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Christopher P. Brown edited this page Jan 25, 2022 · 2 revisions

intelligence

Animals using tools

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, Frans de Waal

Testing whether an animal uses tools has to be done in a way that tool use makes sense to them in their umwelt. Not to us humans. To do otherwise is as unfair as testing an ape's ability to recognize faces by showing it only human faces.

An elephant won't pick up a stick to drag food closer to it because its grasping tool is also its nose, and to pick up the stick will block its sensory input. It will, however, if food is hung up above, kick a box under the food and shake the food down to collect it.

The gibbon won't be able to grasp at strings if they lay on the ground. (The test being for the gibbon to select the string that is attached to a piece of food.) But if the strings are suspended overhead, creating a scenario mimicking their natural state of hanging in trees, then they will pass the test almost immediately.

Ideas

From Where Good Ideas Come From

There are certain conditions that allow for good ideas to develop

  1. The adjacent possible - the zeitgeist, what is possible around you. YouTube could not have been invented in the 90s.
  2. Liquid networks - density, connectivity.
  3. The slow hunch - Letting ideas simmer. Commonplace books (Enquire Within Upon Everything, Locke's index, Erasmus Darwin)
  4. Serendipity - vacilando, chance encounters. Word comes from the story of the Prince of Serendip.
  5. Error - finding opportunity in error. "Generative error,
  6. Exaptation - vs Adaptation = taking an adaptation meant for Thing A, and applying it to Thing B. e.g., bird feathers were initially just insulation, but ended up being pretty useful for flight.
  7. Platforms - closely related to adjacent possible/liquid networks? Twitter was built on a platform of GPS and HTTP/IP. A nesting bird's house is built on a platform of woodpeckers, dead trees, and beaver dams.

Where do ideas come from?

Market Non-market
Individual A B
Network C D

D is referred to as the Fourth Quadrant, and is where the majority of good ideas come from. Quad A, the "genius entrepreneur" is a rarity.

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