
The World’s Smartest Chimp Has Died - uptown
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/opinion/chimpanzee-sarah.html
======
vecter
I frequently run this thought experiment in my head. The world's smartest
chimp is as smart as a young child, maybe. Now imagine an alien race who are
like us as we are to chimps. In the same way that we are unfathomably
intelligent to chimps (so much so that they don't even understand how far the
gap is between us and them), consider how scary it would be to encounter an
alien that was that much smarter than humans are.

~~~
Smithalicious
I think this only works if you consider intelligence only in relative terms. I
like to think that humans have at least some "absolute" level of intelligence
required to understand that another creature can be more intelligent than us,
whereas chimps probably can't grasp that concept. So it'd be easier for
humans, I reckon.

------
SubiculumCode
As is frequent by the media and animal enthusiasts there is a bias towards
emphasizing evidence that fits your desires and beliefs, but ignoring the
evidence that does not. The evidence that this chimp could use language via
manipulation of "plastic magnetic tokens that varied in size and color to
represent words" is weak, and the structure of the tokens made it appear to
carry meaning even when randomly selected and placed, according to several
experts in the field I spoke to at a conference some years ago on the matter.

~~~
ALittleLight
I also found the quote below to be weak evidence. Especially because the
second paragraph makes it seem like "choosing the correct solution" (of two
options) was more of a probabilistic thing. For one researcher she usually
chose one thing and for another researcher she typically chose another. Does
that mean she was solving the problem for her preferred person and prove
theory of mind? Seems weak.

"To have a theory of mind is to be able to attribute purpose, intention,
beliefs, desires, and other attitudes to both oneself and another person or
animal. In order to test whether Sarah could understand that people had
thoughts that differed from her thoughts, she was presented with short video
tapes where a human actor in a cage was trying to perform a task, like trying
to get some bananas that were inaccessible. After watching the video Sarah was
shown two pictures, one that would allow the actor to reach his goal (a box)
the other not (a key). She successfully solved the problems for the actor.

But there was some concern that she was putting herself into the position of
the actors, which would be a pretty exciting cognitive feat on its own, but
wouldn’t show that she attributed attitudes to the actors. So she was
presented with more videos, one in which the actor was her favorite caretaker
and another in which the actor was someone she didn’t really like. Sarah
selected the right responses more often for the actor she liked, and the wrong
responses for the actor she didn’t much care for."

~~~
dmurray
Agreed, it seems like there's an equally good argument for the opposite
conclusion (that this experiment makes her less likely than we would have
thought). Something like: she's good at mindlessly mimicking things, and pays
more attention to the video when it's the trainer she likes.

------
contravariant
When did nytimes start guessing whether I'm using private browsing? (not to
mention they get it wrong, although I can guess why they might think I am
using private browsing)

Luckily blocking all 1st party scripts fixes it, and makes the page a lot
faster to boot.

------
luxuryballs
The world’s smartest chimp that we know of.

------
dade_
I think that the smartest chimp probably isn't in captivity.

