I put a raw URL in the raw text, and javascript rewrite magic happened to it and made it an embedded video.  

I was strongly tempted to try and hit ^z on the rewrite because in my experience embedded stuff changes over times and thus makes the writing "not able to persist in archives for the ages", but... :shrugs:

I'm not surprised that the article didn't have it. LessWrong has had the issue that "comment markdown stuff and article markdown stuff work differently" essentially forever. 

I guess another possibility: maybe the LW forum software devs changed the WYSIWYG javascript editor(s) to work the same, but you have a different browser than me, or that they tested on?

If you respond with a raw youtube URL, and don't get an embedded video based on a javascript rewrite of the comment, that would help clarify what might be going on :-)

Ah, good catch thanks!

I'm not sure that we disagree much about how likely Bunny is to be doing complex language. My primary takeaway was not "this dog can talk", it's "man, we really should be checking more comprehensively whether dogs can talk." I tried to be pretty clear about that in the curation notice. 

I think early stage science looks more like messing around than like rigorous studies. I think you need to do a lot of messing around before you get to a point where you have something to rigorously study. My curation of this is a celebration of checking things and being curious, not an endorsement of the theory.

I think I do agree that the post's title and opening epistemic status are too strong (and yeah I think it was a mistake not to include that in the curation notice. I'll edit it to do so).

I don't think it's fair to say my dismissal of concerns is "cursory" if you include my comments under the post. Maybe the article itself didn't go deep enough, partly I wanted it to scan well, partly I wanted to see good criticism so I could update/come up with good responses, because it's not easy to preempt every criticism.

As for cursory evidence, yes it's mostly that, but cursory evidence can still be good Bayesian evidence. I think there's enough to conclude there's something interesting going on.

Are the vids even real?

For starters, all of this hinges on videos being done in good faith. If it's all creative editing of pets' random walks (heh) over the board, then of course we should dismiss everything out of the gate.

• For Stella IIRC all of the interesting stuff is on Instagram @hunger4words, so I only had those two YouTube vids. I agree they're not the best for leading evidence.
• Please watch this video even if you have time constraints (it works fine at 1.5x speed).
• She shows (excessive IMO) humility and defers to who she considers experts.
• Considers herself a "hopeful skeptic", when Bunny does something unexpectedly smart, she still wonders if it's just coincidence (at 4:05). Also she namedrops Skinner and Chomsky 😄
• Makes a point to put "Talking" in scare quotes in her video titles.
• Tells a realistic story, where it took "a few weeks" for Bunny to learn just a single "Outside" button, takes "a thousand tiny reinforcements" to keep learning. And shows many examples of how she does the training.
• Explains how she teaches abstract concepts like "Love you" and acknowledges it's not the same concept to the dog, but it has "an affectionate meaning".
• In many videos we see Bunny take a looong time to respond. The dog goes away from the board (to "think" presumably) and later comes back with an answer. Those parts are sometimes cut out but usually just sped up. If it's all fake, why include that?
• In some Bunny videos we see random "tantrums". Which shows what a truly random walk sounds like and if she's selling us a bridge, why include that in the videos?
• "Conversations" are mostly very mundane and doglike and she doesn't show any truly amazing feats of intellect. She doesn't even try to teach the dog to count!
• Claims to have cameras constantly pointed at the board for research, and indeed in many of her clips there are lower quality parts shot from a constant angle. That is consistent with "something interesting happened but she wasn't filming at the time". A big tell of fake/staged videos is that someone just happened to be filming at that exact moment despite nothing seeming to prompt that.

On the balance of evidence, Alexis doesn't look like someone who's trying very hard to convince you of her magic talking dog to sell you $250 online dog communication courses. And don't say "Amazon affiliate links", even Scott has done that.

But a bigger part of why I updated towards "there's something there" is that there are several people who recreated this. Of course it's possible that every one of them is also fake, but that would be a bigger reach. Or it could be that it's easy to delude yourself and overinterpret pet output, but then the videos are still in good faith and that's what we're determining here.

• Here's a video of Billi the cat where she repeatedly and consistently refuses food. Which is the opposite of what usually happens, the owner tries to railroad her and she still says no.
• As with Bunny, you can see that the cat takes forever to respond.
• If it was just clever training to always respond yes to food with no understanding, why did this happen?

Ok if vids are real, it's still all Clever Hans

I'll just link to a few comments of mine on that:

Simple button use is expected by induction, danger of over-interpreting [LW(p) · GW(p)]

It can't be classic Clever Hans if owner doesn't know the right answer [LW(p) · GW(p)]

It smells like Buzzfeed and I'm disappointed in LW

It kind of does, but that wasn't the model. What I had in the back of my mind is "if Eliezer gets to do it, then I get to do it too". I think the community simply likes boldly stated (and especially contrarian) claims, as long as it doesn't go too far off-balance.

I didn't consciously go for any "maneuvers" to misrepresent things. IMO the only actually iffy part is the revolution line (steelman: even if your pet can tell you what they actually want to do instead of your having to guess, that's a revolution in communication).

And I think I hedged my claims pretty well. This stuff is highly suggestive, my position is "hey, despite the trappings of looking like fake viral videos, you should look at this because it's more interesting than it looks at first glance". I expect that we'll learn something interesting, but I don't have any certainty about how much. Maybe after rigorous analysis we'll see that dogs do only rudimentary communication and the rest is confirmation bias. Maybe we'll learn something more surprising.

Normie bias

To me, this doesn't feel too dissimilar from something my cousin-who-is-into-pyramid-schemes would send me. This article in particular feels not too dissimilar from something I could imagine on e.g. Buzzfeed; it just says some big things with very little substantive evidence and some maneuvers that seem most commonly used to weakly mask the lack of credibility of the argument.

I expected more complaints of this kind, so I was pleasantly surprised. I can easily imagine structurally similar arguments from someone who thinks AI alignment or cryonics are weird "nerd woo". If we're to be good rationalist we have to recognize that most evidence isn't neatly packaged for us in papers (or gwern articles) with hard numbers and rigorous analysis. We can't just exclude the messy parts of the world and expect to arrive at a useful worldview. Sometimes interesting things happen on Instagram and Tiktok.

Minor complaints

To be honest, a few of the reasons you decide the evidence is "not compelling" are pretty weird. Why does it matter if the dog uses one paw or both paws? Why is it weird that a dog has a "bed time"? What is "seeming disinterest" from the dog and what makes you think you can see that? Why do you expect dogs to strive for brevity and being "more clear"?

My priors include the idea that both animal intelligence is not that different from humans and also that humans tend to overly anthropomorphize animal cognition. The biggest misunderstandings of animal cognition are much like misunderstandings humans have of foreign cultures, often involving forms of mind projection fallacies where we assume other's values, motivations, priorities, and perceptions are more similar (or more different) than is justified.

Sorry for over-reacting to what I perceived as essentially a curated list of youtube videos with no real context. I made a probably more substantial comment as an answer to the OP.

Thanks for the precision, I was unaware of that. I still think this post is of very limited value nonetheless.

To me, and I expect to a group of other readers as well given upvotes to my comments and those of @subconvergence, this is a direction we really think LessWrong should not go in.

I think Raemon is able to see some appeals of this post that are something like:

• Boggling at the world is good, and we don't get as much of that as we'd like
• People reading this post may be able to form their own takeaway, which is something like "man, we really should be checking more comprehensively whether dogs can talk.", and ideas like that are worth sharing.

I think there are some significant problems with this, however:

1. This post doesn't really advocate boggling at the world, instead it makes specific, strongly worded claims that there is already decently meaningful evidence of something.
2. This post does not really advocate for that takeaway, and to the extent someone thinks it does, it's certainly far from the most prominent message.
3. If LWers took-this-to-heart, there are likely between 10,000-1,000,000 things of similar potential interest and evidence base that could be shared in this way, the vast majority of which are highly unlikely to be proven out.

Furthermore, in addition to thinking that if I've guessed at Raemon's motivations correctly, they're based on flawed reasoning for the above 3 reasons, I think there are other factors that make this actively damaging:

1. This makes strongly worded claims that are either untestable (assumptions on LW readership's priors in title), or not nearly supported by the evidence.
2. It employs a number of techniques that, to some, are seemingly effective at actively misleading them (see bullets 2 and 3 of my previous comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], I also find a number more employed in the author's comments).
3. This, to me, pattern matches with LWers having much less critical readership than expected, and than should be warranted when confronting a post of this type, which I've observed in multiple prominent instances over the past ~3 months of newly close engagement. I think continued promotion of articles with poor calibration, with a lack of critical comments (and instead unwarranted enthusiasm), will further degrade LW's state of discourse. Even if this is the only article of this type, and I'm wrong about some of the others, I think even one instance of promoting something that is a better fit for Buzzfeed is at least somewhat damaging.

I do think there's a post that fits my guess at Raemon's appeal of this post (the two bullets above) and avoids all the numbered issues I outline afterward, but this post is a far departure from that hypothetical one.

Thanks for responding, and also for illustrating all the issues I have in your post in a compressed way. Basically, what you're saying is:

1. Something new and exciting is happening
2. There's not a lot of evidence BUT

I think this community should be able to see the issue there. (To also be polemical, occultism was also something that was new and exciting in the 19th century, with many intellectual of their time spending their evening around a turntable, most of them also in good faith when they reported paranormal activity.)

1. is being conditioned on something really happening in 2.

But 2. has a lot of issues and you know it, and I think you do a bad job at convincing me. Your justifications are:

• "There's a study ongoing": good, I haven't read the methods and it's probably interesting, but there are no results yet. Maybe you could summarize it to people then if you want to introduce us to this work?
• "early-stage science often looks like messing around [LW(p) · GW(p)]": yes, but many other things also looks like messing around, and really are messing around in the end
• "videos are made in good faith": Clever Hans, the most infamous exemple in comparative cognition, was literally also in good faith
• "don't discount evidence just because it's normie YouTube vids": what evidence again? and evidence to what?

The main claim is that there's something interesting going on that makes me suspect dogs could possibly produce something that looks like language.

Ok, but you'll have to define what you mean by "language" here because even if the videos are made in "good faith" (which again doesn't make the owners immune to biaises, even if they can name drop Clever Hans), I don't see the dogs using a well defined grammar, nor adding unseen words to their vocabulary, nor composing existing structures to create new ones.

Their "language", even in the best case, seems to be "bag-of-word" based, or simple sequences of a few words that could be learned by reinforcement, especially given the owner's involvement. It also relies on the contextual pressing of a couple buttons, which again doesn't qualify for language. Finally, it also relies extensively on the owners interpretations.

All the recorded interactions span the course of a couple "sentences". I didn't see any "discussion" longer than that, but feel free to link a more impressive video as I didn't watch them all.

You say you're aware of comparative cognition, so you should have heard about Morgan's Canon. 

All of what I've seen in the few videos I watched can be very well explained using a mix of:

• the dogs are heavily trained to produce some basic sentences composed of few words that give the illusion of grammar
• the rest of the time dogs are able to map stimuli to some single buttons
• dogs responds to physical and speech cues from their owner about which button to press (they are heavily encouraged to press some buttons to please their owner and get a reward)
• heavy selection biais in the choice of videos

Given the extraordinary amount of efforts that went into training the animals in the videos, the results seem to be in accordance with what we already knew about cognition in dog.

This is a cool hobby for people who love their dogs and want to spend a lot of time training them. Not a groundbreaking discovery.

In the end, I think you and many other people here are being fooled by:

• The fact that you like dogs as animal companions (and find cognition in non-human animal amazing in general, which I understand)
• The fact that they're using speakers with pre-recorded speech, which gives you the illusion of language

My dog does this unusual roundhouse butt attack when she's playing with other dogs. It's unusual enough that people comment on it.

I've definitely noticed other dogs start doing it too after playing with her a bunch.

There also SEEMS to be a thing where in e.g. Berkeley the dogs at the park play quietly. I wondered how they taught their dogs not to bark while playing, because this is NOT the case in midwest dog parks. But apparently it's "cultural". If the dogs don't bark at the dog park you frequent, your dog will also not bark.

Imitation seems like an important part of teaching/learning, and apes have famously high ability to imitate, and humans are the best imitators among the apes. This may put a limit on how difficult concepts a species can transfer to the next generation.

Humans love copying what others do, and that may be useful at learning habits that are not immediately useful, so the learning at the beginning is not rewarded by anything other than being intrinsically desirable.

Also, training animals is difficult; I probably couldn't teach a dog to communicate. How much would belonging to the same species help the dog to teach its puppies?

I am offering 2:1 odds in favour of the other side.

So the danger is over-interpreting their output. Was this sentence intended or just random babbling? Does the dog understand the word differently from what it means in English? E.g. "bye" seems to become a verb meaning "leaving", "love you" is used for affection but obviously doesn't reflect deep understanding of the human concept of love. 

Interestingly, there's an argument that human infants also learn language by their parents over-interpreting their input, with the infants then adopting those interpretations as true. So one could argue that even if over-interpretation happens with dogs, that only makes it a process similar to human language learning, with the parent/child and owner/dog creating a shared language game.

Our first type of example comes from our own data concerning Zulu infants of between three and four months of age interacting with their mothers, and suggests an answer to this question. [...]

As noted above, there are times when a caregiver will want an infant to fall silent, or in isiZulu to 'thula'. Zulu children are traditionally expected to be less socially active than contemporary Western children, to initiate fewer interactions, and, crucially, to show a respectful attitude towards adults. An early manifestation of this is in behaviours where a mother attempts to make an infant keep quiet, sometimes saying 'thula' ('quiet'), 'njega' ('no'), while simultaneously gesturing, moving towards or away from the infant, and reacting to details of the infants own behaviour (see Cowley et al., in press).

At these times the mother regularly leans forward, so that more of the infants visual field is taken up by her face and palms. New vocalisations, and movements or re-orientations of gaze by the infant, are often 'nipped in the bud' by dominating vocalisations (sometimes showing prosodic properties indicative of disapproval, comforting, attention and/or arousal towards the mother herself) from the mother, sometimes accompanied by increasingly emphatic hand-waving, and even closer crowding of the infants visual field. [...]

With high regularity, and within relatively little time, the particular infant often does 'thula', at which point it is generally rewarded with smiling, gentle touching, and other comforting.

At this stage there is no reason to believe that the infant knows what 'thula' or 'njega' means, or even that it could reliably re-identify the words, let alone produce or contemplate them, so it is extremely unlikely that the word-based aspects of maternal utterance-activity provide labels for the infant. We are considering infants before the stage linguists call 'babbling', let alone recognisable speech production. It is not even necessary to suppose that it 'knows' that it is supposed to be quiet when behaved at in the ways we have just described. We know that the mother wants the child to be quiet, that this expresses itself in behaviour by the mother, and that the infant comes to be quiet.

If we examine the mothers behaviour, though, we can make sense of it. She ensures that it is difficult for the infant to attend to anything else by crowding its visual field. She rejects active or new behaviours on its part by cutting off its vocalisations and movements with dominating signals of her own. She largely restricts approval signals, including relaxing the crowding, and reducing the magnitude of her gesturing, as well as expressing comfort through vocalisation, facial signalling and touch, to moments when the infant begins to quieten down. Its not particularly surprising, then, that it does quieten down.

The mothers behaviour includes salient, repeated, features which are apt for learning. Her patterns of hand gesturing, for example, could at the outset be iconic of the whole episode including her behaviour and the infants becoming quiet, but, when repetition allows the gesture to be individuated and recognised in its own right, go on to become an indexical cue that quietness should follow. The infants responses then become indexical for the mother of the degree to which the child is co-operative, well-behaved, or, more plainly, 'good'. Caregiver descriptions of infant behaviour at these times, manifest either in their explicit vocalisations to the child, including references to being 'good', or references to possible disciplinary sanctions such as 'kuza baba manje' ('wheres your father now?') or, in interviews following the videotaping, show that infant behaviour even at this early age is being classified in line with culturally specific expectations of good and bad behaviour. And a crucial part of what makes for a 'good' child is responding in ways sensitive to what caregiver behaviour is actually about, strikingly in controlling episodes such as the one just described, which make possible the earliest ascriptions of 'obedience', 'cooperativeness' and so forth.

These ascriptions are over-interpretations. They are, though, necessary overinterpretations, in so far as they motivate caregivers to imbue their own behaviour with regularities manifest regularities in their own behaviour which are then available as structure in the interactional environment for (learning by) the infant. A further episode from our data, in this case concerning a child of around four months, illustrates this point about over-interpretation. In it an infant repeatedly vocalises in ways which to its mother, at least, are suggestive of its saying 'up'. Each time she says 'up'?, or 'you want to go up'? and after a few repetitions she lifts the child. Prior to the lifting, there is little evidence that the child actually wants to be lifted, or that it has its attention focussed on anything in particular, except perhaps its own experiments in vocal control. When it is lifted, though, it beams widely. Whatever it did want, if anything, it is now, we suggest, one step closer to figuring out how to behave in ways that lead to its being lifted up.

Still on the subject of lifting, consider the common gesture made around the eighth month by infants who want to be picked up (that is, who subsequently smile or otherwise show approval when they are picked up following such a gesture): a simultaneous raising, or flapping, of both arms (see Lock, 1991). This gesture is not simply copied from common adult behaviours. In the terms we are using here it is partly iconic, in virtue of being a common posture of infants while they are in fact being held up, and partly indexical, in virtue of being able to stand on its own as an indicator of 'being up', as well as being symbolically interpretable as an invitation to lift, or a request to be lifted. Such gestures are, importantly, serviceable label candidates, in virtue of being amenable to disembedding from behaviour, and eventually coming under deliberate control. An infant need not want to be lifted the first few times it makes such a gesture, it has only to be able to notice that the gesture tends to be followed by liftings.

If and when such learning takes place, it does so in the affectively charged environment we have briefly described. We want to bring discussion of the current example to a close by suggesting a way in which these interactions should be regarded as a further example of how minds can be extended through action. Clark and Chalmers suggestion is that paradigmatically mental states and processes can be realised by structures and resources external to the brain. The world beyond the skull of any individual includes, of course, the skulls and brains of others. If active externalism motivates the recognition of a cognitive prosthesis such as a filofax as
part of what realises a mind, then the embodied brain of another can also play that role. Here, then, is our suggestion: that at times interacting caregiver-infant dyads are neither one individual nor two, but somewhere in between. At the risk of sounding sensational and un-PC at the same time, infant brains can be temporarily colonised by caregivers so as to accelerate learning processes. [...]

The instances of indexical learning we describe also permit the beginning of a kind of 'semiotic arms race' between infants and caregivers. Once an infant has learned, for example, that the arms-up gesture can lead to being lifted, it is possible for 'requests' (that is, behaviours taken as requests by others, no matter how they are to the infant) to be lifted to be acted on, or to be refused. Prior to the construction and learning of the indexical relationship, this was impossible––a parent would lift a child when the parent wanted to, or thought it would serve some end. Once it has been learned, 'requests' can be differentially responded to, depending on their situation in patterns of interaction extending through time. Personal and cultural contingencies about infants and parents will codetermine what patterns are formed, and whether, for example, requested lifting is more likely after relatively quick acquiescence to silencing behaviour, or less likely in the period following failure to attend to objects or events in which a caregiver attempted to arouse interest.

I tend towards the 'Clever Hans' hypothesis on this one too. Human language skills are much more complex due to our neurology, as are our cognitive abilities. That doesn't mean dogs aren't communicating at some rudimentary level, as they are at least able to recognize patterns and determine likely outcomes, even if they are at a more reflexive instead of reflective level. Hot dogs for example satisfy reflexive hunger based desires, instead of reflective philosophical desires to be seen as intelligent.

Of course one reason more of this type of research isn't done in academia anymore is that no one wants to shell out tons of money to disprove a lot of 'crazy' hypothesis. Proving things tends to be seen as more productive, especially in the short term, although the long term implications of disproving multiple hypothesis is that it tends to point one in a better direction for particular areas of potential for truth. 

At any level, money is always a polarizing factor in the consideration of 'scientific validity', whether it's selling buttons to 'Dog Parents' or selling data processing clout to Corporations and their beneficiaries. Just making something more convenient to study though doesn't necessarily make the overall scientific community better I think, as it will just provide more resources to easier topics to research, not necessarily more important topics.

In this case though, I think animal cognition is important to study. In a Cohumane sense, it can provide clarity on issues like the ethical use of animals for food sources, experimental subjects, and issues regarding the destruction of the natural environment and extinction of animal and plant life. Is animal suffering even a thing first of all (of course, but does that extend further to insects or plant life?) and if it is a thing, what kinds of considerations are there for our past and present treatment of these life forms as 'resources' akin to minerals we mine out of the ground ( or for that matter, for 'human resources' and our treatment as such?)

I thought that "outside catnip" was an alternate activity so that would be a no to a different question, so that is only 2 nos to "food play". The human also seems insistent and for some reason I attribute uncomfortableness to the cat, so I see "later" as a "yes but later" compromise on being directed to food play.

One interesting feature of the interaction is that the dog is first going to look for Selina and only confused when Bunny didn't find her. That suggests that their mental model of what's going on around him isn't pretty good.

To the extend that elsewhere inside is relevant I expect it's relevant when the dog isn't at their home and thus doesn't have any access to any buttons to express themselves.

(new account because I couldn't log in again with github)

Good question — difficult at the moment because I only have the one prototype, and I'm still updating it. Though I'm open to show-and-tell and/or short-term loans for readers in San Francisco.

I more meant "keeping around cognitive machinery which is capable of this" without making use of it. Given that wild wolves use (relatively) simple hunting strategies which do not seem to rely on much communication, there doesn't seem to be much need to have a brain capable of communicating relatively abstract thoughts. That doesn't seem to affect your core argument though

Good point about autistic humans who can't learn sign language though, I hadn't considered that. I guess my model of autism was more like:

"Autism affects the brain in lots of different ways which is able to knock out specific abilities (like speech) without knocking out other abilities (like the capability to have and communicate complex thoughts, which would not have evolved in an animal without speech)"

than drawing on some amount of general purpose computing behind each one. I haven't studied autism enough to know if this is correct.

I understand that when a clear interpretaion is not super handy it is tempting to give up on it. However human mother will babble with their babies, they don't deem their children incapable of speech if they don't speak like they do.

Siris tea leaf reading is not partial to dogs.

There is also the mirror effect that because the buttons give them "perfect" vocalization there can be temptation that they mean more stuff with them.

Making a dog pronounce English at a human level seems impossible but that is why the barks and whines. There are regional human accent with humans with native languages have certain dialects in english. These can already hinder comprehension so atleast similar if not greater patience should be extended to "dog english".

If it could be clearly established to which word each dog sound corresponds then the vocals would be as good as buttons. It is proper for a trainer to treat the distinguishable sounds as proper dialogue lines. Part of the buttons is that it makes the human confident that word was meant (human has less chance to think it is a meaningless wiff and has more pressure to treat it as intentional communication)

I did mean that homeschooling would be an adequate substitute but there is a diffrence of keeping your children sensory depirvation chamber in a cellar and giving a competent homeschooling. The expectations on what dogs can do and I tried to get afforded to do is very limited. We don't diagnose people with dyslexia if they have never been introduced to the alphabeth (I guess it has forms that manifest that don't depend on symbols, point is shortcomings need a baseline to stand out). The pets are around language ubt are they actually participating in the language games, is management of things that matter to them done throught language? People do not babble with their dogs and in that they are on uneven ground with babies.

Sure the dog understand some words, better but hr can sometimes hold coversation to the point that he can participate in an argument. Even if doing vocals "ruins" it somehow the burden of what is enough of a demonstration of "getting it" with buttons. That is in a "problem of other minds" kind of level problem of why we don't attribute humans to be "merely" tea leaf reading when we are communicating (and some would probably argue that we actually communicate much less than we think we do).

This is partly why the difference between Sherpa and K'eyush is interesting. Sherpa actually really on board with the content but to an untrained ear it seems very similar.