On the other hand, human children are incredibly curious and experiment with everything. It may not be stupidity that keeps them from following directions.

There is much to be learned by occasionally breaking the rules.

1. Draw a triangle on your forehead

2. Make a shitty clone of yourself with a circle drawn on the clone's forehead, who comes out of the shop immediately after you walk in

Then see if your dog decides to follow the shitty clone, or whether it waits a couple minutes for the regular version of you.

Edit: also, repeat with many more dogs, many more dog owners, and many more shitty clones.

Anyway, I think a fun cartoon would be the Flintstones with ceph, for example their screen could be a smaller ceph whose chromataphores are pixels.

[edit]

Old drawing, back of a napkin (apologies to MIT AI Memo 554):

https://github.com/koalahedron/ideas-for-models/blob/main/RE...

Recurring villain, probably gets his own show.

Some primates can delay gratification, along with dogs, albeit inconsistently. Corvids, too, have passed the marshmallow test.

Having had a couple of human children, I would definitely not claim that they are anything but extremely clever, but then so are many primates, dogs, and corvids.

And I learned Hungarian (and Portuguese) as a kid.

The only issue is that there’s a critical window in there that shapes your accent.

On the whole, psychologist and dog researcher Stanley Coren estimates, the average dog's intelligence is roughly as sophisticated as a 2.5-year-old baby's.

A few weeks ago she (on her own) decided to dry her wet painting by taping it to the heat vent. We have never used tape in any way similar to that, and certainly have never used the heat vent to dry anything (it being a long-term safety hazard, and potentially bad for the ventilation system).

She routinely falls on her face because of getting herself into ridiculous precarious situations (in disturbingly similar ways).

The problem is intelligence just isn't 1D no matter how much we wish it was. Delayed gratification, problem solving and communication ability are not necessarily highly correlated enough for a single metric to make sense of the three.

The clumsiness might be a different thing. Changes in height, weight, strength and sight and probably a load of other things come into this. If you change something about an adult it takes them a while to adapt.

The example that comes to mind is a pregnant woman squeezing though some gap. To any observer the attempt was obviously not going to go smoothly.

I think dogs are still surprisingly smart.

And the neurological development to process and produce speech. I'm no cognitive scientist but I think verbal speech and reasoning is a huge amount of what we call "intelligence" in humans and goes beyond simple communication of immediate facts or commands. I suspect babies do have similar problem solving abilities compared to those animals, but I think it's disingenuous to throw out speech just because a dog hasn't evolved vocal chords. They're also missing the brain to use them, with whatever that means for reasoning.

I put gorilla in there specifically for this reason - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)

Gorillas can't produce speech but they can process language at about the level of a 2-3 year old human. Which is roughly the level of intelligence that dogs were being described as having in the article I linked earlier.

>I'm no cognitive scientist but I think verbal speech and reasoning is a huge amount of what we call "intelligence" in humans and goes beyond simple communication of immediate facts or commands.

well I'm no cognitive scientist and I think differently than you do!

>but I think it's disingenuous to throw out speech just because a dog hasn't evolved vocal chords.

and I think it's disingenuous for out cephalopod overlords to claim I lack the ability to reason about potential threats because I don't shoot ink out of my fingers when in danger.

I mean I don't actually know or care that dogs might be as smart as a three year old or that any of the other animals I named might be; I just accept the findings of experts in the manner as being more likely to be correct than what I might think is the case. Still I am supposing none of the named animals are as smart as I am so I am certainly not threatened by the concept.

In humans, intelligence is often defined as "what is measured by an IQ test", which obviously doesn't work for either babies or animals.

So while you can say "some dogs can learn to understand hundreds of words, just like most babies", you can not really say "being able to tell words/people/emotions apart means an organism is intelligent"

I take zero offense and thank you for the correction, but it's somewhat amusing to think that someone presumably has two accounts and switches between them to make comments when a post is inadequately proofed.

Human children are stupid by design (well, evolution). Language, culture, and technology are overtaking genetics as the more effective information transfer mechanism. As we shed our instincts to make room for learning, human children will be born more and more stupid over time. It's a trade-off: At the same time, human adults will have greater capacity for smarts. It is the increasing stupidity at birth which enables us to learn so much into adulthood.

Animals without developed language haven't been able to afford this progress. They are smarter than human children from birth, but are unable to learn as much. So while your dog outperforms a human child at waiting outside the store, it will never have the capacity for art, mathematics, nor engineering, no matter how hard you train it. Humans on the other hand, can be trained quite a bit.

https://vaviper.blogspot.com/2019/06/from-onion-study-reveal...