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 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 187 points 10 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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] ExtraMedicated 8 points 10 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (6 children)

People thought this was real?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 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 10 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 10 months ago

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

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

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

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

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] afraid_of_zombies 3 points 10 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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 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 10 months ago

Do you have any idea how stupid people can be?

[–] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago (1 children)

With the current state of the world it is likely their parting words would be "So long, you assholes killed off the fish"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Wouldn't that be "So long and thanks for all the fish"?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Originally they were thanking the humans for feeding them all the fish. Now they would be telling us off for killing off all the good fish.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Whales are shallow twits - Better Off Ted

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I knew they were all talking about me!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Dolphins are federal agents, confirmed.

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

Yea... hey wait a minute!

(you weren't supposed to let on that we know - abort, abort!)

[–] FartsWithAnAccent 23 points 10 months ago

"Turn's out dolphins are racist as fuck!"

[–] iAvicenna 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I am gonna take a wild guess (wo reading the original article), is this one of them studies where they throw a neural net at dolphins and see if it sticks.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's satire, it's been around since at least 2017.

[–] iAvicenna 2 points 10 months ago

darn it, I really hoped someone would think that they can understand dolphins with neural networks. I should tone down my expectations.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

That one episode of SpongeBob was right al along

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

This is like the dolphins who unionize and strike against the villains organization in starter villain by John sculzi llol

[–] paddirn 7 points 10 months ago

I wonder if they see us some sort of deformed octopus or squid, like our arms/legs just look like tentacles to them?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

That is why I call them dolfucks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

We are going to find out dolphins use the N word aren't we?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

#NotAllDolphins