frozenspinach

I'm not sure I agree with that interpretation, but that's at least an explanation for why they might be at cross purposes. Can anyone else who's upvoting the meme explain what this is about?

Okay fair enough, but if that's the case, do you know what this meme is about?

I must be out of the loop. Are Linux apologists and tankies at cross purposes for some reason?

You said not a high budget, and yet everyone here is saying Framework even though the they are $900 to $1,000 at the low end. To me that is not budget.

Pine64 is affordable but maybe too slow to be a daily driver, unless you feel confident finding your way through ultralightweight software and the command line and can do most of your problem solving that way.

For other pre-built options, there's Starlabs and System76 but those are similarly priced to Librem and Framework.

Beyond that I might just research Windows laptops that are agreeable to being formatted.

If by dozens you mean 50,000?

I remember in the early days people saying that Lemmy wasn't succeeding. Very frustrating to hear because it was like the very early days. And look at it now!

A great way of re-framing it. A lot of how we tease out whatever intelligence an animal has is with some incentive. And sometimes we're comparing apples and oranges if we're making a comparison where one side has more of an incentive.

If the anomalous outliers of human intelligence are inventing calculus or formulating germ theory, what are the equivalently anomalous crows?

Oh and I think that’s the root cause for your post: there can not be a common agreement of those positions because they are axiomatic, as in fundamental definitions.

I think if we are stuck that way, we would really be stuck. But I think we can appreciate intelligence as dynamic and not as a question that's tied to axiomatic definitions. You see this in related fields, e.g. we don't have a definition of consciousness, but research is about closing in on a definition, and we are able to add to our body of knowledge in meaningful ways. There's fascinating new studies suggesting insect consciousness is plausible, for instance. Cancer is not one single thing, but there's still cancer research, and so on. So we sometimes know based on representative instances, e.g. whatever it is, it's like that.

It's convenient to frame it merely as a matter of definition, because that means there's no overarching truth, there's just "by human standards, THIS is intelligent but by crow standards THIS is.." But unfortunately I think cross domain comparison, or clusters of related features (family resemblance) is real enough that there's There there, more like cancer or consciousness than relative definitions.

How much of that do you think is inherent intelligence and how much is nurture?

We spend years helping and teaching our offspring the most basic of functions and how to communicate. We’ve taught other species very basic communication skills as well, like Coco the gorilla. Hell, my own dog knew how to tell me when he had to pee. And that’s nurture, but it does speak to a certain potential.

Breaking this off for a separate comment. I want to reply on two levels. First and most importantly, I think there's probably an integral relation between the two (the capability of responding to training and socialization is an aspect of intelligence, and being able to learn is an important part of being intelligent and may very well be something we are born with).

So I wouldn't want to tie the whole question of intelligence to the idea that we're supposed to adjust for X amount of nature and Y amount of nurture, and then look at animals in light of those adjustments, scaling down how much we credit humans because we benefit from social knowledge. Our capability of growing our intelligence through training and socialization is a reflection of our knowledge and we get full credit for that. Crows have been around for between 17 to 30 million years(!!) enough time for the fruits of socialization and training to materialize, if the ground were fertile for it. Apes are 25 million years, possums curiously are 65 million years, bears 20 million years. Humans depending on where you start, have been here for 300,000 years, or maybe 2 million if you want to go back to homo erectus, yet we leapfrogged everybody.

So that's the first level. But the second level is just a direct answer: humans go through a practically supernatural level of language explosion between ages 2 and 3, and start retaining new words at nearly impossible speeds, something like 20, 30 new words a day at its peak. A 3-year-old can hear a new verb in one sentence and apply it correctly in another, something that stumps even the most language-trained non-human animals. Apes in controlled conditions can take months to learn, and even then through rote repetition.

I think it's just getting too lost in the weeds to look at a dog needing to go outside and pee, and set that side by side with linguistic capability that gave rise to human civilization like an ounce of one is equivalent to an ounce of the other. And here's the thing: I do think it's impressive, dogs especially are social creatures, apes learn sign language is special. And I don't think anyone is losing sight of that when they say humans, at the end of the day, still do it better.

How much of that do you think is inherent intelligence and how much is nurture?

I want to get there, but I want to stick with my question for a second. Do you think "humans are smarter than crows" necessarily involves conflations around ability and intelligence? Because I don't think that's the case at all.

I think we can be respectful of these nuances about how we understand intelligence and still not treat them like they imply superior intelligence to humans.

If I say "humans are more intelligent than crows" and your impulse is to respond by emphasizing the dynamic nature of animal intelligence as if that's not already accounted for, that's what I mean by Crow Quicksand.