More Evidence of Just How Smart Dem Critters Is!

By -
This one from Roderick Long.

My favourite quote from the comments:

"Researchers in Tokyo report that elephants are able to do math and scored 87 percent in basic math tests.

"It's bad enough our students can't compete with Asian students, now we can't even compete with Asian elephants."

Comments

  1. Jim6:52 PM

    You know I'm all about the animals. But I'm a little concerned, based on one web video, that the researcher hasn't eliminated the "Clever Hans" problem. She's loading the apples by hand, and appears, herself, to know how many apples are going in which bucket. And the right bucket is the last one. Plus, she's making the decision when to take the "wrong" bucket away. There just seems too much possibility for the elephant to cue off the researcher.

    Further digging may prove me wrong, mind you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Roderick T. Long9:13 PM

    Thanks. But when ya gonna approve my two pending posts?

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah12:25 AM

    Roderick -- Oops! All other comments needing moderation (which happens only on old posts) are "Runescape runescape runescape" so I don't get to it too often.

    Jim -- Well, I'd hope that any modern researcher would be alert to the Clever Hans effect! But you never know.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Roderick T. Long12:03 PM

    Thanks! But my long comment here hasn't shown up yet. Exists it still?

    ReplyDelete
  5. gcallah12:04 AM

    Roderick, I'm sorry, but I think I must have deleted it in some batch delete of other olden comments. Mea culpa. Felix culpa. Helix culpa.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more