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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday March 04 2020, @04:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-could-have-told-you-that dept.

New Zealand birds show humanlike ability to make predictions:

Whether it's calculating your risk of catching the new coronavirus or gauging the chance of rain on your upcoming beach vacation, you use a mix of statistical, physical, and social information to make a decision. So do New Zealand parrots known as keas, scientists report today. It's the first time this cognitive ability has been demonstrated outside of apes, and it may have implications for understanding how intelligence evolved.

"It's a neat study," says Karl Berg, an ornithologist and parrot expert at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville, who was not involved with this research.

[...] The findings indicate that keas, like humans, have something known as "domain general intelligence"—the mental ability to integrate several kinds of information, the researchers argue. That's despite the fact that birds and humans last shared a common ancestor some 312 million years ago and have markedly different brain anatomies. Previously, cognitive researchers have argued that domain general intelligence requires language.

Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist and expert on parrot cognition at Harvard University, is skeptical. Pepperberg, who worked with the famed parrot Alex for 31 years, says the kea showed "some intuitive understanding, but not ... real statistical knowledge." In her view, the study could not prove the birds understand in detail how the proportions of tokens in a jar influence the probability of a reward.

If kea really do have the abilities the study suggests, there's a good reason they evolved it, Berg says. Animals with even basic statistical and predictive skills should be able to estimate amounts of food or the availability of mates, and so end up with more offspring and evolutionary success, he says. In other words, if you've mastered Statistics 101, you're likely to succeed in the game of life.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday March 04 2020, @05:32PM (7 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 04 2020, @05:32PM (#966553) Journal

    I wish that in high school, after Algebra, and maybe Geometry and maybe Trig, that INSTEAD of Calculus, they started teaching Statistics.

    That would be useful to many more people in their lives than Calculus.

    If you are going to need Calculus in some field that you will study in college, then you can study it. But most people could use Statistics + other high school math much more than they could use Calculus.

    People would be harder to fool. (Oh noes!) People might be more skeptical to BS claims. (OMG, what are sales and marketing people going to do!)

    I learned from a Dilbert cartoon that when people grow up having no useful knowledge, skills or talent, they go into marketing or management. What would happen if most people were harder to fool and could make better choices for themselves?

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  • (Score: 2) by Booga1 on Wednesday March 04 2020, @05:42PM

    by Booga1 (6333) on Wednesday March 04 2020, @05:42PM (#966561)

    Statistics was my favorite class as a freshman in college. Bar none the most practical and useful single class I have ever taken.
    It is truly a shame that high school didn't touch on statistics beyond simple coin flips and lottery numbers.

  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday March 04 2020, @07:33PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 04 2020, @07:33PM (#966651) Journal

    Not a particularly hot take. AP stats is offered at most schools that offer AP calc. At the same level.

    Here's a hot one though. Formal logic and philosophy before geometry.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:51PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @10:51PM (#966732)

    I agree. I took a year and a half of calculus at my local community college and it's mostly useless. OTOH I sometimes use statistics to help make investment decisions. I can use bollinger bands (a moving average with standard deviations) or a regression line or curve with standard deviations to help determine if an equity is overbought or oversold. I can create custom linear, polynomial, exponential, or logarithmic curves with standard deviation bands in excel. It's far from perfect in terms of its predictive power but it is definitely helpful.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @11:10PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2020, @11:10PM (#966738)

      (Same poster)

      and I also look at the R^2 value to help determine which curve is the best to use (but you have to be careful with this, I can always create a complicated but ridiculous curve/equation that has a good R^2 value).

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Thursday March 05 2020, @01:37AM (1 child)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Thursday March 05 2020, @01:37AM (#966780) Homepage

    You need calculus to understand statistics though. You can't do many basic things with probability distributions without integrals.

    And lets be honest, if you can't pass calculus you won't be able to usefully understand statistics either. I know most people who pass AP Statistics don't actually understand the subtlety behind confidence values and null hypothesis testing.

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    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @10:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @10:37AM (#966910)

      You don't need any calculus to understand statistics, wtf? Learn to code bro, no one does any statistics that matter by hand. All interesting problems are solved with MCMC and friends.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday March 05 2020, @03:42AM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday March 05 2020, @03:42AM (#966825)

    No, teaching kids statistics in high school would be terrible: it would totally destroy the state's lottery system.