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Dolphin markets in everything, Gresham's Law edition
I enjoyed this story:
Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.
Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.
Here is the full article and I thank David Curran for the pointer.
So how would dolphin bimetallism work? I think we know!
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 4, 2009 at 10:32 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
Of course, the Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28315
Posted by: Mike S at Nov 4, 2009 10:53:38 AM
Seems invertebrates are getting in on the worlds oldest profession. Paying for sex can lead to a bad case of the crabs
"Female fiddler crabs mate with their neighbours in exchange for protection."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18103-crabs-trade-sex-for-protection.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
And this is a great time to point out this video of monkey fairness criteria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAFQ5kUHPkY
Posted by: David Curran at Nov 4, 2009 11:44:48 AM
While there is debate concerning paper money and what 'backs' it, I think we need to draw a line somewhere before we begin using seagulls as a form of currency.
Posted by: Rich Carpenter at Nov 4, 2009 1:49:29 PM
Stuff like this is striking evidence of the culture-independence of basic norms relating to social exchange. (I recall similar work with primates demonstrating that they shared certain human intuitions about fairness.)
At the same time, all the highly-evolved earth mammals share a lot of the same neurological hardware. So it's interesting to wonder: how big is the set of workable frameworks for social resource-sharing? Would any community of smart beings settle on a set of behaviors that would be isomorphic to recognizable human behaviors, like trading and promising? Or is it possible that, if we ever observe a culture of intelligent aliens, we'll find that their "economic" intercourse is built on radically-different, maybe unintelligible, behaviors?
Posted by: matth at Nov 4, 2009 2:16:05 PM
I would pay 4 seagulls to read this article.
Posted by: Brian Moore at Nov 4, 2009 2:40:50 PM
On David Curran's link, the monkey video could also be evidence of monkey use of technology (i.e. trying to "use" the chip exchange correctly). Whereas a breach of fairness code may indeed result in a monkey choosing no trade rather than poor terms of trade, what happens in the video is that it persists, as if it were trying to replicate the technology used by its comrade. Or, more simply, as if it knew that grapes were on offer, but the human wasn't working correctly. We know that advanced animals use technology, so that would be less of an assumption that ascribing a code of ethics to capuchin monkeys.
Posted by: Millian at Nov 4, 2009 2:50:04 PM
I'd agree with Millian. It was clear that the human was malfunctioning. The monkey was trying to force the human to work properly (and if it broke, it needed replacing anyway).
If the monkey had been ascribing malicious motives to the human, it would have gotten ugly.
Posted by: Tom West at Nov 4, 2009 3:38:02 PM
That video (and related ones on human vs chimp learning) show a very loose definition of science. They gathered interesting data, indeed. But as been suggested, there are other, equally plausible explanations. I wonder how the monkeys would have reacted if there were a box, as opposed to a human, for instance.
Posted by: Right Wing-nut at Nov 4, 2009 3:59:13 PM
"how big is the set of workable frameworks for social resource-sharing? Would any community of smart beings settle on a set of behaviors that would be isomorphic to recognizable human behaviors, like trading and promising?"
Any sufficiently civilised group of sufficiently intelligent beings is going to come up against the fact that knowledge is distributed among all members of the group, and that no central planning committee can know enough to guide the group. That means their interactions have to involve a large amount of individual autonomy, and therefore involve trade between individuals (or voluntary coalitions of individuals). I would therefore predict that any sufficiently civilised, sufficiently intelligent alien species would have social behaviours that are similar and can be mapped onto human social behaviours.
I think it is extremely unlikely that a species would evolve that could overcome the problem of the division of knowledge. Any such species would need to have a brain that was far more complicated than "necessary"; such complicated brains are likely to get competed away in the process of evolution.
The individuals in this sufficiently intelligent alien species would have to be able to communicate with each other, form coalitions with each other, keep track of their own and other's coalitions. In short they would need to have a psychology that could be mapped onto human psychology. I can't see how any species could overcome the knowledge problem and not have these psychological abilities.
The argument that I've sketch has a pretty astounding conclusion: That any sufficiently civilised sufficiently intelligent alien species would probably have a society that involved things similar to individual freedom, and a market economy, and have a psychology that would at least be recognisable to a human.
Posted by: Robert Scarth at Nov 4, 2009 4:17:51 PM
Give a dolphin a fish, and you make it dependent.
Teach a dolphin to fish, and you make it independent.
This dolphin worked its way off welfare,
But, it probably has a public option healthplan.
Free Willy.
Posted by: Bill at Nov 4, 2009 5:13:49 PM
Robert: what about a eusocial organism where there is only one more-or-less hardwired coalition per group?
It may not be an optimal arrangement with respect to rate of innovation, but I would argue it's entirely possible to achieve division-of-knowledge level development while subsuming the individual's self-interest to that of the group.
Posted by: a goddamn communist at Nov 4, 2009 5:32:34 PM
This dolphin understands capitalism better than most, if not all, of our Democratic Congress critters!
Posted by: joated at Nov 4, 2009 5:42:30 PM
Go with me on this:
Let's teach the dolphins how to iron-fertilize the ocean, which produces plankton, which draws fish to eat the plankton, which the dolphin hunt to feed themselves.
What's not to like?
Posted by: Larry at Nov 4, 2009 6:25:55 PM
"This dolphin worked its way off welfare,"
"This dolphin understands capitalism better than most, if not all, of our Democratic Congress critters!
Actually, this dolphin has found dolphin Earned Income Tax Credits. By working, it is getting more payout from its government than if it didn't work. Not really capitalism.
Posted by: liberalarts at Nov 4, 2009 7:16:04 PM
"We know that advanced animals use technology, so that would be less of an assumption that ascribing a code of ethics to capuchin monkeys.
Posted by: Millian "
Good point to assume the monkey thinks 'this is unfair' you assume the monkey has a theory of mind where you are not just a tool (piece of technology). The only evidence i can think of for a theory of mind for monkeys is the magic watching chimp video posted a while back http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM-KQxgtOao
Chimps are much closer to us then monkeys are to them though.
Posted by: David Curran at Nov 4, 2009 7:24:26 PM
So, when is her confirmation hearing to be Fed Chairman?
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Nov 4, 2009 7:43:22 PM
I would pay 1 million chimpanzees to write this article with little scraps of paper.
Posted by: Eric H at Nov 4, 2009 8:58:30 PM
The article is from 2003. Since then, cetacean speculators (fueled by massive imports of cheap Chinese bird feed) created the great gull-bubble of '07 and '08, which burst and led to massive Fed bailouts for Fishie Mae. Barney Frank is now crafting legislation for greater regulation of Big Spout. AFT, I say.
Posted by: Affe at Nov 5, 2009 3:10:31 PM
Hm, would the dolphins react any differently from humans if you decided to "supsend convertibility" (i.e. reneg on your deal to redeem paper for fish)? Or would the dolphins go "ape-sh**" (pardon the expression)?
Posted by: Silas Barta at Nov 6, 2009 4:03:30 PM
Stuff like this is absolutely amazing. It pleases me to no end to see exactly how smart these animals are. I can honestly say that I would have never thought of hiding the paper and turning in small chunks at a time. I've got to wonder how fast the dolphins turn in the pieces, though. It seems that the paper would eventually break up, meaning that it must be at a fairly quick pace. This just means that the dolphins have completely outsmarted their trainers. It reminds me alot of a child getting an allowance from both parents.
It's almost hilarious when you realize that these dolphins have a better understanding of their "monetary" system than some humans do. The dolphins are essentially investing their money (fish) to get a larger profit via the "gull-baiting." They are doing it for a larger return in the future rather than just blowing it all on immediate satisfaction by getting that new T.V. that will be outdated in a few months. I do have to wonder exactly how the gull-baiting works, though. Right now I have a very funny mental image of the dolphins putting a rock inside of the fish so that the gulls can't fly away.
Posted by: T. Hamrick at Nov 9, 2009 11:55:20 PM
