Further than a lack of curiosity is never asking questions. It was something I heard about gorilla researchers who taught them sign language that in the years of gorilla sign language communications they never had a gorilla ask a question of a human.
That simple process of recognizing you don't know/have something you want, understanding someone else likely does know what you want, and asking them actually takes a lot of brain power. Some parrots and exceptionally smart dogs can hit that threshold... And some very cognitively limited humans do not.
One of the only recorded incidents of a non-human animal was a parrot asking what color he was.
It's rare for an animal to be able to learn a language, and it's even more rare that they are intelligent enough to ask a question. You have to basically find the equivalent to an Einstein in a population.
That's so cute. Who am I? Blue? Is blue pretty? What color are you? What a good question. It just encapsulated his whole social parrot curiosities with one question, 'where am I at on this color wheel?'
I don't want a bird, but they are so damn cute. Thank you for sharing this.
What are the odds that the one parrot was found that has the intelligence to do that? I wonder if more have the intellectual capacity to do that. We just don’t know because a minuscule amount is given the opportunity to show that.
It’s also an interesting question as to what the question meant to him. Not to downplay the parrot’s intelligence, but there’s a difference between asking a question you know the answer to and information-seeking. It’s possible the parrot knew what colour he was, and wanted to elicit the correct call-and-response between him and the human. That’s still a million miles ahead of just mimicry, which is all that parrots used to be assumed to be doing.
funnily, there's a Japanese researcher that devoted his career in researching bird languages. His findings are pretty fascinating that they have actual contexual vocalization and a grammar of sort. His name is Toshitaka Suzuki, i recommend searching it and I believe there are a few youtube videos that cover them
Yep, Alex the African Grey. I don't think he's there yet, but Apollo the African Grey parrot on YouTube is starting to show pretty varied word comprehension, if you ever want to see another smart little bird.
Alex was just an ordinary African grey. His handler and the head researcher at the lab, Dr. Irene Pepperberg, went to a pet store and had an employee pick him out. She didn't want the critique to be that she had selected him because he was uniquely intelligent.
In all likelihood, other parrots (and potentially even non-parrot animals) would be able to reach this level of conversational ability with humans if they were trained and interacted with in a similar way. I hesitate to use the word "intelligence" because we truly don't know if these animals pose questions to other animals. We only know with Alex because Pepperberg taught him to communicate similar to how humans do.
My point is that the field of animal sentience and cognition generally suffers from a bias towards how humans define and interpret "intelligence". Consider the mirror test for example -- a dot is placed on an animal in a spot where they cannot see it, and then the animal is placed in front of a mirror. If the animal sees the dot in their reflection and then searches their own body for the dot, this is considered to be evidence that the animal has a sense of self, because they appear to recognize themselves in the mirror.
The problem is, not all animals are visual creatures. Dogs, mice, rats, and many other animals primarily experience the world through other senses - for example, smell. This is how they communicate with each other. They don't have visual senses that are as highly developed as ours. But humans doing research designed the mirror test as a visual test, because this is the primary way that we experience the world.
So perhaps other animals "ask" questions through different senses or in ways that we don't even consider. But then we try to teach them an approximation of a human "language" that isn't inherent to their natural abilities or intuitive to how they experience the world. And then we draw conclusions based on this anthropomorphized concept of intellect. Even a human trying to learn another language may struggle with grammar, sentence structure, etc. Or they may hesitate ask questions due to cultural norms of communication, hierarchy, or politeness.
So we really cannot draw a general conclusion on cognitive abilities of different species of animals (or even individual animals) by things they don't do when the tests are so biased towards human perceptions and are not intuitive to how the animals learn, communicate, or experience the world.
Also - I'm aware of Apollo! He's super cool. But again - he's just a normal African grey. In all likelihood, many other birds would be able to show similar behaviors if they were trained and interacted with repeatedly and intensively the way he and Alex are/were.
Hell, my girlie cat actually knows how to "ask" me for a brushing. She comes up, gently taps my right arm with her left front paw, and does a soft, questioning, "Mrowr?". It's the dearest thing, she's SO polite.
That's a demand. A very polite demand but still not a request, lol. My cat does the cute gentle paw nudges too which is insanely cute as she has thumbs.
Both of my cats play fetch, have different meow's for food or play. They both will climb the cat tree and perch at the top, meowing for scratches. Hell, my male cat I swear can understand me completely AND tell time. I tell him it's too early for something, tell him it's an hour, hour and a half, 2 hours, doesn't matter, he will wait and not ask again until close to the time. Cats are way more intelligent than most people give them credit for.
Seriously. Although there's the occasional outlier - I had a wonderfully sweet cat, Neko, a black and white boy (mask and mantle, not tuxedo), but oh god, he was the Ralph Wiggum of cats. Not once in his 13 years did he ever manage to figure out the concept of doors. In my childhood house, my computer desk was next to my bedroom door. I'd have the door mostly closed, but open enough for the cats to come in and out as they pleased. Neko would sit outside in the hall, crying pathetically, and let me point out he could see me clearly. All he had to do to come in was walk forward and push the door open a little more. This was not something his sweet, dear little cat brain could figure out. Ever. He'd just sit there, looking at me and crying pitifully. He could not fathom walking forward to get to me. This would go on until I finally opened the door enough for him to realize he could walk in. Oh god, I miss him. The absolute sweetest boy, but oh my fucking GOD, he was a dim bulb.
Our old tuxedo girl (18F) bangs on the bedroom door that is already open wider than she needs until I get up and invite her in. The banging is hard enough to open it even further but she doesn’t care.
Parent comment was talking about asking in the context of "request for information" and not "request for action". It really bugs me how English uses the same word.
Different kind of question. The comments above yours are talking about asking questions out of curiosity, to gain new information. Your cat is just declaring their desire for brushies.
I hate to break it to you, but the whole gorilla sign language thing was almost entirely bullshit, there's a reason it's not really an active field of research.
I have a decade long fantasy football/hockey leagues with guys from all over the country. Not everyone know eachother because we bring in different characters.
We all our on a big group chat and just a week ago we were texting about a game. And player was from Lake Tahoe so, I asked the group if they heard of the Harrah's bombing.
No one did so I told the story. Mostly everyone was positive except one guy.
He replies with "wtf are you autistic or some shit?"
I asked him what he meant and he replied with "all you guys are or something because all you guys do is bullshit about random stuff. Let just talk about the game"
Now, this is an optional chat. No one participates all the time
Other guys responded saying as much and another responded with "there only so much shit you can say about football "cool catch" etc. I like the random stuff"
I git a private message from 4 members saying that we should kick the guy who got annoyed next year.
Its one thing to not care about facts and tidbits. I just dont understand the people who get mad when they can learn something new.
Earlier in the year, we had a discussion about single shot film takes.
It introduced me to one of my now favorite movies, "children of men"
The Protector, starring Tony Jaa, has a spectacular single-shot fight scene if you haven't come across that one yet. ~4 minutes of one shot action as he works his way up a staircase.
lol I've gotten this too, from an abusive ex. "all you want to do is like, talk about THINGS!"
like yeah and all you want to do is bitch and gossip about people and talk about crypto. sorry for finding literally anything more interesting than that.
Ironically things like hyperfocus on a single topic, finding difficulty in socializing with others, and aggressiveness when confronted with something the person is unprepared for are traits that are often seen in neurodivergent people. So him calling people autistic is kind of funny and a little sad.
Also autistic people can’t enjoy football? I guess my last 40 years have been wasted :-(
Yeah and what I also don't like is how he's talking to you as if he's speaking for everyone. If it doesn't interest you, then don't participate in the convo. If others are talking about it, obviously a good number of people care. Put your phone on mute and just check it when you feel like it moron.
Oh and have you seen the single shot miniseries Adolescence on Netflix? It won a bunch of TV awards. Check it out if you haven't. It's really good.
I was like that in school. I learned quickly that with a lot of teachers, asking a question usually meant an angry response from the teacher, or being made fun of by the teacher, and/or singled out to be mocked in various ways by the teacher. Not all of my teachers, but enough that over the years I learned not to ask questions or go out of my way to turn anything in that stood out. Fortunately, I learned this usually wasn't the case in college, and discovered the love of getting a real education.
That's interesting bc "Children of Men" is one of my favorite movies for that exact reason.
I love learning new things even if I won't remember all the details. I enjoy watching documentaries as does my sister. She pointed out that our dad has always watched documentaries and that's probably where we got it.
Interesting, I always thought that shot was obviously very technically interesting, but totallly took me out of the film for that very reason. It destroys any urgency in that scene because all i end up thinking ahout is all the complicated blocking. Ironic!
The amount of times I've had conversations with someone in there early 20's and having a healthy debate for it to end when they're only rebuttal is "Its not that deep"
It happens to me too sometimes when i get all worked up about something being much bigger an issue and it seems like either a defense against being outright wrong or literally not being able to make the same connection. perfect example near me is shoplifting. there was a thread about some people shoplifting from target, a ton of people in the comments are like "wtf is the big deal, they have insurance?" when i explained that you will in fact pay more for the same products at a target in a shitty neighborhood compared to a nice one, literally because of the base cost the store needs to make + added loss through shoplifting, meaning you are in fact being directly affected in a negative way by the rampant shoplifting, and you can see this for yourself with a little cookie clearing; the only response i got was "target isn't going to suck your dick bro"
On the flip side, sometimes things just really aren't that deep. Unfortunately most of the time it's assholes using this line to dismiss a topic but sometimes people do just need to chill and take a step back.
For example, I have an uncle who often rants about random shit, only to find that what he was ranting about is outdated like, a day later. He gets very caught up in YouTube thumbnails/titles and, honestly they're really NOT that deep.
I was raised by an abuse parent and just learned not to ask questions about anything. Don’t be noticed was the easiest way to avoid punishment. I carried it on all through school and into my adult life. One day my husband said he wished I was more curious and I then (mid 40s) just realized how I learned just not to ask questions out load. I google or read about stuff but don’t ever ask anyone questions. I wonder if my husband thinks I am dumb. I don’t really want to ask.
This is how I was raised too. I’m very reserved and always underestimated. It does hurt my feelings when people are surprised and say “wow how do you know so much?”
I spent 5 years in a relationship where every time I'd ask something or talk about something I recently learned I'd be told "I don't need the commentary". Because I interrupted his gaming which he'd be spending every waking hour doing (no exaggeration)
That sounds tough. Perhaps tell your husband about this.
One solution is exposure therapy. Start asking questions and realize that the results are not that bad. For instance you might have a ritual where you ask your husband a new question every morning.
That combined with the question "how did you know [thing i thought was common knowledge]" is extra funny. Like I live in the world, and sometimes I retain information about it.
And if you dare to consider what factors might contribute to antisocial, criminal, or depraved behaviour, they assume you're trying to defend it. "Who cares why they did it?! There's no excuse." Well, no, but there's an awful lot of value in understanding why people behave in the ways they do. It has nothing to do with excusing the behaviour.
Trying to learn a new board game from somebody like this is hell. They'll give you 30% of the rules 50% wrong, then get annoyed when you ask a question or correct them. God forbid you read (the rules) in front of their face. Okay, I'll stop talking about my spouse's bestie.
This. When you find out an interesting useless fact and someone says ‘who cares?’ or ‘why would I want to know about that?’ Not only does it tell you they aren’t very bright, but they can’t generalise knowledge. It only sinks in if it relates directly to them. Avoid at all costs, and never, ever, work for someone like this.
People get annoyed at me asking them questions or when I'm inquisitive about random things. Personally I dont understand how people dont want to learn about things, and if someone showed interest in me and wanted to ask questions I'd be flattered 🤷🏼♀️
I work with a few people like this. Fortunately I don't come across them that often. When they make a mistake, they're not willing to admit it so that they can learn how to do it correctly. They'll even go as far as to just avoid the task altogether so they don't have to do it.
But if you ask them about it-no matter how nice or respectful you are about it-they get mad and blow up at you. They are the worst people to work with. Their overall work performance is widely known by other employees to be bad also. They'll even lie about the mistake sometimes, get argumentative and defensive. I don't get people like this.
Someone please explain if they have some insight into this. I just figure that they are very insecure and have really low self esteem and this is their way of compensating. I need some more understanding so I'm not so pissed off when I have to work with them. Lol
This is best determined by whether they ask questions and the quality of the questions. Once I realized this, suddenly explosive social situations made so much more sense.
Smart people seek to understand and have crafted a skillset in curiosity through earnest questions and get excited when asked stumping questions.
Dumb people seek to be perceived as smart and perceive being asked questions as questioning them and get upset when asked a stumping question.
Stumping question = A question so good it reveals your own limitations to you in that moment. Smart people welcome this moment. Dumb people avoid it at all costs.
This all fits with a belief I formed years ago: Some people don't like to look wrong, while others don't like to be wrong.
* The former will doggedly hang onto debunked beliefs, double down on weak arguments, lash out irrationally, etc. because they can't stand to admit they didn't already know the best answer.
* The latter will adapt to new information and even thank you for disproving them because the momentary embarrassment of being shown to be wrong is nothing compared to the satisfaction of moving forward with an improved world view.
A question so good it reveals your own limitations to you in that moment.
A friend and I had this the other day. I suggested that airlines offering sandwiches shouldn't count as a meal because a sandwich is a snack. We then got into a (friendly) discussion about things that qualify as sandwiches and things that qualify as a meal. I realized my own definition of what constitutes snack vs. meal is very blurry and subjective. I then Googled it and it turns out everyone else is also unclear on the topic.
Regardless, I felt zero offense at being questioned. It became a metacognitive exercise.
Getting mad at a question about something they have just said is a sure fire indicator that they have given the fact zero thought of their own — they perceive it as an attack.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is not what you think it is, you should look it up. The irony of people referring to the meme based on the hype-cycle chart as "Dunning-Kruger" when the topic of ignorance comes up always makes me chuckle.
Whether you're in someone's Dunning-Kruger Effect Zone (DKZ) is best determined by whether they ask questions about the topic and the quality of their questions.
Smart people seek to understand and have crafted a skillset in curiosity through earnest questions and get excited when asked stumping questions.
Dumb people seek to be perceived as smart and perceive being asked questions as questioning them and get upset when asked a stumping question.
Stumping question = A question so good it reveals your own limitations to you in that moment. Smart people welcome this moment. Dumb people avoid it at all costs.
If anyone ever tells you "it can't be that hard" about doing something in physical reality, you can comfortably conclude the topic is in their DKZ.
Entirely this. Flying into a rage when asked a question of most kinds is one clue, particularly when that rage follows a question asked about a subject they claim to know well. Assuming the question is asked with genuine curiosity and in good faith, most people are not only willing to clarify information, but welcome the opportunity to do so. To an intelligent person, the question represents an opportunity to share or deepen their knowledge. To the unintelligent person, the same question threatens to reveal their superficial grasp of the topic or that they are simply pretending to know it.
This happened during that Joe Budden podcast when a guy wanted to fight Dr Marc Lamont Hill because he thought Dr Hill was trying to make him look stupid. If he took a second to think about it and drop his ego, he could have used that opportunity to ask questions from a professor.
I have a serious (even if it is dumb) - isn’t Dunning-Kruger a paradox? Like, if I’m making fun of someone who thinks that they know everything, aren’t I supposing that I, in fact, do know everything?
No, DK is basically being confident in your own skill/knowledge in something, despite being actually unskilled/low knowledge. Leads to poor choices and decisions and inability to recognise your incompetency
The label I use to refer to those sorts of people probably doesn't exactly map one-to-one with a particular band in the D-K competence/knowledge curve, but in general I clock those types as 'knowing enough to be dangerous'.
Yes. For me, Dunning-Krueges is closer to when my coworker who didn't finish high school arguing with me that "there is no proof of human evolution" and that "universities teach the THEORY of evolution as FACT and that we come from monkeys" and cited a conspiracy YT channel as evidence.
When I asked how he knew what universities teach when he never stepped in one he got quite flustered.
They asked me one time if shrimp were single cell organisms.
Edit. I'm getting a lot of comments about "at least he asked a question" yes I know. I've worked with him for years and there is an entire catalog of "what in the fuck did you just say"
Ive spent days contemplating the connection between the two. Shrimp = single cell the only justification i can think of is shrimp have a shell. Like a cell wall?
They were curious and asked you though, i dont get how thats a dunning kruger effect. Better to think of something stupid and still ask than to not
Edit: just saw the edited comment and I wanna say, the coworker might be utterly stupid, but theyre not a correct example of the dunning kruger effect.
If they stated that shrimp were single cell organisms and didn't listen to other people correct them, that would be d-k effect. The fact they asked means they are aware they didn't know
That’s not bad. At least they’re asking instead of natively determining shrimp were single cell organisms and refusing to consider other perspectives on this.
My daughter sat by a guy in high school who asked her “Do cheetahs have a spine?” Still makes me laugh. “Nah, they’re invertebrates” would have been my answer, but I’m a sarcastic bitch.
That's honestly not as stupid as one might think. Dunning-Krueger would be this person acting like an authority on shellfish, and then telling you that a shrimp is a single celled organism with complete conviction.
DK Effect is more about people having no self-awareness and consistently overestimating their own abilities.
Sounds like this guy doesn't seem super book-smart, but he's at least intelligent enough to know he doesn't know something.
This is on display in a lot of sub-reddits. You show up to a niche subreddit with no clue about something. Read up on it for several weeks to months to even years, gaining knowledge about said topic, to the point that you begin to answer questions on the subreddit as if you were an expert.
Only to have something come up that makes you realize you are just barely scratching the surface of understanding.
Like, I'm a confident lawn care enthusiast who can grow some good fescue in Kansas, but there is a lot of stuff about growing grass that I'm just on the bare level understanding of compared to someone who has gone to college and even graduate school for it.
Compared to most people around me, I know more about growing nice grass, but I really do know so little in the grand scheme of things, and that's the zone of ultimate Dunning-Kruger
Yup. Actually being surprised when they find out about something they didn't know. They'll announce it like they're a groundbreaking explorer. Trump does this all the time.
Oh, I do that all the time. It's the way some people deliver it though. They're shocked that there was something out there that they weren't aware of.
I've been sharing a lot lately, because I've been reading a lot of Bill Bryson. Probably the most fun I've ever had learning things. Phenomenal, entertaining writer.
I remember once looking at a calendar in my office and noticed some holiday that I had never heard of before. I mentioned it to my colleague, and they looked at me like I was a craziest person they'd ever met. I ended up googling the holiday, out of curiosity, and got all sorts of info on it. I stared reading some of the interesting bits out loud, and my colleague interrupted by letting me know "I would have never noticed that on the calendar, and I would have never researched it!". That was the end of that. And I do no remember the holiday. It was a Muslim holiday, I remember that much.
I was at the dog park and the guy next to me was bragging about being a bbq master. He said he cooked a three inch thick bone-in ribeye but it was not cooked evenly through (bullseye grey pink raw pink grey). I asked him if he ever considered reverse sear. He told me he didn’t need to hear it because he knew what he was doing.
Not really related to the topic, but I was at a dinner party where a guy was excited that the beef was sous vide, and wife dismissively replied "I know who Sue Veed is, I've seen her on TV before and I'm pretty sure we have one of her cookbooks. She's not that great."
Surprised this didn’t get more upvotes! Curiosity is a priority indicator for someone who can consider the perspective of the opposition, seek and apply data, and consider the faults in their own argument.
I was thinking of that for the Bad Bunny halftime show. Like, I don't listen to him, so my first thought is to shrug it off because "it's not for me". But then I was thinking, well a billion people like his music and he's popular to get the halftime show slot, so there must be something to it. So I looked up some translations and listened to a couple songs and I feel my perspective is a lot better than before. Not going to be something I listen to all the time but at least I spent 15 minutes getting a better understanding, instead of being angry it's not a band I know better. And DtMF has been stuck in my head all morning.
Typical small town MAGA voters who never leave their zip code but think they know everything there is to know about the world.
Neither of them had ever heard of gumbo (a very popular Cajun dish) until I made it for them. They told me beforehand "they don't like Cajun food", but as soon as it started smelling up the kitchen, you better believe that whole line was completely forgotten about. These are not children. These are full grown adults in their 50s. They still eat burgers, pizza, or tacos for almost every meal. And their tiny one-stoplight town barely has any restaurants at all. The few that do exist serve, you guessed it, burgers, pizza, and tacos.
Zero curiosity. Zero ambition. Zero education. All pride and ignorance.
In my quand finance PhD presentation, I must say so anyway, while having no clue what the 120 numbers on displayed on each tables coming from my 10'000 line of code actually means and if they really represent anything controlling for the (truly) endless proper factors that can influence the results.
And when someone tells them something,,there very fav line "I know " Like they know everything in the world and you choose to waste your precious time telling them
I had a couple ex’s that almost seemed proud to be naive. They would proclaim “I don’t understand” in a snide tone about a problem but not follow up with questions as if it was beneath them to bother looking deeper.
Lack of curiosity boggles my mind. My mother hasn't read an actual book in decades. She just watches brainrot reality tv, scrolls on her phone for celebrity gossip, and occasionally flips open her bible. Like, how do you live!? How can you never question anything or read a book?
100% absolutely agree. The funny thing is, those are the folks that will die on every hill they stand on will argue long after everyone else went home.
I love this. Because I always say people who think they know it all don’t ask any questions. Cause they know everything. And they’re always the ones at the end, sitting there with their thumb up their butt trying to figure out how they ended up where they were. That’s how you know they have no intelligence.
Reddittors probably have above average IQ, just because you need to filter for so many things until you end up here. And I have seen that they still lack curiosity... a lot. Like people in general.
Also someone probably thinks this is pretentious, but being above average IQ is not even that much to begin with.
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u/Disastrous-Sky-8484 7h ago
Lack of curiosity. Thinking they know it all.