“Economic researchers at Yale managed to successfully train Capuchin monkeys to understand and use currency.”
Related! 1-900-PRIMATE
“Economic researchers at Yale managed to successfully train Capuchin monkeys to understand and use currency.”
Related! 1-900-PRIMATE
Great news! How soon can they have 595 of them trained to replace our Congress?
HEH, should have followed the link first, but the above still applies!
Damn smart monkeys to be able to teach them that quickly.
Those monkeys put me in mind of Bill Clinton. I have no doubt that old perv would pay to see any bottom.
Come tax time who is the real chimp?
Hey baby, can I buy you a mango?
I am willing to accept that some monkeys were trained to use some tokenization game, for some value of “use”. I am not willing to accept that some monkeys were trained to understand “currency”, or in the vernacular, money. After all, most humans don’t.
Now, if some of the monkeys supplied goods or performed services for a token fee, and then output less tokens than they input, thus accumulating a surplus of tokens over time, which they then made transiently available to other monkeys at the cost of compound interest, then I might accept that some monkeys understand money.
Money is a market traded promisory note representing value exchanged. Thus it is in itself valuable, and so money is worth money. I know, a lot of people don’t like that, but it doesn’t change the axiology. That’s why humans have a word for obsession with the value of money: avarice.
Any word on how the monkeys are doing with axiology?
In later development, after the study’s conclusion, the monkeys opened a strip bar in the New Haven zoo. It was alleged to also include prostitution activities, although zoo authorities never had adequate evidence to bring charges. The Bar subsequently shut down due to the zoo authority not accepting grapes as payment for taxes.
Hey buddy, can you spare a ZWD $18,712,000,000?
tinyurl.com/37apey
Any reports of Socialist Monkeys grabbing tokens from hard-working Western Mountain Monkeys and handing them off to Central Frankish Monkeys in exchange for future considerations? Just wondering.
vit
“””After all, most humans don’t””””
you once did an excellent piece on “scale”, now try CONTEXT:-)))))))
The Theory of Money And Credit by Ludwig Von Mises, available for free:
http://www.econlib.org/library/mises/msTContents.html
And if I were to write a book I’d like to write “The Theory of Trying To Find A Friggin’ Copy Of The Theory Of Money And Credit”.
Just goes to show that with a little imagination and a lot of grant money you can train a monkey to do pretty near anything.
Does it show anything about the monkey’s internal mental state (if any)? Nope. It shows trained behavior, and maybe at a stretch it shows monkeys responding to a forcing event in their environment.
What’s news here is that these jerkweeds still get paid money for these lame-ass “psychology” studies with monkeys.
You want me to be impressed, you show me monkeys -inventing- money on their own.
Or hell, just show me a dog trained to unwind his chain from around the post after he’s gotten down to the last foot or so. That’d be frickin’ impressive animal training.
Here in Toronto, we have monkeys who can talk on a cellphone and chew gum at the same time.
Their natural habitat is the TTC. (They haven’t learned how to use garbage cans yet- too complicated for them.)
I’d pretty much given up on the idea that socialists would ever understand money, but hey, if they can get a monkey to do it there’s still hope.
Moving on to kiting cheques…;)
matbe they can be trained to take over the bank of canada.
“Does it show anything about the monkey’s internal mental state (if any)? Nope. It shows trained behavior, and maybe at a stretch it shows monkeys responding to a forcing event in their environment.”
Here’s a hint: try reading the article BEFORE commenting.
Also, it might not hurt to follow the two links at the bottom of the article, since they add even more information to help you understand what’s being observed.
I read both the articles Alex. I assure you, I understand what they said, what they did, and how they did it.
I just disagree that what they said matches what they did. As in, their extravagant conclusions are not supported by that experiment. Happens a lot in psychology, they get grants based on criteria -other- than scientific rigor.
Leads to things like the controversy over sex change operations. Outside the die-hard gay rights whacko crowd, actual scientists are privately saying there’s no evidence to support the “woman trapped in a man’s body” hypothesis at all, and plenty of evidence to suggest its a fairly serious mental illness. Little things like, quite often if you give them the right medicine it goes away, if they stop taking the medicine it comes back. Plus the small detail that the authors of the original research have publicly admitted it was total crap.
That’s why I very much disagree that these guys have shown monkeys understand money and use it to pay for sexual favors. Capuchin monkeys don’t display that kind of mental prowess in the wild, and they most certainly would display it if they had it. Surviving Mother Nature takes everything a monkey’s got, and a capuchin just doesn’t have that much.
What these guys have shown is some pretty fancy training and a willingness to make claims they can’t back up.
lol
I see. So how, exactly, do YOU interpret a male monkey giving “money” to a female monkey, having sex with her, after which she promptly exchanges the money for food?
Nope, never mind, you’re right, it doesn’t show a thing about their mental state! It’s just a coincidence that a species which shares such a massive percentage of their genome with us also happens to show similar behaviour when introduced to the concept of currency. After all, if we accepted the idea that their brains are wired in a manner similar to ours, then we might have to doubt the veracity of Intelligent Design, and the accuracy of the Bible! Can’t have none of that heathen talk influencing our young’uns ….
Oh, and BTW, none of this has ANYTHING to do with sex-change operations. I’m inclined to agree that sex-change operations don’t do a thing for the patient, and are an ineffective and harmful way of treating what is essentially a mental disorder. But I agree with that because there’s scientific data to support such a conclusion, and not because of any personal ideological bent of mine. Whereas it’s obvious that your motivations are political or ideological rather than scientific or intellectual.
Which is fine, too. If you say “I don’t want to believe this because it suggests uncomfortable things about my religious indoctrination”, that’s fine, I won’t push ya! Just don’t pretend to be making a rational objection based on the evidence.
Alex said: “So how, exactly, do YOU interpret…etc.”
Stimulus. Reponse. No consciousness required, just operant conditioning. The observed behavior does not -require- thought in order to occur. If a great ape were doing this I’d me more likely to believe there might be some understanding going on, but a capuchin? Come on. The thing’s a glorified squirrel.
No religious indoctrination Alex, just that I don’t like sloppy science.
Bullshit. It’s clear that they understand abstract concepts like the “value” of an object to others. If you want to call it a trick, that’s fine, I guess – just don’t be offended when someone suggests that your children are extremely well trained.
And please don’t use the phrase “sloppy science” when you’ve done absolutely nothing to refute the research being conducted. Maybe you think that your personal opinion is the ultimate authority on all subjects, but I certainly don’t share your assessment of it’s value.
Calm yourself, dude. I’m saying I don’t think a capuchin has the neurology to be able to do what they said. I could be wrong. Or they could be wrong.
I merely find it more likely that -they- are wrong, based on their experiment design. Its insufficient to prove their conclusion of “understanding” due to the possible confounding of mere operant conditioning. My evidence includes the teeny brain of the subject monkey.
The experiment itself isn’t sloppy, its the conclusion that’s sloppy. Kinda like concluding global warming when the measurements are confounded by sticking the thermometer next to an air conditioner.