Orca communication project - seeking feedback (and collaborators)

post by Towards_Keeperhood (Simon Skade) · 2024-12-03T17:29:40.802Z · LW · GW · 6 comments

Contents

  TLDR
  Project plan summary
  Video series showing how one might get started teaching a language to orcas
  Seeking feedback and collaborators
  Seeking funding
  Appendix: Text summary of project
None
6 comments

TLDR

It is currently plausible (35%) to me that average orcas have at least as high potential for being great scientists as the greatest human scientists, modulo their motivation for doing science^[1]. To see why I think this, see my LW question [LW · GW] (including the considerations in my answer [LW(p) · GW(p)]).

I now want to test how intelligent orcas are as soon as possible. For this, I am creating a very easily-learnable language, which is easy for orcas to vocalize and ideally also for humans (after some practice), along with a plan for how to teach the language to orcas.

I hope to start teaching orcas the language around the start of January, but I still need to plan where to best do this, buy equipment, and find at least one person who can operate a boat who is willing to do those experiments with me.

Project plan summary

For a rough summary of how I'd go about teaching orcas language, you can either watch the overview video or read the text summary in the appendix below.

I expect we will already get quite useful evidence on orca intelligence from seeing how fast and accurately they can learn the language and the abstract concepts we're trying to convey. But I will probably also try to create some other tests for testing the orcas' intelligence, but haven't thought about it yet.

Video series showing how one might get started teaching a language to orcas

To get a better impression how the project might look like, see my other videos in my video series.

Seeking feedback and collaborators

I think other smart people could probably contribute to this project, and in particular I think experience of people who know much about linguistics could be useful.

If you have feedback or ideas how you would design some part of the language, please comment. Also lmk of resources (e.g. useful wikipedia pages...) that might be useful to know for my project. (Also feel free to book a call if you think you have useful experience to share.)

If you are maybe interested in working with me on this, please PM me or book a call. (I currently don't have funding but haven't tried getting some yet so please lmk in either case whether you'd contribute for fun/impact or if you got paid.)

I'm interested in learning about how different languages are structured, especially Esparanto/Ido and Lojban^[2], but also other languages that are significantly different from central european languages^[3]. If you know the grammar of such a language well, it would be very interesting for me if you would book a call to tell me about it (or explain it in the comments or link a good resource).

Seeking funding

I will probably need at least $2.5k for a waterproof monitor, $1k-$5k for flights back and forth to where I can study orcas, and perhaps money for renting a boat and living somewhere^[4].

On top of that ~$2.5k for delegating creating the slides for teaching orcas once it's clarified how we want them to look like (aka for transforming sketches into something useable).

And then possibly more funding for paying researchers (maybe including myself because I currently just work for free and don't have super long runway) for figuring out how to best create the language and how to teach concepts to orcas. But I'm not yet sure whether I can find competent people who want to work on this over the next weeks. 

So I don't quite know yet how much money I will need, but if you'd be interested in funding this then please lmk already.

Appendix: Text summary of project

The plan is to design a (vocal) language that's easy for orcas to learn (only using sounds that orcas can easily imitate), and then to teach orcas that language by conveying the meaning of the words/sentences through showing them pictures and videos (on a waterproof screen which we put under water but in a way it's still mounted to the boat).
The language won't be super similar to a human language, maybe more like halfway between human language and logic programming.

I'm going to try to have clear sentence parsing structure (where no parsing order needs to be inferred from semantic context), and have a unique grammatical structure for expressing a sentence^[5]. Also mapping semantic similarities to phonetic similarities to make words lower complexity to learn, like e.g. having the same prefix for words that describe particular body parts. Obviously the language should have no synonyms and no same label/word for different concepts.

As example for how one could start teaching the language:

1. Show images of orcas along with the word for "orca" to teach the word for "orca". Do the same for "human", "fish", "shark", "seal".
2. Teach the word "hunt" by showing multiple things like:
   1. Show video of orcas hunting fish along with sentence for "orca hunt fish"
   2. Analogously for orcas hunting a seal.
   3. Perhaps also show humans fishing and describe it as "human hunt fish".
3. Show another video, e.g. a shark hunting a seal, and make some tone that's supposed to indicate that the orcas should answer, and when they correctly combine the words "shark hunt seal" make some tone indicating that they got it correct (or give them fish initially).

We could teach numbers like "three" by showing pictures of 3 orcas/fish/humans/stones/whatever. Then we can teach addition by inventing words for "plus" and "equals" and then showing/saying lots of true equations like "2+3=5", and then text whether orcas can notice and complete the pattern "3+1=<Tone indicating expected orca response>".

1. ^{^}

   Aka if orcas had similar access to education and information as great human scientists, 35% that most orcas could be superscientists if they also were so obsessed with scientific problems as e.g. Einstein (though most are likely not that obsessed (though they might still try hard for instrumental reasons like preventing extinction)).

2. ^{^}

   In case you were going to comment, yep I also know about toki pona and I'm going to learn that one.

3. ^{^}

   E.g. I heard chinese/Mandarin doesn't have articles, and I'm generally interested in such grammatical differences.

4. ^{^}

   Perhaps also for paying someone (who can drive a boat) to do the experiments with me, though if I don't get funding I will try to find someone who does it for free, but not sure if that will succeed.

5. ^{^}

   Aka I don't want there to be multiple options for how to assemble some words to express a particular idea, e.g. not the option of using either active or passive voice, or e.g. no two options like "Simon's phone" or "the phone of Simon".

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