
Raccoons Pass Aesop's Fable Test By Upending It - dsr12
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/animals-intelligence-raccoons-birds-aesops/
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rl3
> _She climbed onto the cylinder and rocked it until it tipped over, giving
> her access to the sweet treat._

> _“That was something we hadn’t predicted,” and indeed, had designed against,
> says study leader Lauren Stanton, a Ph.D. student at the University of
> Wyoming._

They should have consulted me for this experiment. Growing up in the suburbs,
I have extensive experience in observing the little bastards topple or
otherwise gain access to all manner of receptacle—no matter how seemingly
impregnable—on inumerable occasions. Their cunning knows no bounds.

~~~
KGIII
Raccoons, black bears, and skunks are all smarter than many people seem to
think. They can find their way into most anything in common use. There have
been cars broken into by bears, for example.

~~~
rhcom2
Finding their way out seems more challenging for them based on my anecdotal
evidence of finding a very pissed raccoon stuck in my trashcan after the lid
closed on him.

~~~
KGIII
So very, very true. This is not the right forum for telling my story of the
garbage purloining skunk who got his head stuck in a peanut butter jar.

You know the adage about how a skunk won't spray in an enclosed area, so that
you can throw a blanket over a skunk and not worry about being sprayed? It's a
lie. Mr. Skunk does not care.

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baddox
It’s interesting that the test involves showing the animals how to use the
rocks to raise the marshmallow. Not to insult any particular species, but that
seems more like a test of the instinct to mimic behavior with some desirable
outcome. I assumed the Aesop’s Fable test was testing for an apparent
understand of water displacement and floating.

~~~
naasking
> Not to insult any particular species, but that seems more like a test of the
> instinct to mimic behavior with some desirable outcome. I assumed the
> Aesop’s Fable test was testing for an apparent understand of water
> displacement and floating.

How is that not understanding? They associate the outcome with a cause, and so
realize how to trigger that cause themselves to achieve the outcome. What more
is there to understanding?

~~~
baddox
As a simple example, take the water out of the tube. Do the animals continue
dumping rocks on top of the marshmallow, since that process used to work, or
do they appear to understand that it was the water in the tube that made the
rock-dropping process work?

~~~
naasking
> As a simple example, take the water out of the tube. Do the animals continue
> dumping rocks on top of the marshmallow, since that process used to work, or
> do they appear to understand that it was the water in the tube that made the
> rock-dropping process work?

All you're doing is adding more variables which makes the causal relationship
more complicated, it doesn't diminish the understanding of the original causal
relationship.

~~~
mannykannot
These variables were there from the beginning; the question is whether the
raccoon's model of the world was taking them all into account, a question
which probably requires more experiments to answer.

Understanding is not a binary thing, as demonstrated by Clifford Stoll's 'Why
is the sky blue?' question.

~~~
naasking
> These variables were there from the beginning

But not observable given the experiment's configuration. I don't see how
bringing these into the discussion clarifies anything. The question the
experiment addresses is whether there is _any_ understanding, 0 or not 0. The
degree of understanding is out of scope.

~~~
baddox
I don’t think it is. If you show a raccoon that putting rocks into a took
yields a marshmallow, you cannot include anything about the raccoon’s
understanding of water displacement. If you show a raccoon that pressing a
button yields a marshmallow, you can’t conclude anything about the raccoon’s
understanding of electronics.

~~~
naasking
"Understanding water displacement" is not the goal of the test.

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sampl
Reminds me of this guy who tried to build a cat-proof automatic feeder:
[http://quinndunki.com/blondihacks/?p=3023](http://quinndunki.com/blondihacks/?p=3023)

~~~
jaclaz
Yep, discussed here (just in case):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230904)

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diminish
How can I stop autoplaying video? What I want is to:

\- mute the sound \- prevent autoplaying \- prevent video download consume my
internet quota.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
For Firefox: About:Config setting media.autoplay.enabled to false.

For Chrome: Chrome://flags set autoplay policy to "Document user activation is
required".

I know that this breaks animated .gifs in Firefox, though you can get them to
animate by viewing the image info (right-click menu). That's rarely a big loss
anyway.

~~~
f1nch3r
The Chrome trick may work for some sites but not others, most notably CNN.

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rjbwork
Wow, NatGeo's site is terrible right now. Full screen unskippable autoplaying
video that starts off unmuted. It then had at least one of the same type that
was unmuted on the actual page, so upon page load it just sounded like a total
cacophony of videos. Totally unusable site.

~~~
executesorder66
I got none of that with uBlock Origin. You should try it.

~~~
rjbwork
I run uMatrix with a small amount of allowable filters. I have no problem with
ads generally, so if I must I will open FireFox where I don't run such things,
but also don't log into anything personal.

