[dang]

I changed the title from "Can We Really Be Friends with an Octopus?" to "When octopuses are social with humans, are they reaching out or simply reacting?" (the subtitle, more or less) in the hope of avoiding shallow comments like this. (A comment reacting purely to information, or lack of information, in a title is pretty much shallow by definition.)

Since that didn't work, I guess it's time to look for some more representative phrase from the article text.

Edit: ok, I've combined two phrases from the article to try to that. Commenters: please discuss the actual material now.

[wombatmobile]

… in the hope of avoiding shallow comments like this.

Shallow? It’s profound.

Have you tried to respond to the question, in the human context?

[dang]

A shallow comment can contain a profound question. "What is the meaning of life?" would be an even shallower comment.

Were a comment to contain new and interesting information about a profound, i.e. generic, question, that would be fine. But this is precisely what internet comments bringing up generic questions don't usually do. It's not a good fit for the genre. Someone who really has something original to say about a profound question would be better off writing an essay, or a book. Certainly not a one-liner to an internet forum.

This is so much the case, in fact, that changing the subject from a concrete topic to a more generic one is a frequent form of trolling.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[wombatmobile]

In this case, the question is informative and stimulating because it challenges the assumption that human interaction has a different dynamic to animal interaction.

Bringing this question to conscious awareness is a different category of social discourse to “What is the meaning of life”, which is not really a social question at all.

[dang]

I'm sorry, but I don't agree. The topic is the social behavior of octopuses. It's not always bad for HN threads to go off topic—for example if there's an unpredictable direction which is more interesting than the original topic—but it's pretty much always bad for them to go in generic, pseudo-profound directions like this. It makes discussions more predictable, and therefore more (yes) shallow.

p.s. Please don't use multiple accounts to comment in the same thread. That's abusive, and will eventually get your main account banned as well.

[Sporktacular]

It's not pseudo-profound. It goes to the heart of what social behaviour is and provides another angle for interpreting the personal experiences shared by the researchers. There's nothing shallow about it.

[nonameiguess]

The reason it's shallow is this is directly addressed by the content of the article. The author starts out the essay by giving all of the reasons we have to believe that our relationships with pets and other humans are mutual, i.e. closeness in evolutionary distance, the fact that we're all social creatures that form bonds within our own species that are clearly advantageous to us and friendship makes sense from that standpoint. It then contrasts that with a traditional naive view of octopuses as loners that either mate or kill each other when they meet in the wild, giving reason to doubt that they would form friendships with humans.

It then goes on to complicate that narrative, claiming that more recent discoveries indicate many species of octopus are, in fact, social creatures, and older understanding of them was likely due to insufficient observation and the fact they hide themselves so well.

It's quite an in-depth essay with a lot of information in it that addresses this exact question with nuance, research, anecdotes, from every side of every possible answer. It deserves better than a pithy response implying the author never thought to just ask the reverse question. He definitely already thought of this.

[austinjp]

I agree with sibling comment; parent comment may be terse, but I didn't find it shallow.

[majormajor]

I found it shallow because it didn't meaningfully add or respond to the article's topic. Saying "humans also do similar things implies the animals do it for the same reason" would not make a reliable way of evaluating the motivations behind the actions.

I don't believe humans are nearly as "special" as historically seen in comparison to animals, but the rephrasing as performed in the comment here doesn't add anything to support that case.

[fleddr]

It's not shallow at all, it's rather the human shallowness being exposed, of which the article has lots.

For example, the article correctly claims that we don't really know how an octopus perceives these interactions with humans, as they're of an entirely different non-mammalian intelligence and social behavior. Next, the article strongly affirms they're about as intelligent as a racoon.

These two things directly contradict each other and show shallowness on our behalf. The real answer is that we have no idea at all.

The article continues to state that things like deceit and learning ability are rarely found in invertebrates. Which is plain wrong. They are found in creatures a thousand times smaller than an octopus.

Weak scorpionfly males pretend to be a female so that they get a food gift from a strong male, which they can carry to the actual female. Deceit. Some butterflies strategically place their eggs near ants after which the ants take the pupa (which is evolved to look like an ant pupa) and nourish it to an adult. After which the young adult butterfly goes: thanks for everything, bye now. Deceit. Camouflage. Deceit. Traps. Deceit. Mimicry. Deceit.

Beewolfs (which are wasps) navigate by beacons. Move the beacons and they re-learn the path. Learning ability. The absolute "dumbest" creature showing learning ability: earth worms. We're talking a handful of neurons. They drag leaves into their dens to feed on. By giving them lots of different leafs, they learn which types they want. They also learn to drag them in the right direction, as the other way blocks the den. It actually remembers this and gets better at it over time.

We are incredibly shallow in misunderstanding but above all underestimating the capabilities of animals and overestimating the value of our own definitions.

So the challenge is warranted. Perhaps another species is studying us and concluding that we're not a social species, because we all seem to sit by ourselves looking at some weird bar of bright light all day. Even in mass gatherings (cities) of millions, this weird species does not show actual social behavior. Nobody knows each other and actively ignores others.