability where they can be transported by individuals who cannot read them.
So the tradition goes, at least… without the comparing current written version to the ‘original’ version, it’s nearly impossible to tell how accurately our current understanding is after thousands of years.
Oral tradition is just a story, it’s not a record, the way writing is.
it looks like you and everyone else responding to me need to go read about the Vedas. They have been passed down for millenia and contain a form of error-corrrcting code that ensures fidelity. If you dispute the accuracy of this mechanism, I'm sure some Indologists would be very curious to hear more.
Regarding the first anecdote about "the juice": my cousin was a crime reporter. She had dozens of similar stories about incredibly stupid crimes. The guy who signed a petition, with his real name and address, right before robbing the convenience store next to the petitioner; the person who tried to smuggle a watermelon out under her skirt; the person who fell asleep on the couch of the house he was robbing (this one is common).
"the person who fell asleep on the couch of the house he was robbing (this one is common)." This is common? is it addicts nodding off? I'm picturing myself in this situation and imaging my anxiety how could someone possibly fall asleep? actually baffled
In the case I remember, the burglar broke in, started to steal the XBox, decided to play a game, and fell asleep. But I heard other variations after my cousin told me this one.
I wonder if "common" in this case is relative. I.E. it's the right type of story to grab our attention so we are disproportionally more likely to hear about few cases that do happen.
Something is interpreted as "common" because it is disproportionately talked about, but it's disproportionately talked about precisely between it is uncommon and therefore interesting! Is there a name for this phenomenon?
> the Rubik’s cube world record currently stands at 3.13 seconds, set in July 2023.
> However, the record-holder, 23 year-old Max Park, didn’t discover the insights that allowed him to solve the Rubik’s cube. His success was built atop a foundation of accumulated knowledge that mathematicians and puzzle enthusiasts derived—mental algorithms that enable “cubers” to solve the puzzle with lightning speed.
Looks like intelligence is a collective property and not the domain of any one individual. We tend to build cults of personalities around certain smart people, but if you displace those smart people onto a different time or place, they would have achieved nothing. They owe their success to so many other people.
Having a genius on your team is less important than fostering an environment where a group of people feed off each other's ideas and produce intelligence.
> Looks like intelligence is a collective property and not the domain of any one individual.
The one question that has kept me up at night the most (can’t recall who posed it) was; “What are we building? Ants build ant hills, beavers build dams, what is humanity building?”
Human mental capabilities don't seem to be well characterized - thus when people say 'intelligence' it's unclear what they're talking about. Case example: John von Neumann, who surely ranks high on anyone's list of 'most intelligent humans of the 20th century'. Brittanica:
> "Von Neumann insisted on the value of game-theoretic thinking in defense policy. He supported development of the hydrogen bomb and was reported to have advocated a preventive nuclear strike to destroy the Soviet Union's nascent nuclear capability circa 1950."
So, if humans destroy modern civilization with fusion bombs and are reduced to a Stone Age existence on a radioactive planet, will visiting aliens say, "Gosh, wasn't this a stupid species? Clever, yes, but not very wise."
Interesting information but his key point wasn't really presented with any evidence. He didn't make a good case that octopus don't believe in conspiracy theories.
How would we know?
Instead he assumed they don't because they learn somewhat complex tasks and exhibit a level of forethought in their activities.
But do they hold beliefs that are not true about things they don't understand well? (the basic building block of a conspiracy theory)
What do they think about the scientists and the aquarium they are in?
Why do they prefer one scientist to another or try to escape?
We don't know.
Saying they don't fall into "conspiracy theories" kind of comes out of nowhere.
So the author exhibits exactly the same trait of assuming we can know things without evidence that produces the kind of thinking he labels as "stupidity".
Personally I often find a reference to "Dunning-Kruger" to be associated with a tendency to argue with rhetoric rather than fact. Maybe someone should do a study.
The actual DK study is far less assertive about it's conclusions, from what I can recall. People who think they don't suffer from it love to prove that they do by raising it almost to the level of physical law.
Octopi are intelligent, but we see them reacting to their environment the vast majority of the time. We do not see them engage in behaviors that result in bad outcomes. They seem to spin up a mental model to assist them in their day to day, which is very different than having a dogmatic belief that harms or even inconveniences them. They seem very direct. I'd want to see some documented behavior such as cyclical motions, or returning to a spot repeatedly, disregarding danger, that kind of thing. Our intelligence models the world imperfectly, via metaphors we encounter in the world itself. We use the mental space we gain from using a portion of our working memory, as well as our exectutive control functions to not react as we create our narratives, which we use to persuade others socially via language. Sociality is baked in.
Quite possbily octopi use their 9 brains in a genetic algorithm for problem solving. The camo they use gives them advanced signalling for free. The redundancy their multiple brains give them might let them just compute solutions who knows?
Finally, it's important to remember that people who never change their mind often propogate their worldview to more malliable people. That constancy is comforting to many, and the emotional machinery is millions of years older than the rational system we cobbled together out of our excecutive control function we got from our cortex. That's why advertising is not just somebody reading the benefits of a product.
After all, smart people get scammed just as easy and dumb ones. In fact, it's better. Once their emotions are subverted, the story they tell themselves will be utterly plausible.
You also don't need to be a genius to sense when somebody is manipulative, and contemptuous of you. So you stick together with your peeps and crowdsource a heuristic of distrust of the eggheads. You can't really trust people smarter than you, right?
9 is also a ideal voting number for a state switch between interested, neutral, fleeing. A octopus having voter deadlock with 8 brains would freeze up in some scenarios.
> You can't really trust people smarter than you, right?
You can not. They are out to get you by means of hacking parasitism. Then again, society is the biggest game plan, and when a large part of society votes for a parasite purge, howling and screaming it all goes. Game theory and free market noises non withstanding..
True. Maybe they're all a bunch of paranoid, misguided wing-nuts. Who knows?
Genetics means nothing apart from an ability to chemically copy something.
Am I smarter than a Chimpanzee, given that we share 99% of our DNA? Considering that I'm here and they're there, the answer is probably "yes". It's just an observation, but seems solid enough as a conclusion with the evidence I have.
Are Octopuses smart? Who knows. But, I'm still here, and they're still there. Of course, nothing lasts forever. Maybe they're playing the long game.
Same goes for whales, porpoises, dogs, ponies and elegant rocks. Were they all super smart, they'd be here and we'd be there.
I think the subtlety is that cephalopods/corvids/etc probably don’t hold false beliefs about the following:
a) things they care about
b) things they are cognitively capable of understanding to be false, and
c) things they can plausibly falsify for themselves by obtaining the relevant information.
So an octopus can have all sorts of misconceptions: indifferently making false assumptions about a cave they aren’t going to explore themselves; bizarre pseudo-magical explanations about human technology far beyond their understanding; incorrect guesses as to another octopus’s mental state. But what makes a conspiracy theory more than a mere misconception is the effort spent reinforcing the falsehood, using tools and methodologies which reflect a theoretical capability to understand why the conspiracy theory must be false[1]. (In particular the problem of people who cynically spread conspiracy theories without believing them.)
Conspiracy theories and other misconceptions motivated by politics or ideology are unique to humans because language + complex social organization + some intangible “humanness” means that abstract ideas and information can have great social power, and hence power in the real world, regardless of whether these ideas reflect reality.
[1] Note how many modern conspiracy theories are “backed up” by a slew of “evidence” which takes great analytical effort to refute line-by-line.
Conspiracy theories are a bug in Human Space - a problem that only exists because we exchange information with other humans, and we rely on informal systems of narrative logic to do it quickly and efficiently.
And we're most impressionable when emotionally agitated, which is why conspiracy theories are a combination of nonsense narratives and powerful emotional triggers.
If you're an octopus you're going to have misbeliefs and poor assumptions, but they're your own work. It's not clear that octopuses share much - if any - information in the way that (for example) corvids do.
Octopus are a tricky case. We just don't know. On the other hand we can confidently say clams don't believe in conspiracy theories. Neither do jellyfish.
I agree with the rest of the post, its hard to say one way or another if octopuses believe in conspiracy theories, and the conclusion drawn seems, at best, orthogonal to the data presented.
But I disagree with what you said here:
>But do they hold beliefs that are not true about things they don't understand well? (the basic building block of a conspiracy theory)
Facilely, this is a tautology. Everyone necessarily holds untrue beliefs about things they incompletely understand. The scientific method taught to school children is a framework for identifying and removing them. Your statement is akin to "the fundamental building block of conspiracy theories is knowledge gained from empirical observation"
But less glibly, untrue beliefs held by individuals with incomplete understanding are insufficient building blocks of conspiracy theories. The issue doesn't arise from incomplete understanding, nor is it dismissed by efforts to expand understanding. You need an untrue belief, certainly, but you also need to approach that belief with a confirmation bias.
That's why I drew attention to the confirmation bias portion of it.
Very intelligent people still buy into conspiracy theories, and its always the same: the conspiracy theory lies about certain things, so as to preserve the illusion of the truth in other things.
The lab leak conspiracy theory mainly appeals to the audience's desire that bad things be, in principle, preventable. Take that away, and people end up feeling like they have less control over their own safety, which is considerably more troubling than just the fear of some disease.
We should not try to understand any given conspiracy theory in the context of "what information are people getting wrong?", because (like I said previously), everyone, regardless of intelligence, will always be wrong about something. We should instead try to understand why the conspiracy theory is more emotionally satisfying than the truth.
Lab leak is such a bad example here since it's now officially considered the most probable explanation. Labeling something as a conspiracy theory especially when the explanation is the simplest and most probable explanation just screams politics or groupthink. A lot of conspiracy theories are just plain true but they get labeled as questionable because it goes against official narratives, interests, etc or are associated with kooky people. Well that's how the world works I guess.
I am completely unable to find any official source claiming that the lab-leak hypothesis was more credible than the wet-market zoonotic transmission hypothesis. Can you provide some support on that front?
The closest I get to an official US position is the "summary" of hearings from the House Oversight Committee, as published on oversight.house.gov. But the way that report is written (and the way the whole of the website is structured) casts a pretty dark shadow on the reliability of the whole thing (at the bottom of the page, there's some quick links that are, verbatim "Press Releases, The Overview, Biden Family Investigation, The Bidens’ Influence Peddling Timeline, Biden's Border Crisis, COVID Origins". Considering that Biden impeachment hearings around some of that have been repeatedly rebuffed by republicans, the fact that those are on the main page reveals a pretty seriously bias.
The WHO is pretty silent on the subject, as is the CDC and the NIH. This makes sense, both within and without the conspiracy theory context, so the silence is not damning for either conclusion.
More tellingly, the closest I get from the scientific literature is that we cannot definitively rule out a leak as the cause, but that's adequately explained by the Chinese government's historic silence on internal issues. That silence is not an argument in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. If the PRC had been an open book about everything else, but suddenly clammed up about the origins of COVID 19, then I guess, sure, but even then, more "open" governments have denied more over less damage.
That's pretty much how it goes for every piece of "evidence" that supports the lab-leak hypothesis: the whole thing is based on circumstantial evidence that is most readily interpreted as innocent or inconclusive. For instance, its true that 3 scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill with an unidentified respiratory illness in December 2019. But only 3, while quite a few more people became ill around the wet market. Sure, the scientists could've become ill at the lab, then carried it to the wet market. But why didn't more at the lab become ill? The simpler explanation is that the scientists went to the wet market in the city they lived in, and were exposed to the virus there.
And this is all for the best-supported version of the lab-leak hypothesis, that does not assume deliberate weaponization via genetic engineering or anything of that sort.
The point I'm making here is that while the conspiracy theory is the more emotionally satisfying explanation, you have to massively overemphasize certain bits of data, and massively underemphasize others, to arrive at the conclusion that its even as likely as the non-conspiracy theory.. That's the very definition of confirmation bias.
Opinions are split among many organizations but considering the politics involved in admitting fault from labs and the emotional satisfaction resulting from keeping the same opinion as before (lol), lab leak is the most likely culprit.
> The irony is that the situation is actually reversed. In their seminal paper, Dunning and Kruger are the ones broadcasting their (statistical) incompetence by conflating autocorrelation for a psychological effect. In this light, the paper’s title may still be appropriate. It’s just that it was the authors (not the test subjects) who were ‘unskilled and unaware of it’.
When it comes to the term "Conspiracy Theory", the stupidity is baked in, as a theory is something proven, not assumed.
Hypothesis > (test) > Theory
The conspiracy among three Physicists, now known as the Manhattan Project, with hundreds of thousands of unknowing participants, with whole new sectors of industries, and supply chains, brought us new medicine, nuclear power, and peace through mutually assured destruction, yet people seem to think of conspiracy as some harebrained concept spun up by halfwits.
I had an interesting interaction with Claude Opus after reading this article. Prompt: "Before the invention of writing, how did people send each other anonymous messages? How might the most intelligent non-writing species on earth such as dolphins, crows and octopi be sending us messages?"
I can't take seriously the suggestion we should expect chimps and humans to be similar due to the "small" number of DNA base changes.
Tiny genetic difference can make a huge difference to an organism. Their statement is like saying doing something 10 times versus 100000 times should give similar results, because expressing both as text the difference is only 4 characters ("10" v.s. "100000"). There are literally places in the human genome that have that kind of effect, e.g. small substitutions resulting in extra whole functioning vertebrae.
In their colorful thought experiment, if all our writing/printing ink faded in short time periods, all recognizable civilization would disappear. Seemingly small changes can result in radical impact.
I am objecting to their initial motivation: it being surprising that "small" DNA changes lead us to be vastly superior to Apes.
They suggest in the disappearing ink thought experiment that this is because the genetic change is sufficient for us to pass some critical threshold (allowing cultural transferences of ideas).
That is a completely different from my complaint. I complain that they subtly mischaracterize how we should think about DNA changes. The number of DNA base substitutions is a pretty meaningless metric in the context they are attempting to use it.
I dont disagree with their argument that there can threshhold changes and that cultural accumilation might be one of them.
Isn’t that what they are saying, after raising the question of how percentage of DNA differences doesn’t account for the profoundness of our developmental and behavior differences?
That a few key DNA changes could account for profound change? So small percentage differences are no barrier to very different results?
>I mention Alfred Wegener, the balloonist who proposed that the continents must have drifted, given how clearly their coastlines fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Blinded by scientific precepts, what is now plainly obvious to any child who glances at a map of South America and Africa
Problem: coastline shape is a dependent variable. Amount of water is the independent. Looking at S.America and Africa only makes a jigsaw puzzle in modern times. During the ice ages, will those continents still look like a match?
I say no.
Furthermore, continental drift has pulled these contienents apart. When they eventually collide, there will be mountain building, much like the Pyrenees, or the Himalayas.
Also, South America is on the ring of fire, a subduction zone. Ocean floors are erupted basalts, which are pushed over to the continental trenches where they, being heavy and dense, are pushed down into the mantle. Seawater as well. This seawater reduces the density of the basalts, and as they melt in the mantle, the magma is forced upwards. Pumice is an extreme example of this, but continental granites and anthracites are formed in this fashion. These rocks make up the vast majority of the continental crust.
Diamonds in Africa suggest that the core of the continent is ancient and very hard rock known as kratons. Rock drifts into these structres and sticks there. creating a continent via accumulation. They root deep in the mantle, Im actually unsure if they move via drift. The diamonds are created at their base, and slowly percolate up to the surface. These rocks are on the order of 2-3 billion years old.
Finally, not all continent building happens at subduction zones. Giant blobs of magma called mantle plumes bubble up from the mantle and massively heat the crust that moves over them. Iceland is one such place where this is happening. Hawaii, another. Scotland clearly was wildly volcanic at one point, until it drifted away from the plume.
What's the point here? Well, the shape of these places is a complete fluke. They do not fit like any jigsaw. The proof of continental drift is that we see fossils of giant land animals, as well as flora on both continents. There is no way they could have floated over on some sticks, or whatnot. Creatures living in an arid landlocked area roamed freely over these continents, until most likely a mantle plume pushed began to break up that supercontinent.
Such plumes are more likely to occur when all the landmassses of the earth are together. Regardless, does it count if you looked at those continents because of erroneous deduction, only to find the proof that the same populations of creatures inhabited both distant ( in the present day ) places?
>Problem: coastline shape is a dependent variable. Amount of water is the independent. Looking at S.America and Africa only makes a jigsaw puzzle in modern times. During the ice ages, will those continents still look like a match?
This isn't quite correct. The continental shelf maintains the general shape of the land above it. Any amount of lowering from ice ages is still going to be within the shelf break and give the same outline.
> Krakauer points out that humans and chimpanzees share nearly 99 percent of our genetic code. “Imagine I gave you Hamlet,” Krakauer says, “and I changed less than 1 percent of the text and I said, ‘What’s the play?’ and you said, ‘It’s Hamlet.’ And I said, ‘What have I changed?’ ‘I’m not quite sure…I did see a few typos.’”
I can’t stand this comparison, I mean, sure if you got Hamlet with 1% errors you’d recognize it as mostly Hamlet. But if you got a computer program with 1% of the instructions switched out, I bet you’d get a non-working program.
Also Hamlet is ~30,000 words long. If you randomly distribute errors, sure, it will look like Hamlet. If you give somebody 300 words to change Hamlet, I bet they could come up with something. Put “actually Hamlet was a ghost the whole time” at the end, I don’t know, I’m not M. Night Shyamalan.
> But if you got a computer program with 1% of the instructions switched out, I bet you’d get a non-working program.
I believe it was a comment I saw on here once that took it a step further and included the OS and all hardware logic in there as well. I can have two identical desktop computers with only one program installed on each, the only difference being that the program is totally different. Those two devices could ultimate be two seemingly completely unrelated machines to the end user, even though they share far more than 99% of the exact same instructions. The only "code" they wouldn't share is the specific program they run. Everything else from the hardware to the OS is many millions of "lines" that are the same.
Something that plays movies nonstop vs a production database. Photoshop vs Halo: The Master Chief Collection. An IDE vs a point of sale system. Control software vs a web browser. A program that locks you into the software vs one that still gives you access to the OS. The differences can start getting seemingly huge very quickly.
The problem, I think, is that a layperson is unaccustomed to systems like computer programs and DNA where 99% precision is laughably insufficient to specify the behavior.
If you baked some cookies and you adjusted the amount of any one ingredient by 1%... I'm not sure the average American cook has the measurement equipment to notice. With a good scale you might be able to tell. Built a shed and adjusted the measurements by 1%? It's still going to stand up just fine. Wrote an email and swapped 1 in 100 words? They might not seven notice a difference.
If you took out only the 1% that was the baking soda, or the 1% that is the nails in the rafters, or finished your email with "Screw that!" yeah, that might be hugely different...but that's exactly the kind of precision edits to critical details that computer programs and DNA require to change user-visible behavior in a huge way.
Lay people are totally used to this type of precision.
It's like you did a typo in your cookie recipe and instead of 100 grams of sugar instead put 1000 kilos. It's only a few extra zeros after all. A tiny change in the text.
You could do much more damage than that. In poetry and Shakespeare especially, each word is used very carefully as a unit of very dense information. You could make Hamlet not related to his own father and fundamentally change any structural meaning behind the play. The resulting work would be named "Hamlet" but not be THE "Hamlet" at all.
> But we are also capable of breathtaking stupidity, imagining that it’s a good idea to turn over a nuclear arsenal to Donald Trump
And ... nothing bad enough happened to warrant the phrase "breathtaking stupidity".
I think the author spent their entire article on the wrong precept, viz that while humans are smarter than cephalopods, they are also stupider, but it is hard to understand what the author's bar for stupidity is, considering that the final example didn't warrant the description of "breathtaking stupidity".
It's possible that the author is blind to certain facts, ironically, because it doesn't match their worldview.
Except oral traditions exist and have been passed down for thousands of years without writing.
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