this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Science Memes

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So long, and thanks for all the fish! (mander.xyz)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 187 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, so I found the original article for this screenshot, and it's by Dash MacIntyre, a satirist who self-publishes on Medium.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Ah fuck. I was really hoping dolphins were slating us. :(

[–] ExtraMedicated 8 points 9 months ago

We'll have to find some other excuse to duel with them.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (6 children)

People thought this was real?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I didn't think it was real but if it was I wouldn't've been surprised. Does that count?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, I would have doubts that they come into contact with humans (or our fishing boats/nets) often enough to have words for us. But swear words are a pretty attainable language feature...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

256k vessels at the moment, I'd say there is a good chance!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

We make the ocean noisy, even if they can’t see us

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

I mean... A lot of my vocabulary is anti-human, too. Its believable enough to make me wonder.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

I mean, there are real projects. I know that the orca population near Vancouver is a focus of decoding mammal language.

They have recordings going back like 30 years and log books to connect the calls to orca behavior. Last I checked (a few years ago) they were pretty far with unsupervised learning on the audio data and we're going to tackle the (barely readable) logbooks next.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

I doubt we are far enough to train ai for animal-human translation on more than a conceptual level, and I doubt that I would hear about it from dolphins for the first time.

I expect a widely covered story of translating dogs' barks (or cats) first, and not in a "Hello Human, Welcome back home, I missed you. Please give me food" way (which would be probably fake) but just "Friend! Joy. Hungry"

And I don't know how we could scientifcally differentiate a slur from a descriptive name on that conceptual level.

What I don't doubt is that dolphins have slurs for humans.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I assume the earliest words in any animal language are slurs for humans

[–] afraid_of_zombies 3 points 9 months ago

I kinda think you might be right. If you have an animal that has nouns wouldn't one of those nouns be for the biologists that keep hanging around it and interacting?

[–] Seudo 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Can already kind of do that with dogs. They're like a Twister board with big buttons the dogs can push. As you say, not whole sentences but "human, leave, dog, sad" is essentially them learning our language.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It's debatable if they really understand it, or if they just press the buttons that make their humans happy. And dogs are really good in spotting even the tiniest clues in our body language

[–] Aggravationstation 4 points 9 months ago

Yea, there was a horse that appeared to do maths but it was just a genius at interpreting human body language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqM5sRvZnjc

[–] Seudo 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Dude, we fed LSD to dolphins then gave them a rub and tug in the name of science...

[–] AngryCommieKender 3 points 9 months ago

Carl Sagan didn't intend for the researchers to give the LSD to the dolphins. They were supposed to take it themselves to see if it helped them understand the dolphins. May have still ended up in a dolphin wank though.

[–] xkforce 4 points 9 months ago

Do you have any idea how stupid people can be?