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Meanwhile humans, when put thru the same experiment, realize they can make the human in the unpleasant box pay $ if it wants out. They then learn to create more boxes for more profit.
Meanwhile, humans are stuffing other animals into cages to see what happens.
and then murdering them. good point.
ironic that experiment on empathy done by scientists doing mouse experiments.
This comes to my mind:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JFCgz959ARYI dont believe this is inherent. It’s not human nature. Its social conditioning as a result of living in a capitalist society.
In a capitalist society, yes. Absolutely a lot of people would do this. But even then, its not everyone.
I live in capitalism but i would certainly not force someone to pay me to let them out of a trap. Especially if they were suffering. And i would never befriend someone that would.
I would think they were a cunt.
you must suck at capitalism then and would literally never be able to chair a publicly traded company maximizing profits, no matter the cost, for shareholders then. (i say lovingly)
I really dont mind sucking at capitalism.
That’s like saying “you suck at giving people cancer” or saying “you are terrible at being a complete dildo”
Yeah. I am fine with that.
If I’m ever told that I belong on a board of directors at a company, I’m going to Luigi myself. I would have deserved it
And i would never befriend someone that would.
My problem here: many of us are friends with one of the other person that thinks investing money in the stock market is a good idea and taxes for the rich is bad. Those people are already forcing others to pay to get out of a trap, they just have a few middle men.
I mean, we still live in this mess, so investing your money in the stock market is in fact a good idea. We should obviously tax the rich.
No, investing in stocks is a mix of lottery (fair but zero sum) and theft by exploitation of workers, resources & environment.
No, the entire system is built on exploitation of workers. As a worker in the system, I’m talking about how to scrape a life out the best you can.
It’s objectively better to put your money that you want you save and possibly grow in an index fund, if you live in the us.
It is impossible for money to create added value. Inflation adjusted gains in investments are entirely made up by losses of other people and/or wage theft. The oligarchies around the world have lobbied their way into politically mandated investment funds for private pension insurance, thereby ensuring us workers as accomplices in this scam, while they hope we don’t notice that for the breadcrumbs we may earn, we protect their interests - e.g. opposing capital gains taxes.
Investments are theft. And stock traders / investment bankers are thieves who steal from the poor and give to the rich, taking a good margin for themselves. Parasites to mankind.
That’s just not logical man, because first of all it’s the entire basis of the banking system. Money creates money, and your investment in the stock market is essentially similar to a loan offered by a bank. The money you spent buying the stock allows the company to invest more in the business, and you get increased stock value for your trouble.
Maybe you want to be more specific about what you mean by “value”, but it was valuable for me to be able to buy a house without having to pay for it all up front, for example.
You even acknowledge that we workers are forced to be accomplices in this scam, chasing our breadcrumbs. Why would you denigrate those who participate in the system because we have literally no other choice? What is your point? Should I boycott the stock market in the hopes that some oligarch notices?
That sounds eerily similar to a situation in Secret of NIMH (the book, not the movie), when the rats
Tap for spoiler
being taught how to read discover how to open their cages at night and decide to free the caged mice next to them out of empathy, who then aid in their escape.
Don’t think there has ever been much dispute of a rat’s intellect
They’re known to be the only animal on the planet more intelligent than dolphins. IIRC only two of them survived though, while the dolphins all left in time.
That’s mice, you fool!
I don’t think this was about the intellect either, just about empathy. Sure, the free rat could learn to open it quicker, but the point is that it did. It didn’t eventually figure “eh, nothing in it for me”, it repeatedly went and freed the other to the point of routine.
I wonder about this in animals all the time. Like, many animals seem to really enjoy being loved on and getting scritches, have a relationship with their owner or caregiver, are happy to see them and snuggle up… but in the wild they might be mostly solitary, only interacting with their own kind for mating and maybe raising young. Yet they’re often very different from the (eat sleep reproduce survive) basic wild animal when given the opportunity. They have personalities, happiness, etc.
Rats, in specific, do what those studying them have described as laugh when being petted/tickled. It’s ultrasonic, so we can’t hear it, but other rats can hear it when a rat is enjoying themselves.
https://www.science.org/content/article/tickled-rats-reveal-brain-structure-controls-laughter
I’ll take the risk of sounding like Willard here, but rats make delightfully playful and affectionate pets.
It sounds counter intuitive but once your rats(need to have at least two) bond to you they treat you like a giant one of them. They’ll groom you for hours, and you can play chase with them with your hands like you would with a kitten(without the scratches!) They’re like a cat and dog together in a much smaller animal. One of mine played fetch.
I just wish they lived longer and weren’t so prone to cancer. Maybe one day science can fix that.
Only 4 or 5 years, right? I don’t think I could handle loving a pet who’s lifespan was that short. But I do know people who have pet rats and they really love them. Doesn’t really surprise me, guinea pigs are similar. And you need to have at least two of them as well.
Yeah, unfortunately they don’t live very long. I actually don’t keep them anymore because it felt like I was setting myself up for heartbreak after awhile.
I’m happy for the experience though! And that doesn’t surprise me about guinea pigs. A lot if people underestimate the intelligence and needs of small pets.
Some dog breeds are trending that way, especially large breeds, anecdotally I know of a bunch of Bernese Mountain Dogs that were 4-5 years due to cancer (which isn’t uncommon), 7-8 is the normal expectancy for them afaik.
I’ve got two brothers we got as kittens, they’re 4 next year, we bond really strongly with animals.
I would never get a purebred dog and that is yet another reason. I have had two mutts live to 14 and another one is 10 now.
Get a mutt and rescue them from a shelter or rescuer. I have not regretted it even if they are little shits. Even the big ones are little shits.
Absolutely agree on that, our cats are rescues and we’d do the same for any dog.
had a Shepard/retriever mutt growing up, by far the longest lived dog I had, her brother was the longest lived of the litter (and the neighbour’s) at like 16. Have family that show for fun, only do it if the dogs enjoy it, I don’t like the way some people talk about their dogs, definitely not a fan of breeding practices in general.
It’s called domestication. In the Soviet Union a scientist domesticated foxes by selecting for “niceness”. It only took a couple of generations for the typical domestication signs to appear: longer childhood, friendlier face, smartness etc
They’re talking about fully wild animals. Grab a baby squirrel, and it will enjoy human company in no time. Same with raccoons, ravens, mountain lions, etc.
You’d be hard pressed to find an animal that doesn’t take to human companionship when given a real chance. And it has nothing to do with breeding.
Let’s domesticate squirrels then! Not sure how we’ll use them, but we can worry about it later.
Foxes are fully wild animals.
ravens
How about no? Domestication of one of smartest species sounds stupid.
Problem is they then go around quothing.
Yes? But the person I was replying to was talking about a study where an individual was essentially rapidly domesticating them.
You’d be surprised.
A lot if it is selection bias. Humans prefer animals that show those traits. We instinctively understand how they are thinking/feeling, and that makes us more comfortable with it.
It’s also worth noting that complex mental pathways take a long time to evolve. Nature tends to play with there tuning, rather than strip it out when unnecessary. Most solitary creatures had ancestors that formed groups. There’s no reason to risk breaking useful instincts. They just get overriden by newer ones.
I think we shouldn’t underestimate human empathy. The problem is just that we build structures to avoid it. Rich people choose to not see poor people too much or they would feel empathy and be inclined to help them. If the poor are far away, merely an abstraction that is said to exist, then their existence is not felt strongly enough to trigger an empathy response. Surely there are exceptions to some degree, but I think humans are very empathetic and that’s one of our great powers.
We have places like San Fransisco and New York, with some of the richest people in the whole world regularly walking past homeless encampments. I don’t think the structure is the problem. I think it has much more to do with the culture and family they are raised in.
We live in a society that rewards narcissism. Our society tells these rich people that homeless people are only homeless because of bad personal choices.
There is no reward for empathy, besides the positive feeling a healthy person would get from being kind. In fact, being empathetic can be a detriment to being successful, so many upper class families skip that lesson plan on purpose.
Yes I think you’re right. Culture and upbringing are very important factors. What remains is that the potential of human empathy is incredible. I don’t think empathy needs a reward per se, I think the positive feeling you describe is enough reward, again it’s not to be underestimated. I am personally volunteering one day per week at my local homeless shelter, while I work a paid job 4 days per week at a mental hospital as a nurse. I don’t want to be paid for the homeless shelter, I am fine with doing it voluntarily, I specifically wanted to do something voluntarily just to proof to myself that I don’t maximize my income, to be sure I don’t play the money game. But your point about how it is not only unrewarding financially but the reverse: it can even be a detriment to success, that’s very true. Before my nursing school I got a degree in marketing & management (which made me incredibly unhappy). I’m very glad I chose to go do something else, because I feel like my contribution to society is far bigger now than it ever could have been as a marketeer. Despite that I would’ve made a lot more money as a marketeer. Free market capitalism is amoral when it comes what to contributing to
societythe market, if your job is to sell addicting products to people, that destroy their lives, but it makes you a decent profit, then you’ll be rewarded for it. Far more so than most essential workers would ever earn. That combined with money not being just money (power), but also status: we celebrate wealth. Wealthy equals good. We don’t look at how one earned his wealth, we just look at the wealth and are in awe. Obviously we are giving people the wrong incentives.
If a rat has a better developed sense of empathy than you do, then you’ve probably made some seriously awful life choices somewhere along the line.
… which isn’t news to me.
For a time it seemed that everybody wanted to shit on animals as being way inferior to humans in every way, including lacking empathy emotion feelings and stuff.
But that was always wrong. Who has ever worked with animals be it horses dogs or farm animals knows they have a soul. Well, but also a lot of them are just evil bastards.
Capitalism wants us to believe that it’s the only stable solution, because it comes close to the natural order, and that in nature there is only selfish behaviour, eat or get eaten, homo homini lupus and so on. The truth is, this supposed natural state is completely made up and animals and human beings naturally behave much more selflessly than what is expected from us under capitalism.
Thing is, even the phrase homo homini lupus predates capitalism significantly, and the sentiment dates back to before even the phrase. ‘Naturally behave’ is a very questionable phrase.
We have the ability to be better and build better societies than we currently have under capitalism. I just don’t think an appeal to a state of nature is useful or accurate.
People didn’t wait for formal capitalism to be assholes.
i did
I think there is definitely a line from early modern natural state theory to today’s justification of capitalism, although the argument has somehow reversed itself.
Actual natural behaviour is not even important, since we abandoned that some time ago, and it probably isn’t desirable to go back. Its just easier to sell an ideology when you disguise it as natural order.
I’d say it’s more of an easy to make justification than a real argument. History is incredibly long and full of varied situations in which creatures have survived in many different ways, so it can be mined for examples to support almost anything and claim it to be “natural”.
You don’t see them fuckng each other over for a goddamn percentage!
Rats. Can’t use the term as an insult anymore considering they’re more human than we are.
Seems that’s an insult to the rat.
Ok, but let’s say they is a toy train and it splits into two tracks and put the rat at the lever.
now make the rats comprehend fascism.
Would be an interesting study if that was possible.
Another run of this experiment found rats free those with the same fur color faster or more readily
huh, that’s definitely an interesting paper to write.
I like the one where they gave rats a lot of food and space (rat paradise) and let them breed till they were crawling over eachother till there wasnt enough food for them all. When most of them died and food was available once more, the remainders stopped eating and all the rats died.
Rats are interesting but I think the guy that programmed them left in some bugs.
rats are strange little critters. incredibly clever, but you’ll never know what they’ll use their smarts for
Even the creator of that experiment said it was deeply flawed, and that their colony broke down because there was literally nothing to enrich their lives in the habitat. They were essentially going crazy from boredom.
He then went on to design rat experiments that were designed to actually facilitate a fulfilling and engaging life for the rats, and they thrived, from what I recall.
Yeah idk if I just watched most of my friends and family drop dead from starvation, I don’t think I’d want to go on living either.
Is this going to be a model for the history of mankind?
Couldn’t this be explained by the “tit-for-tat” hypothesis? That selfless behaviour is learned in communal animals, and that its implied it will be you who need help next time?
There is a bat species that I think feeds on blood, and they share the food they managed to get in a night, if a bat refuses to share one night then the next time they get left out of the sharing.
I’m always mildly concerned about how shocked people are about animals being conscious beings with feelings. Do people really think we are mentally that different from other animals with brains?
Yes, they do. And Christian types often believe that we have “souls” and animals do not.
I’m more concerned that people believe it’s rare, in both humans and the animal kingdom
Predators will share territory if there’s enough to go around, even forming close relationships across species, sometimes even raising their young together
Empathy is the natural state, unless there’s enough scarcity. Humans are naturally generous, unless we’re raised in an environment of eternal artificial scarcity…
Predators will share territory if there’s enough to go around, even forming close relationships across species, sometimes even raising their young together
Some predators(and scavengers) have special move “Recruit!”, which allows them to invite members of another guild(species) into their party.
All those rich bastards that are not generous at all must have been raised in a lot of artificial scarcity then. Really artificial since most of them grew up well to do as well.
Unironically, yes. Daddy’s approval, respect from their peers, relationships based on you and not your money, even basic self respect- they’re raised chasing money to fill the hole, to see it as the value of a person, of themselves
The ones that aren’t cursed with this artificial scarcity? They quietly live their lives however they like, they’re not trying to nickel and dime their way for more. You don’t hear about them much, because why would a mentally healthy person put themselves through that for no reward? Any of them could buy a nice house (or a dozen), pretend to be upper middle class, and live whatever kind of life they want. They could live out of 5 Star hotels and be waited on hand and foot. They could buy their way into fame as an actor or a musician
It always strikes me as absurd - we’re destroying the planet, and none of us are happy - not even the billionaires benefiting from it. Their family lives are a mess, they’re hated (or idolized for things they’re not), and especially now, they probably live in fear of being targeted walking down the street
They spend all their damn lives not even fully comprehending they’re not living in scarcity, because the only resources they’ve ever been taught to focus on are those which are inherently scarce - competing for attention, fame, social status, etc.
Yes, they really do.
Yes
To be fair, with academic types running experiments like this, the question is usually more along the lines of “At what point does instinct become empathy as we would recognize it?”, and depending on how high the criteria is set for empathy there, the level of premeditation may be geniunely surprising in some animals.
