[ExI] Blueskins

[William Flynn Wallace]

I scorned much of what I learned in grad school.  My profs were hard line
radical behaviorists and mind and emotion and such were never mentioned.
Lots about rats, though.  I was tickled to death to read later that
experiments with wild rats, trying to replicate studies with white lab
rats, showed that there were large differences in the two sets of data.  If
you cannot generalize between two types of rats, what good is that data for
people?  For rats, OK, but we are not in the biology business.

Facts on which I base my mule argument:  horses can be whipped into running
or working themselves to death.  Mules, no.  When a mule is tired, it will
just stand there and let itself be whipped until it is not longer in danger
from overwork.  Donkey's, burros, ditto.

Back to rats:  I have wondered if, instead of using chimpanzees, who are as
we all know our closest genetic relatives, we used bonobos, an ape with a
very different personality.  No, I have not Googled that.

>From pigs' point of view humans are a terrible idea.  Pigs supply more meat
to us than any other animal.  Now what if an intelligent alien species were
to invade and take over. Of what use would humans be?  Perhaps food (as in
the Man-Kzin series by Larry Niven and others).

 bill w

On Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 11:55 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> > *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Blueskins
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> Actually, I am a big fan of hogs.  In my grad physiology class my lab
> partner and I took out a pig's brain.  It is a marvel of convolutions.  If
> you took a picture and did not get any perspective, you would assume it was
> human.  Why Mother Nature chose to give pigs such a big brain is probably
> not known, but they are said to be smarter than dogs and only a bit less
> than monkeys.  How we know this is a problem, since they resist learning
> anything we try to teach them.  Stubborn as mules (who are really not
> stubborn at all - ask me if you don't know why).   bill w
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> I already know why mules are not really stubborn.  I have an explanation
> which I will offer but I want to hear yours first.
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> I too am a big fan of hogs.  The heavy lifting in red meat has always been
> cows, but hogs can produce meat for about a third of the price.
> Nutritionally pork is nearly equivalent to beef.
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> Measuring the intelligence of a hog is inherently difficult as it is with
> chimps: in both cases they are examples of species which really just don’t
> like humans and they don’t like to play our games.  In the case of chimps I
> kinda understand it: they are revolted by how much we look like deformed
> chimps.  They have a kind of uncanny valley thing going on, vaguely
> wondering perhaps if we are not really chimps, but something went wrong and
> we have these ugly bulbous heads and we managed to breed anyway even though
> it isn’t clear how we could find each other attractive.  Of course all this
> is written from the perspective of a human supremist.
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> spike
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