In the first week I was walking her and passed a bus stop mainly used by school kids. There's a small wall behind it and she dashed around and emerged with half a sausage roll hanging out of her mouth.

To this day, every time we pass that spot she enthusiastically pulls and goes round to inspect.

We know how place memories work quite well, Place and Grid cells specifically. There is a natural and almost physical level of 1:1 mapping at various scales[1] from location (based on different tracking systems - point integration, landmarks, your own steps) to activating cells in your brain. Simple co-activation alongside reward, like a literal map, sets down "good stuff here" signs in your brain.

Once attenuated and activated by Dopamine, the place cells to triangulate (at different "distances") that position have basically fewer mechanims and binding opportunities for neurotransmitters to change upon other interaction(they have little input beside place + pleasure + pain), so they do not result in loss of their attenuation or association (part of why place stays longest in Alhzeimers patients association).

Memory of sounds however, isn't so clearly mappable, there is no obvious grid/comparable formulation of sound memories in any kind of "order" like there is with location and places in Place Cells. And clearly we humans forget many of the sounds we have heard (e.g. songs, lyrics). That's why it's quite interesting that dogs remember toys names for a long time. It makes you ask questions like "If we had less sounds/named things to remember, could we remember the ones we do remember for much longer, with less forgetting?". "What is the difference between permanent, event and temporal memories?", "Could we resolve neurodegenerative diseases by modifying neurons to be longer lasting or impervious to future modification in strategic areas of the brain? Could be retain some learning?"

[1] http://www.rsb.org.uk/images/biologist/Features/Grid_mouse_d...

> And clearly we humans forget many of the sounds we have heard (e.g. songs, lyrics).>

It's true we forget many sounds, but songs and lyrics is a curious example. I'd guess those were high on the list of things humans are good at remembering… maybe #4 behind places, faces, and language in general? I've had pop lyrics and commercial jingles and theme songs rattling around in my head for decades, and I can easily sing them word for word. Something about a sequence of words put to a beat and a melody just seems to stick.

Years later after everything was fixed, going to walk in this area the dog would always look up at this exact spot and bark a few times. Like "heck don't you dare coming low again I'm watching you".

It's just people talking about (a screenshot of) a Twitter post, quote:

> "A month ago Dusty found half a pie in this bush, so every day until the end of time we must closely inspect the Magic Pie Bush."

Mostly Reddit and one or two blog posts.

The first one was stupid easy to train. Food motivated and could be refocused in every situation with food. Picked up commands quickly. Would do training basically any time of day.

Second dog just stares at me if she doesn’t want to be trained or feels the task is too hard. When she gets distracted, it doesn’t matter how high of a reward I give, she won’t take it if she doesn’t want it.

Anyhow, my favorite of the dogs from my childhood was generally uninterested in what certain people wanted from her. She was more motivated by praise and the sheer joy of teamwork with her favorite people than by food.

So one day my mom (not one of this dog's favorites, through no fault of her own) sets her up to do the trick: she asks the dog to sit and places a treat on the dog's nose. The dog slowly decides she'd actually rather do something else. She tilts her head down towards the ground, the treat slides off her nose, and she leisurely walks away.

But humans want obedient dogs not ones that have their own opinions :)

Independent, great explorer and hiker, hated clear objects like she had an intifada against them and never got into trouble or destroyed stuff.

She was a good dude and would have been less fun if she was more obsequious or eager to please and predictable.

My mom had a boxer who was absolutely obsessed with her for his entire life. He was so eager to please her that she would often cue certain (benign) behaviors by accident, because he was always watching her to see if there was anything for him to do with her. He was so invested in figuring out what she wanted and in impressing her that the gentlest scolding would crush him— it could easily ruin a whole training session.

The things my mom (who is legally blind) got that dog to do were amazing. She (just a hobbyist) did dog sports with him (competitive obedience and rally) and got titles in advanced and intermediate levels. He did some 'American trick dog' stuff where he would do really gimmicky but pretty cute and impressive multi-step tricks, like going outside to fetch the mail and bring it back, or hopping into a suitcase, closing it on his own head, and lying down. He had some routine tricks that were pretty cool, like searching the house to collect all of his toys and put them away. He worked as a therapy dog in hospitals, where he was especially beloved by children, who were invariably amused and pleased that they could get a big, strange dog to do many tricks for them. He'd also do some little assistance things for my mom, like pick things up off the floor (if asked) so she didn't have to get down on her hands and knees and pat around to find them.

Unrelated to his training career, I'll never forget his watchfulness and sweetness toward my tiny old chihuahua. As you likely know, boxers can be extremely energetic dogs, but he was a calm soul as far as boxers go. While they didn't meet often, he had a special connection with my little < 5lbs Chihuahua: she trusted his gentle nature and he sympathized with her frustration with the antics of my mom's younger boxer. When the young energetic one wouldn't stop following my little one around, he'd trot in between them and quietly create some distance for her. My little old lady evidently appreciated this quite a bit, so much so that it once caused my family a scare. We always kept the big dogs and small dogs separated if the big dogs were playing, or if we were out of the house, or if no one was committed to supervising them. One day after an outing my mom panicked a little when she couldn't find my little old lady, and it turned out that she, not wanting to be alone for the long duration of a shopping trip and dinner, walked a couple steps down (at her age and size she was quite apprehensive about stairs, and typically would not cross even one or two steps) and then squeezed through the bars of a baby gate in order to nestle into a dog bed with my mom's dog. He was really an incredible dog, and his gentle, agreeable, social, other-oriented nature was certainly a big part of that.

On the other hand, that little old lady of a Chihuahua, when I met her, didn't know how to walk on a leash, resource guarded laps and bit about it, and didn't respond to my stupid attempts to scold her except by mistrusting me and avoiding me. Learning how to communicate her and win her over was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. By the end of her life she was a dog I could trust around strangers, dog and human, of all sizes and personalities, whom I could take offleash anywhere, who would wait for my signal at a crosswalk, who I could have lie down on some blankets on a table where I was eating and trust her when I walked out of the room, and whom I learned to read for the tiniest signals: eye contact, pointing at what she wanted with her eyes, inaudible growls/whines I could only feel because she was in my lap, the 10 kinds of trembling that comprise key terms in the Chihuahua language... and I probably wouldn't have learned much of anything from her if she hadn't demanded that I come to her and understand her perspective and needs and wants first.

That's a smart dog, while I can imagine someone observing such occurence calling the dog dumb.

The former, I'm not sure they'd remember toy names from 10 years ago but I've been impressed time after time after time at her ability to understand the world around her.

THe latter, he's just lucky to remember how to walk down the hall.

Sometimes it is the luck of the draw.

High stress or emotional arousal or a distracting environment will supersede this but it's a decent starting point which people often miss. Luckily our second dog likes play and praise so that gives us more options.

Dog #2 just doesn't care. She eats the recommended daily amount, but will take hours to finish a meal. Walking away and coming back later. She just doesn't care about food.

I have heard trainers who suggest meal time is meal time, the food is taken if it is not eaten, it's not a self-serve grazing buffet. I think part of it is about making it clear who is in charge, especially if a dog is not listening during training, but there are other reasons I forget like resource guarding and predictable toileting. But we all decide how much we let them express their personalities :)

I have two purebred poodles (not bred for Instagram) and one is highly motivated by food, the other will decline treats pretty often, even treats we know he really loves. This is not super atypical of poodles.

And to put another layer of complication on your dismissal of other people's challenges training dogs: the not food-motivated one is way easier to train.

Don’t assume your experience is universal, especially when there’s a lot of people telling you it isn’t.

Eventually I realized she also loves to please - and reason things out herself - and the food was completely unnecessary! No specific "dominance" training necessary.

We have a time frame of roughly 3 hours in which we feed the dog.

That way we can have a nice dinner too, go to a musical etc. pp.

A friend of ours made the same mistake as you. His dog becomes a real diva after 6pm, if she hasn't eaten

So I switched to using a phone alarm that marks when it's time to feed the dogs. I can easily change the time it rings to adjust their meal times, and they remain patient because they know that they won't be fed until they hear that sound.

Out of curiosity we've tried to figure out if there's some external cue he's relying on outside of a very accurate internal 'clock', and haven't found any. He's consistent even in the face of timezone changes and travel across the country (and other mundane tricks that'd eliminate stimulus like daylight cues), different environments / homes (ruling out equipment / building / neighbourhood noises), and different humans (in case his usual companions unwittingly broadcast hints).

I'm forced to the conclusion he swallowed a Rolex at some point.

My own schedule isn't particularly routine otherwise, so it's actually not an unwelcome anchor. He does understand and give up after a couple attempts if you tell him 'later' or have an obvious reason for the delay. He's intent, but not impolite.

We left him with a friend once for a few days who feeds their own dog an hour earlier. The discovery that 5 o'clock dinnertime can be a thing completely rocked his world. He tried to share this revolutionary breakthrough with us but with limited success.

Anyhow, like many of her kind she is NOT into food. That made training her in the beginning very difficult, because we knew no other way back than. Even today, I always have to chuckle when I try to give her a treat and she takes the treat very gently from my hand and puts it down on the floor, like saying "let me put it there for you." Of course, sometimes she just eats it but you never know.

But for the 80% case, yeah, grab some string cheese and a clicker.[0]

[0] https://www.rover.com/blog/clicker-training-dogs/

Of course sharing food is a way to build social bonding and positively motivate social conformance. It is with people too, which is why it's so natural for us to carry it over to our relationship with dogs.

How or why is that depressing?

It's good that we crave what helps us thrive and that we can recognize who makes it easy for us to have more, and there's a beautiful elegance to that fact that so many creatures share the trait, across such diverse lineages as birds, reptiles, fish, arthropods, mammals, etc

Isn't that inspiring, rather than depressing?

Then there are those who just don't care to train their dogs.

There is a worse option.

The thin extending dog lead at maximum extension while walking the dog in twilight on a cycle path. What could go wrong?

Got some doubts about the value of those leads in general; surely it just means the dog has no gauge at all in how far they can go in any direction?

It wasn't a dog, it was a skunk. Fortunately it didn't seem threatened and just waddled away.

Spend some time training dogs and you'll also find both that food motivation can vary quite a bit (some dogs are more interested in toys than food, for instance) and also that it's quite possible to train dogs without always relying on a food reward.

Generally the deeper you go with understanding and training dog behavior, the more you realize how the same learning theory that informs scientific dog training also describes human behavior. (Imo it also reveals deficiencies in thinking in terms of learning theory/behaviorism alone; idk how you could work closely with animals and seriously believe they lack cognition.)

https://allcreatureslargeandsmall.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/t...

"As time passes without survivors found, search-and-rescue dogs — especially those trained to find living people — experience increased stress and depression. One way this is mitigated is for handlers and trainers to stage mock “finds” so that the dogs can feel successful."

That makes me think of a managerial strategy that involves feeding a low performing employee softball tasks and praising them for completing them. Once they are convinced they are highly competent slowly start ramping up the complexity.

People screening luggage for bombs/knives/etc do significantly better if you show them a picture of a bad bag every now and then. Often these systems are used to monitor screener performance, but even if you just show them the picture now and then with "this is a test, no action is required" they do better.

Being primed with things relative to the task improves human performance, and I'd expect it would work in smarter animals, too.

in deference to 082349872349872’s curiosity, human beings can, in principle, train dogs (in this very limited context) to walk the fine line between bad faith (not exhibiting distress) and good faith (exhibiting distress).

Can they, in reality?

*or, maybe like Athena, born fully salvated from a crack in Zeus (athenogenesis)

"Sometimes you find live people, which is sweet, and sometimes you find dead people[1], which is a bummer, but I am a good boi no matter which because I search thoroughly and report immediately."

[0] take the above with a grain of salt; almost all my canine experience is second-hand, with scent and herding breeds, so that "ideal" is a cross between a short conversation with a neighbour who trained avalanche dogs and a friend who is a ski instructor, and believes:

"Sometimes it's sunny and the clients are talented and resilient, which is sweet, and sometimes it's snowing hard and the clients have no talent and no nerves, which is a bummer, but I am a good ski instructor no matter which because I bring them to at least 80% of the improvements which could have been possible given the conditions and clients of that particular session."

[1] unsolicited moralising: there are weather reports. use them. there are beacon/pole/shovel avalanche sets. buy them. there are guides. hire them. So many of the deaths reported in the local papers are because people are not good bois: they go off piste, without a guide, without self-rescue equipment, on days when there were already avalanche warnings given in the morning.

(advice on choosing a hunting prospect which I've run across: put something startling [alarm clock, etc.] next to the litter, and see how they react. Your best prospects should be among those puppies which first investigate, then ignore, the novelty. Those who never investigate probably won't be curious enough to easily train; those who never ignore probably won't be able to focus enough to easily train)

EDIT: maybe that wasn't what you were asking. Dogs obviously engage or disengage with other people based on whether or not they believe their person approves. But I don't think dogs ever (like someone asking a leading question of a third party not because they wanted to hear the answer but because they want their so to hear it yet are unwilling to say it directly) instigate a dyadic transaction explicitly for the effect it has on third parties. Horses for sure don't. (there is "dogpiling", but I think for dogs and am pretty sure for horses that that's a side effect of dyadic jockeying, not the social game monkeys make of it) What say the dog people?

2024-09-06 Dogs with prior experience of a task still overimitate their caregiver https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-70700-3

(With suggested related content)

However, a direct comparison of overimitation timing with humans is necessary to understand if this approach is indeed partly what differentiates dog overimitation from that of humans.

Yes, will consider the 3-way communication styles at some point (and the Rao talk chart) but right now exploring what a purely dyadic interaction can bring us, e.g. how to model the occasions on which Sir Humphrey/Hacker considered rewriting their firmwares post-startle (with or without npc intervention from Annie or Woolley)

I don't have anything further to contribute to this discussion, so if not for that bemusing remark of yours, I wouldn't have engaged.

If I'm being honest, I don't understand the middle two paragraphs, either. (Why "bad faith" and "good faith"? Why do you say it can be done in principle, while leaving "in reality" an open question? and how does what's essentially a theory defer to anyone's curiosity? Surely I'm missing context.)

But this isn't even about this particular half eaten sausage. A dog doesn't know the difference between a pristine sausage and a half eaten one, to them it's just meat. And the point is that dogs should be taught to never eat any meat on the street - because they can't think "uh, looks half eaten, probably fine".

Especially to our mammalian brethren, who have many of the same underlying neurological mechanisms (though in differing quantities).

Dogs have co-evolved with humans for thousands of years.

Remembering names seems like a useful albeit unsurprising skill, especially when it comes to recognizing/avoiding danger.

“The bear/wolf/demon tribe is back!”

Will we ever stop looking down from our heavenly pedestal? Can we instead treat at our earthly contemporaries as different but equal?

I think it cuts so deep into people's psychology, and frequently religion. The very notion that we are not the apex of anything. And that we no longer need to eat other animals to live and be healthy. Too much to bear for many, so it frequently results in low-quality conversation, laden with emotions.

The fact remains, however. Non-human animals are not that different from us. Pretty much all mental behavior is represented in the animal kingdom. They, in so many ways, are us. And we are them.

Why should it be otherwise, after all? It would be strange to have a quantum jump in mental behavior with humans, and only primitive behavior in all other animals.

It'll probably take some centuries for humans to see other animals as inherently worthy of respect.

The complexity of human language, social structure, and technology is not even in the same ballpark as animals. Humans make iPhones and travel to space and write War and Peace. We dominate the world, changing its very climate and wiping countless species off the planet, and no other species even tries to stop us.

It seems a bigger stretch to think other animals have similar emotions to humans than the opposite.

That's true only for a small subset of humans. 99.9% of humans achieve no feat as you describe.

You can easily make the case for attributing these feats to smaller subsets. E.g., Africans, Native Americans do not make iPhones, travel to space, etc. And therefore its ok to colonize them. I think that sounds familiar to history.

If you go by this notion, it would rather make sense to attribute these feats to a small elite and not humans entirely. And by that logic, this elite is siphoning money, creating riches for their own benefit. Which is probably what is happening in most countries (more so if they are authoritarian).

I think its simply about a feeling of superiority, might makes right. If you can, you abuse others for your own benefit. Whether they are a human or another animal.

To add on to your argument in the context of this quote, I also think this is also an extremely compelling argument for not only the arrogance of mankind, but the true stupidity of mankind.

We treat our one and only planet -- source of survival -- like its rental. Hopefully within the next century, we can develop some method to eat those iPhones because we might not have many options left.

You can have a conversation with 99.9% of humans, something you can’t do with any other animal. The other list of accomplishments is not even needed to surpass what animals can do.

You have to be intentionally being obtuse to suggest that the gal between humans and animals is not an order of magnitude away from the gap between humans and other humans.

By the way, you can't have a proper conversation with someone, if you don't speak the same language.

To answer your other argument, there is a different fundamental level of 'superiority' over animals that you could never argue for over humans. Even the most 'primitive' of civilizations have been able to articulate their resistance to oppressors in a way no animal has ever even come close to doing. Again, the orders of magnitude difference between humans and animals makes it a completely different comparison than between humans and 'weaker' humans. It is insulting to humans to imply it is the same thing.

Are humans more intelligent than animals though? By human definitions and metrics? Unquestionably. However, I am not convinced that humans are truly superior in every facet of intelligence.

I have mental health issues, I breathe in toxic air, consume poisonous food and drink, wait in traffic to go to some miserable office, to be surrounded by miserable people, to do meaningless work. I do all of this so that I may survive and placate myself with the leftovers. Other "intelligent" humans give me concoctions that alter my brain chemistry in order to help me cope and distract myself from our Sisyphean existence.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished for believing he was more intelligent than the gods. I sometimes wonder if we, too, are punished for believing we are superior to nature. Perhaps true intelligence is not defined by our metrics after all.

People are wrongly taught when they're children that as a human they're special.

Mostly it's with good intentions (encouraging ethics and responsibility), but often the message is rudimentary or lost along the way.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...

Is it possible this mass of mycelium has some form of intelligence that is difficult for humans to measure? Maybe it "knows" things we can barely conceptualize. What about trees that stand in place for hundreds, or even thousands of years?

https://www.treehugger.com/the-worlds-oldest-living-trees-48...

Perhaps the trees experience time differently due to their slow growth, and they too have "witnessed" many different events in their environment over time, encapsulating them in the rings and structures within themselves.

We could write this off as non-sense as trees have no nervous system, but maybe a lack of such a system doesn't necessarily preclude some type of intelligence we just don't consider "intelligent".

There are whole worlds to be discovered yet here on our little blue dot of a planet

That's actually the plot of a Garrett P.I. novel.

Just look at all the cases in human history where other people were reduced to primitive beings and could be treated more cruelly. If we can rationalize these actions towards fellow humans, I assume that the barrier for accepting animal emotions is even harder to break

I personally really appreciate the definition of intelligence from Dr. David Krakauer, a mathematical biologist. Krakauer once said on Sam Harris' podcast (episode 40):

Intelligence is, as I say to people, one of the topics about which we have been most stupid. All our definitions of intelligence are based on measurements that can only be applied to humans. An IQ test is not interesting if you’re trying to calculate the intelligence of an octopus — which I would like to know, because I believe in evolution. I think we need to understand where these things come from, and having a definition that applies just to one particular species doesn’t help us. We’ve talked about entropy and computation, and they’re going to be the keys to understanding intelligence.

Let’s go back to randomness. The example I like to give is Rubik’s cube, because it’s a beautiful little mental model, a metaphor. If I gave you a cube and asked you to solve it, and you just randomly manipulated it, since it has on the order of 10 quintillion solutions, which is a very large number, if you were immortal, you would eventually solve it. But it would take a lifetime of several universes to do so. That is random performance.

Stupid performance is if you took just one face of the cube and manipulated that one face and rotated it forever. As everyone knows, if you did that, you would never solve the cube. It would be an infinite process that would never be resolved. That, in my definition, would be stupid. It is significantly worse than chance.

Now let’s take someone who has learned how to manipulate a cube and is familiar with various rules that allow you, from any initial configuration, to solve the cube in 20 minutes or less. That is intelligent behavior, significantly better than chance. This sounds a little counterintuitive, perhaps, until you realize that’s how we use the word in our daily lives. If I sat down with an extraordinary mathematician and I said, “I can’t solve that equation,” and he said, “Well, no, it’s easy. Here, this is what you do,” I’d look at it and I’d say, “Oh, yes, it is easy. You made that look easy.” That’s what we mean when we say someone is smart. They make things look easy.

If, on the other hand, I sat down with someone who was incapable, and he just kept dividing by two, for whatever reason, I would say, “What on earth are you doing? What a stupid thing to do. You’ll never solve the problem that way.” So that is what we mean by intelligence. It’s the thing we do that ensures that the problem is efficiently solved and in a way that makes it appear effortless. And stupidity is a set of rules that we use to ensure that the problem will be solved in longer than chance or never and is nevertheless pursued with alacrity and enthusiasm.”

That's not diminutive of them, more a reflection that we've been selecting dogs for this behavior and other "breed traits" (which I think of as specific hereditary OCD) for thousands of years, so it makes sense they're primed for this from a context- or direction-giver.

It's why if you teach a dog a trick that it's still able to recall years later, it won't go off and practice it on its own or teach it to other dogs.

And in your strange example, if this dog wasn't eating due to a toothache, the parents are forcing the dog to anxiously eat through the pain of a toothache.

I have no idea how you'd get "I'm in pain" from the associated body language; but, then again, I'm not a dog. In this case there were behavioural cues, but I don't know how I'd tell if there weren't.

For toothache specifically, we'd do a differential check: does the horse eagerly eat a soft mash, but won't eat hard cubes? If so, time to grab that tongue and do a visual inspection (and if everything looks normal, it's still worth palpating).

(a typical vet complaint is that owners don't do any of the above, and first notice only when stench ultimately makes it obvious to check for toothache)

There are some times when as humans, we have knowledge that the dog needs to eat now, because they won't have a chance later, for example if going on some trip with the dog where feeding later would be inconvenient. In those cases it's useful to have this trick available.

The first year I had him as a puppy, he could smell/hear (?) his best neighborhood buddy walking multiple buildings away from our apartment while the windows were closed. He'd run to the door and start crying and as soon as we got outside he knew the right path. And his friend hadn't even walked by our building yet, so it's not like there was a trail to sniff other than whatever may have been carried by breeze.

Dogs are incredibly smart.

In the experiment, then they did everything they could to remove their owners scent from their home. The dog's owner came home at the usual time, but the dog wasn't expecting it this time because they had removed the owner's scent earlier, so the dog was clearly surprised and confused.

Dogs have a very strong sense of smell which we humans often fail to appreciate. It's not like dogs can smell their owner coming home from miles away, that's a little preposterous. But they can use their sense of smell in other ways, which are not so obvious to us, such as to maintain a sense of time.

As for that first video, honestly it feels phony/staged, like all that fake miraculous crap that was common on TV 10-20 years ago.

Probably average about 2 a year. My dog understands when it’s time for the new one. She’s ultra excited and all the sudden the old ball we have kicked and fetched every single day for 6 months, is non existent as we are on to the new one. I always get a kick out of it. She’s too funny about it.

I miss that girl.

Now, in our house, music is playing pretty much constantly, and we always assumed that dogs either didn't understand it or didn't care about it. But whenever the Warren Zevon song "Werewolves of London" came on, my wife would try to get Zuni howling with the "Aaaaaaaah Ooooooh" bit. Every time the song would come on, she'd make the same silly joke with the dogs. Zuni would begin to howl immediately, and Pasha would join in with him.

Well, Pasha was diagnosed with bone cancer and we lost her a few months after that. Sheena couldn't bare playing the song and I intentionally avoided it. We got another greyhound as a companion for Zuni.

About a year after we got Lily, I put on a random mix and wandered around the house doing chores. Some time later I heard the first bars of Werewolves in London and immediately though "damn, I hope the wife doesn't hear this". Before I could finish the thought, Zuni was howling his head off, and racing around the house, I think, searching for Pasha.

It hadn't even gotten too the "Aaaaaaaah Ooooooh" part. Which means that he also recognised the song in the first few bars.

Our old Collie could fetch different types of ball on command without really any intention training.

And sometimes it's just a bunch of scientists having a great time playing with doggos :)

A few years after leaving wherever, I begin to forget even the simplest names, and I consider this as a blessing, as if Agent K set the flashy-thing in my eyes and I've returned to an ordinary life.

Traditional names are the first names, and these have been less direct for a very long time. First names are assigned in childhood and used for most of your life, so they are rarely related to your occupation. Much of Europe, America, and the Middle East of course use mostly the names of religious figures, but even in societies that didn't adopt foreign names, given names are typically words that evoke some positive aspiration, such as well liked/respected animals or plants.

Of course, sometimes people would be known by other names as well.

Taller Than My Dad turned out to be comp.lang.c FAQ maintainer, Steve Summit.

Me: Hello, $Firstname! No need for the card, I know your number is seventeen forty-two. It's been about six months since you've been in, let me get into the computer and get your activity printed.

Him: You know me?

Me: Just by your picture. [idle chatter mode initiated as I wait for the printer]. Say, you've lost about ten pounds. That's down to one-sixty, right? I'll make a note to update your profile.

Him: [shifting uncomfortably] I was really one-eighty but I fudged it, so now it is accurate.

Me: So, how's the insurance business?

Him: You remember that?

Me: [continuing on like a chipper but oblivious robot] Our members are important!

Him: I'll buy you a steak dinner if you can tell me my birthday.

Me: July thirty-first, nineteen forty-four.

I let him off the steak dinner thing.

I am not good with people and it took me a long time to learn that, although people like to be recognized and known to some degree, huge amounts of detail retained over long periods, or remembering even singular encounters with high fidelity freaks some folks out. Somewhere along the line, I had mechanically applied the "remember people's names" advice from books like How to Win Friends and Influence People and must have figured if some is good, more is better, then used the few strengths I had, but instead ended up setting off people's "information asymmetry" threat detection and/or Who Is This Freak.

Now I clamp down and try not to blurt out recognizing someone from decades back, even though I am, like a puppy, happy to see a person from long ago once more. When I make jokes that I am like a golden retriever, I am kidding on the square.

If you have to rank the animals by intelligence, second (or first, even?) is certainly Benjamin the donkey.

[In the 80s, Rabinovich was allowed a tour of Europe. He sent telegrams from everywhere: "Greetings from free Bulgaria. Rabinovich" "Greetings from free Romania. Rabinovich" "Greetings from free Hungary. Rabinovich" "Greetings from Austria. Free Rabinovich"]

So idk if it’s a great lens for AF, where all the proletarian animals are more or less equally taken in.

But anyway, Benjamin is definitely a loser, not a sociopath! He comes closest to understanding what’s happening, and his response is to put his head down, so his job, and seek meaning outside the political game. A Ryan-type sociopath candidate would ditch work to make a political play. Benjamin is Stanley.

(To abuse a Ridley Scott favourite: slip a Marechal’s baton into his rucksack)

[this is opposite of the Rabinovich “strategy”, which hints that YC are not sociopaths]

EDIT: I dont think this is comparable to Steve Jobs’ 100-Person Retreat without more insider data, e.g.,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41416275

Would be interested to know if anybody got promoted as a result of these retreats, my hunch is, no, because everybody knows about the 100-person retreat.

EDIT 2: another system to compare with, kind of the opposite of Rao’s model, is the Lambeth race, thats more like openly favouring the tortoise? So that no rabbit would sign up in the first place. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41468567

I. [Benjamin is attending an Animal Farm wedding with his mare friend from a neighbouring farm, Kay.]

— and Napoleon assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.

— ...

— That's a true story. That's my farm, Kay, that's not me.

II. [After the death of Napoleon, the younger pigs took out a mortgage from the human bank. Pinkeye meets Benjamin to discuss some financial aid the latter provided for recent payments.]

— Com.. Mr. Benjamin, of course we pigs are very grateful for your assistance with affairs of farm, and so we thought we should give you a quick heads-up. You're an animal of the world, you know how unforeseen things happen; we'd like to repay you on the original schedule but our accountants are saying we might have to get creative and renegotiate. I don't know what we might do, that's for others to decide, and unfortunately it didn't get discussed at the last committee meeting because we were too busy drawing up this list of the new government ministries. Would you care to see it by any chance?

— Don't worry about negotiating with me; you should be worrying about negotiating with your Maker for breaking your word, when you come before Him to have Judgement passed on your soul...

— Mr. Benjamin, surely you of all animals know that we pigs live quarter to quarter and have no time to waste on something so far off as that?

— Allow me to repay your kindness by giving you a quick heads-up. You're an animal of the world, you know how unforeseen things happen. I'd like to be flexible but my investors are impatient. If we don't get repaid by Friday, you might be meeting your Maker on Saturday.

III. [Years later, Benjamin, having since officially taken over from the pigs, has scheduled a "working holiday" at a secluded fishing spot with the president of the bank]

— Ben, how do you do it? These skeeters are as loud as the outboard and I'm slathered in DEET but still getting eaten alive. Yet they don't bother you?

[Benjamin twitches his ears back, and lifts a hind hoof ever so slightly off the aluminium deck. In the sudden silence, the president can hear wavelets rippling along the gunwales of their fishing boat.]

— They... know better.

— ... Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself.

— Is it possible to learn this power?

— Not from a pig.

This trouble with the proles (app store, actual store, icloud, contractor relations, PR screwups.. ) ultimately stems from that failed pancreas transplant, so that they no longer had an IV to keep entropy in its place..

[plus maybe the programmers n ee types started to feel they werent fully designers (Bret Victor, later, pple like Lattner?)]

[Check out the wwdc videos.. the sw engineers dress like.. they havent read the canon]

https://culturology-journal.ru/en/article.php?id=309

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/À_la_maréchale

See cultural references in the less misogynistic (misandric?) en wiki

Equoid Lagniappe: the surnames 司馬 and Marshall have a common origin

>the recipes in which are infamous for reducing the population of anarchist cooks

>I then began thinking about the other aspects of the bizarre parasitic life-cycle of the unicorn

I liked Добро пожаловать, или Посторонним вход воспрещён (1964), in which the summer camp director plays a very soviet version of an Eric Berne Transactional Analysis* game, "Everything I do, I do it for you".

According to wikipedia, it's infamous in russian for the lines:

— Children, remember! You all are the owners of the camp. [All of] you! What do you all [therefore] need?

— [children in chorus] Di. Sci. Pline!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku_V2HgK6i8

Thx for Equoid! Not having started in on it yet, all I have for now is pedantry, for the commenters on Stross' blog who are making horse analogies (as well as the wonderful Unicorns From Hell vid) are way off base: horses are Perissodactyl, but unicorns are Artiodactyl.

* I'm not sold on TA, but learning to tune out as soon as you notice the opening moves of a TA game? That's sanity-preserving material right there.

PS. I've lost the source for the roman trichotomy; plz remind?

You and the top level parent commenter are confusing dogs with wolves

Saying a dog isn't good in human soceity is like Saying wheat or cattle aren't good for eating. They've been specifically bred to be so over thousands of years by us, specifically for these purposes.

Dog is truly man's best friend

If a dog doesn't trust a person I been believe the dog, if a person doesn't like dogs, I don't trust the person. I always trust the dog.

Agriculture, animal raising, these are what separate us from our ancestors, these are what enable civilization

Horses, cows, dogs, cats, other livestock. These animals have made us what we are, and us them. They and our modern civilization are inextricably tied.