Actually Wong, Trainability ISN'T a sign of great intellect.

In fact if training can take over instinct, this is a dangerously stupid trait, contrary to an animals chances of survival.

Let's say you train a dozen dogs to 'know' that on a certain course which it has to run, all dark coloured spots on the ground give it a mild jolt of electricity, while all the light and neutral coloured spots are safe to walk on and you make sure that any time they are on a neutral coloured spot the have a choice between moving to a dark or light coloured spot and both will get them closer to the end of the course.

And then you try to train a dozen cats to 'know' the same thing.

And then you take your course and leave it the same except that you switch it so that the light coloured spots are now all trap doors that swing down if something comes across them and the dark and neutral spots are safe to walk on.

And then you take your dozen specimens of each animal and get them to run the course again, what you will see is this:

All of the dogs will rely on what they know and run straight across a path of light and neutral spots, meaning they all end up through a trap door, while with the cats you can be pretty sure that they will atleast TEST the dark spots first to see if they are still dangerous (and thus atleast one of them may find his way across, with the emphasis on may, rather than just following training into certain doom).

So no, trainability does not signify intelligence as such.

Nevertheless dogs ARE intelligent because they are pack predators and pack predators need to be intelligent both because it takes intelligence to hunt other animals (whereas herbivores just need to sneak up on something green without sensory organs that's by it's very nature utterly immobile and even that takes all of their cognitive abilities) and it also takes intelligence to deal with other animals in a social arena, especially one as complicated as human-dog interaction. Or wolf-wolf for that matter.

Any way, all of this is irrelevant. Morality is a personal matter and you can't say 'eating animals is immoral', because unlike the laws of physics, morality changes and to some people eating animals will never be immoral.

That is just retarded. In your silly example, you've proved that dogs can 'learn'! You gave them an enviroment and stimuli, and they recognised them and put them in memory so that in a similur circumstance, they equate them. That is learning....That is intellegence.

The cat is working off of pure instinct, and you've rigged the 'experiment' so the cat wins.

Completely true... if indeed dogs at one point consciously decided to do this, in truth however they did not, so your point is moot.



Wait... so just because this experiment proves my point, it's rigged?

That's the f-ing point of an experiment.

This experiment is set up to prove that conditioning can be detrimental to an animal's chances of surviving, which it does.

Moreover the cat does not work off of pure instinct, the cat learns too, but unlike a dog, the cat doesn't take anything for granted, it's intelligent enough to trust it's instincts.

Wrong. The fucking point of a scientific experiment is to test an idea by setting up a condition where it can be falsified. If an experiment is set up in such a manner that the idea is not tested by a genuine attempt at falsification, then it is nothing more than intellectual masturbation.

No it's not. When you get down to it the point of an experiment is to prove yourself right. No scientist has ever said 'Gee I just spent 25 years of my life working on this theory, I've spent billions of dollars getting ready for this moment and now finally, I get to prove myself WRONG!!'

You do not set up a condition where it can be falsified at all... you set the conditions under which it can be proven. You state "If I do 'A' under the exact conditions 'B', the outcome should be 'C'" and then you perform an experiment in which these conditions 'B' are strictly maintained. If your statement earlier is correct then the result of the experiment will be as you predicted, if the result is not as your predicted your statement has been falsified.

Therefore I'll repeat and restate: You do not have to make any attempt at falsification in an experiment whatsoever, because if your idea is incorrect falsification will be automatic. The only please where you have to make and attempt at falsification is at the idea itself. After all if your idea is '2 is more than 1' then any experiment that you set up will prove your idea, but THAT is intellectual masturbation.

If you want to get absolutely technical on me, then you could say that the point of an experiment is to 'test' an idea, not to 'prove' it and while that is true on paper, in reality (almost) no one has ever set up an experiment intended to disprove his idea. Even if the experiment is set up so that his idea MAY be disproven, his goal is still to have them not be disproven.

Not at all.

Your assumption here seems to be that animals that can't be trained, can't learn and THAT is preposterous.

Intelligence, last time I checked, is not (just) the ability to learn, it's also the ability to apply what has been learned and the ability to determine when it must be applied. A trained animal has learned perfectly what it must do.
But when it is put into a situation where several (or even only one significant one) of the parameters differ from those of it's training, it will be in trouble if it still relies blindly on it's training. A truely intelligent animal (for instance a human) will be able to analyse the situation and determine where what it has learned still applies and where it doesn't.

Ease of training is not a sign of intelligence, it's a sign of lack of common sense.
A dog is like a Fundie: He'll rely blindly on what he's been 'told', because the first thing he's ever been told is to rely blindly on what he's told.
A wolf is like a free thinking person: He applies what he's 'told' to every situation he encounters and determines how much of it is valid for each situation.

Oh and what you take as a sign of excellent social intelligence just plain isn't. It's not social intelligence, it's social naïveté. Afterall, a dog identifies a cat as a social creature... but a cat ISN'T a social creature, atleast not in the way that dogs are. Nevertheless dogs DO have large amounts of social intelligence ... because they easily interpret the social actions of other species (they know that a raised voice is a sign of anger and that petting is a sign of affection, despite the fact that dogs do not pet each other).

Where did you learn about the scientific method? The Flintstones?

I see it was indeed the Flintstones.

Yet again, incorrect. It is completely possible to set up an experiment which produces correct results but does not validate your theory. For example, I could set up an experiment to "prove" that Newtonian gravity is just as accurate as Einsteinian gravity by simply conducting it in the regime where the observable differences are immeasurably small. You are supposed to set up an experiment so that it is most likely to falsify your theory, hence failure to falsify your theory actually means something. If you don't understand that, it's not my problem.

In the part quoted below, you accuse me of argueing semantics, you're doing that exact same thing here though. Oh and a cat or dog can indeed choose to ignore it's instincts. House training is a good example: a dog's instinct tell it to shit where ever the fuck it pleases. A dog that's house trained however KNOWS that if it shit in the house, it gets yelled at and thus CHOOSES to ignore it's instinct to shit untill it's outside of the house (and for preference outside of the yard).



First of I'll thank you not to call me a moron.

Secondly: WTF? I seriously don't understand your reaction. I never said that it WASN'T a condition where it CAN be falsified. I merely stated that you do not state when it can be falsified, but rather the exact conditions under which it must be proven.



Holy attempted ad hominem batman.
But seriously how's about you don't resort to name calling, because I have a tendency to do so too and I've been trying very hard to be fair here.



No... In your example, the fault does not lie with the experiment but with the theory. Your theory here is 'Newtonian gravity is just as accurate as Einsteinian gravity'. And you are correct about the fact that you can make an experiment to prove that. The problem however does not lie with the experiment, it lies with the theory or better said: it lies with the fact that you have no theory.

A theory, for the purpose of an experiment, is state as 'if 'A' when 'B' is 'true', then 'C''. Thus if the conditions defined in your theory take a regime that's wide enough, Newtonian gravity IS indeed just as accurate as Einsteinian gravity. This is why schoolchildren are still taught Newtonian physics: because for the regime you encounter as a schoolchild Newtonian and Einsteinian ARE pretty much indescernible and Newtonian physics is just plain simpler.

Thus the point of an experiment is to prove a theory. If the experiment is succesfull (in other words if it adheres to the conditions in the theory correctly) and the outcome of the experiment is the projected outcome stated in the theory, the theory is proven. BUT this outcome only applies to the specific conditions set in the theory and it does not in any way prove anything that lies outside the specified conditions.

If your experiment exsists soley for the purpose of 'proving your point' then yes, it is rigged. When you do your little song and dance in the earlier post and conclude that the dog has learned according to the stimuli of the experiment and the cat is continuing as it was before; yet the cat is more intellegent......you've rigged it so that only the cat can win.



Bullshit. You changed the goal posts. In your senario, the dog was given a stimuli that was different than the norm. In your retarded view, since the dog learned that it was indeed dangerous, you think that if you change the stimuli again, and the dog does not instantly know it, it's less intellegent then the damn cat since the cat never learned the in's and out of the first stimuli.

Pure tripe. The dog learned your silly test. Just because you change the test at the end to a 'new' test, does not signify that the damn dog didn't learn your origianl one.

In blunt terms, you rigged it.



In your example, the cat didn't learn a damn thing. It distrusted the stimuli at first and still distrusted it at the end, even when you changed it.

In reality, the damn cats curiousity would have had it fall into your trap both times under both 'rule changes'. While the damn dog would have 'learned' from the first one and not fucked with the device again.

L-E-A-R-N-I-N-G!

You absolutely missed the point AND you're rude about it too..

The point of the experiment, from the get go, was to prove that conditioned behaviour (or extreme ease of training) CAN BE (not is, but can be) detrimental to a creature's survival.

And nowhere did I state that the cats did not learn, in fact I stated that the cats DID learn the same thing as the dogs. And then I implied however that when the dog learns that it can't trust a certain colour, it only learns it can't trust that colour. A cat (potentially) also deduces that any colour can be dangerous.

And if you must know if it is rigged at all it is not rigged to make sure the cat wins. It's rigged to make sure the dog most certainly loses, the cat is just the control side of the experiment. I could also have taken untrained dogs, but the problem there is that it's impossible to have dogs run the course without them getting trained and if you don't let the 'control' dogs run the course on the first part of the experiment, they are unsuitable as control group for the second part.

But it is not structured so that YOU can loose. Hence the entire point of my posts, that you've missed (incidently).

In fact;



You want to prove that 'trainability' is wrong or bad.




goal one.



Wow, change the whole thing and move them goal posts.



They will do this because they 'learned' from your experiment. But in your retarded world, this is not enough. We've got to go to rule #2, and since they didn't do so well there, then.....poooph, your right.

For one, it's retarded (if you don't like it tuff. I'm not rude to point out your idiocy, dumb is dumb. Deal), and second, you've moved the goal posts to 'prove' your right. Hello leap in logic.

They learned you first experiment. So just because you change the rules on them suddenly, you think you're proving they're less intellegent? Your ass backwards and I doubt you are going to recieve any grants in the near future to do experimentation.

If you can't loose in your experiment, and/or you have to change the damn rules to get the conclusions you want, it's not an experiment and it is RETARDED.

What the fuck are you talking about? I just said that animals can and do learn. Didn't you even


Except that you are wrong. Dogs and other animals can and do analyze situations and respond to variables while humans can and do have trouble as well with variables. The difference is the speed and ability to respond to these variables. Humans, as a general rule, respond much much faster than a dog to a change in a situation or a variation. That is why humans are more intelligent than dogs. However, just because humans are much smarter than dogs doesn't mean that dogs completely lack intelligence or capacity to problem solve.


That's funny. A human child who can easily learn new skills and be trained it called "smart" and "talented", but a dog who can easily learn new skills and be trained is "lacking in common sense". How much sense does that make?

For one thing, dogs and wolves are the same when it comes to obedience, it's who they are obedient to that matters. You obviously don't know very much about how wolf packs if you think that wolves are free thinkers. Wolf packs have rigid social structures where wolves of lesser status are largely utterly obedient to their alphas so long as they preceive the alphas as in charge. If an alpha snarls, they leap. That's how it works. I've watched documentaries showing a lesser female in a wolf pack actually drive her cubs away because of the alpha female in the pack, which adopted them. Such free thinkers!

With dogs, the alpha is changed. Dogs (and wolves, when raised by people) make the abstract leap between species when figuring out "who's in charge" in their pack, family, or clan. Humans don't look, act, and most especially don't smell like a dog, but dogs can make the mental leap to accept humans as part of the crew and as the boss. That's an important mental leap that many animals aren't even capable of making. Wolves as well, you raise a wolf domestically, and the wolf will act the same. I know people who own wolves and wolf-dogs, and if anything, they are unusually obedient and well-behaved because they need stricter rules when raising.


Once again, you are funny. A human child who's good at making friends and establish relationships with other people, even unfriendly ones, is called "outgoing" and "a people person" and "smart", but a dog who does all that is "naive". That's what social intelligence is; the ability to relate and interact well with others.

---

"Show me an angel and I will paint you one." - Gustav Courbet

"Quetzalcoatl, plumed serpent of the Aztecs... you are a pussy." - Stephen Colbert

"Really, I'm jealous of how much smarter than me he is. I'm not an expert on anything and he's an expert on things he knows nothing about." - Me, concerning a bullshitter

Since you simply cannot keep this civil I'll be a bit harsher too:

Listen you twit, the changing of the course IS the experiment. I didn't change goals, I simply expounded more than your feeble attention span could muster. Next time instead of explaining how I'm going to train the animals, I'll just state "you take a bunch of animals that have been trained to know that light coloured spaces are safe, except you run them along a course in which the light spaces are unsafe, so they all die horribly, except the ones that don't follow their training, ha!"

And yes I can, loose, but only and ONLY if my theory is wrong.
My theory being: If an animal conditioned to run a course with two routes, on which one route is safe and the other is not, is put on an identical course which is the safeness of the routes is reversed, the conditioned animal will take the second course's unsafe route every time.
The cats are merely brought in to ensure that non-conditioned animals do not exhibit the same behaviour as conditioned animals, not to prove cats' superiority to dogs or something.

If I am wrong, then conditioned animals will not take the unsafe route every time (note: I do not propose to have the conditioned dog run the second course over and over again, since that would recondition it. Since this is a 'survival' test the animal should be considdered 'dead' after the first time it takes the unsafe route on the second course, even if in the experiment itself the animal is not actually killed.)

Actually, I've been fairly civil.



So your experiment is to 'teach' an animal something to prove it is stupid. That's pretty much it. Like I said, retarded and rigged.

If you take 'intellegence' to 'learn' and that to 'learn' knew stimuli as if it were dangerous, you some how expect us to believe that this new trait is not advantageous?

How does introducing a secondary stimuli immediately after the animal learns about the first prove he/she is stupid, as opposed to the first animal that didn't learn a damn thing.

By changing the stimuli, you're now running a 'new' experiment. If the dog survives it, then he/she will LEARN that the stupid squares are really fucking dangerous instead of just dangerous. Hence, learning.

Teaching a kid to read, then shooting him in the head as he reads a book, isn't the way to show that reading is dumb. This is all you've tried to show.



Your theory is that 'conditioned' animals are stupid. You proceed to 'prove' that by 1) showing that an animal can learn. 2) Then showing that you can be smarter by changing the rules and killing it.

Congradulations.



You fail to show, if and when the dog survives, if he changes his behavior and doesn't run that same course again, because you know....HE MIGHT LEARN AGAIN.



Thus rigging it. You don't learn automatically. You learn by experiencing. If you don't let the dog run it more than once, you are not allowing the experiment to prove you wrong.

Cherry picking the best results to back up your theory. Rigging it, you fucking moron.

You don't seem to realise the difference between learning and being trained. The difference being that learning is the acquiring of information, while training is the implanting of a certain automatic, reflexive reaction to certain specific stimulus directly into a person or animal, generally through repeatedly applying the stimulus and then punishing an incorrect reaction and/or rewarding the correct reaction.

The difference then between training and conditioning is that in training the stimuli and reactions are generally implicit, for instance in housetraining the stimulus is 'being inside the house' and the reaction is 'not shitting'.
Whereas in conditioning they are explicit AND they override instinct and training, for instance a police dog trained to attack a person indicated by the trainer in a non-instinctive fashion, going straight for a target's hands if the trainer shouts 'disarm'.

And actually you did get me on the point of social intelligence, I have to concede to you there, although not all wolves live in packs as strict as you described (and indeed not all wolves live in packs their whole lives, the term lone wolf isn't just a catchy phrase invented by Joe Dever).

Oh and I'm definately not saying that dogs are stupid or something it's just that their ease to train is actually a sign of social instinct. They recognise the alpas and follow their commands.

Again you rely on insulting me and again you miss the point.

I never said that an animal that is conditioned is stupid. I merely said, repeatedly, that conditioning is detrimental to survival if the circumstances change.

I already stated earlier that the experiment had nothing to do with intelligence, it adressed a different point entirely.

But you seem to have either missed or ignored that and instead choose to make derisive remarks towards me because you can't fucking seem to read properly which makes me wonder whether you got that 'reading kid' analogy from your own personal life or something and let me comfort you then: don't worry noone will shoot you in the head if you learn to read so I suggest you do so before responding to me again.

Nice backpedalling.



Emphasis mine.

'Dodge, skip, whatever.' I've adressed your points. Insulting you isn't even among them. Deal with it, you fucking moron.



It has never occured to you that stating that an animal that 'learns' equals some disadvantage in its enviroment pretty much equals that it is stupid? The most succefull animals are those that are smart and thus those that LEARN.



Bullshit. It was intellegence v instinct.



I notice that I've made point by point rebuttals to your bullshit, yet you've kept up you ad hominims. Curious that you accuse me of such shit.

Obviously, you never read the rules. You will answer his points directly, or you will soon lose the ability to answer at all.

Not at all. As you will note I said that (paraphrasing here) when training overrides instinct in such a way that it endangers survivl, then this is a stupid trait. And subsequently I set out to prove that in this case, training does endanger survival.

Recap: Yes the entire POST does reflect on the nature of ease of training towards intelligence, but the experiment itself, does not.

So nice try, but no dice.

And Knife, I'm not the one that dodges the point here. To quote myself:



I made statements regarding training, not learning.
I have established these two terms as seperate.
It should be noted that training and conditioning are stored in an entirely different part of the brain from short- and long term memory (and thus 'learning').

It was conditioning vs survival. Are you now telling ME what's on MY mind?

Oh and stop calling me a moron, I asked politely, now I'm telling you.

I DID, repeatedly, but he just keeps on bringing back his own assumptions and frankly I'm sick and tired of him tell me what I had on my mind. if he wants to debate against his imaginary friend, he can fucking well do so without insulting me atleast.

You're an idiot. By this logic, a human soldier is dumber than an animal. And yes, soldiers are trained rather than educated; the military training process relies on repetition in order to overcome natural reactions.

You have a lot of nerve to be giving orders to anyone. Shape the fuck up or I'll boot your evasive ass out of here.

Now you're just being dishonest.

If we accept what you're saying - that you're realling talking about conditioning versus survival - then what does that have to do with the discussion?

Nobody was talking about survival versus conditioning!

No you didn't.

Readers can judge that for themselves.

I've had enough of your contempt for our policies and board culture, as well as your refusal to take my warnings seriously. Our rules stipulate that refusing to address points because of insults is a bannable offense. Rules have no power unless they are backed up with action, and you are about to discover that I have no compunction about making examples out of people, especially when they have contributed as little as you have. The fact that you're a blithering idiot is just icing on the cake.