Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mithridates]

Just a thought: since chimps, gorillas and some other primates are capable of learning sign language and simple reading, why is there no push to educate them all? Why not educate them all? Is it just an idea that few people would consider or is it actually scary?

[Ya-ta Boy]

It's all about return on investment. Koko never had anything all that interesting to say once she learned to communicate.

[rapier]

On the contrary, I think we should learn from them.

They have managed to live for millinia longer than us without destroying the planet, after all.

There is a bird called the bar tailed godwit. it can migrate 14000km without stopping to eat or rest, after being abandoned by its parents, and arrive at exactly the same right location, without ever having made the trip before. And without a compass or map. And yet our modern civilisation values it as worthless and is busy trashing its feeding and nesting grounds.
Humans have infinitely more to learn from nature than they from us. Problem is we're destroying it rapidly before we get the chance to find out.

[mithridates]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[mithridates]

Don't forget though, that even with the intelligence of a six-year old some of them will be talking about concepts we've never imagined before. I got the idea when Hater Depot posted on my board about how it's been found that monkeys have accents too, depending on the region. I'd love to hear a monkey talk about those uppity sub-tropical folk and their snooty way of screeching. Okay, so you can use sticks to know if water is safe or not and we don't know how to do that, big deal.

[The Bobster]

Ursula le Guin wrote an excellent short piece on this theme a decade and a half ago, called "The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics."

If you can find it online, tell me. I just looked. Gotta buy a book. About 8 pages, as I recall. Bought the whole anthology full of other authors based on what she wrote in the first three pages of a short story. I laughed, I cried, I kissed 5 bucks good-bye ...

The punchline is this : the "author" is an ant separated from his colony by the sudden loss of the pheromone trail that would guide him back to the hive - and if we could read it, the scent-messages he leaves as he struggles in isolation from his society would constitute poetry more profound than Keats looking at a Grecian urn, and move us far more than anything scribbled by Sartre or Camus in some tobacco-laced Parisian cafe.

Yata, you SURE Koko never said anything interesting ... or is it possible we weren't listening?

[Gord]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[rok_the-boat]

It has been proven that you can teach chimps a certain amount but that they reach a barrier in terms of moving towards more advanced communication. It seems their brains can only be programmed (by us) to go so far, which is of course, no further than they are already at. However, if we constantly teach them they will slowly evolve and may one day think just like us if we stick at it for another million years. Except, we will have destoryed ourselves by then and instead, any survivors will have long since gone back to swingin' in the trees.

Dolphins - I think they have the same opinion about us. If we stick at it, we might catch them up in a million years, or so. If some smart alec ever decodes what they are saying to us, the first message will say is - stop fishing.

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Leslie Cheswyck]

It's been done, mith. Just look at all the IT majors swarming about.

[fiveeagles]