[dang]

That's better, yes! Although it makes me want to cite this other guideline:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

- because I think the article already addresses this "other species don't have literature" argument, though it doesn't talk about literature specifically.

[card_zero]

But the article, or the book it's promoting, isn't making any very strong point. I checked. It's saying that animals have great senses, and some of them can see Saturn's rings on a clear night. But they don't know or care that they're seeing Saturn's rings, and they don't have telescopes anyway, and we do and can see the rings much better if we want to, because we do want to, because we think about the things that we can see. So, I don't know, maybe there's nothing to talk about here except sidetracks.

[swat535]

I think that that was the strongest plausible interpretation of the article in my point of view as well.

I’m not sure if you read the article, but if you did, what would you say is the strongest argument that should be discussed ?

The author literally argues that humans are not exceptional because some animals can do things better than us.

[dang]

The strongest plausible interpretation isn't "humans are not exceptional". Every species is exceptional by definition, so that's a weak and easily dismissed claim. This critique is not so interesting.

What's meant by "human exceptionalism" is something more like "humans' longstanding habit of regarding ourselves as the apex of a strict hierarchy of species, a worldview which has had profound consequences for ourselves and others". That is a complex thing worth exploring, and what the work in the article is about. A critique from that level would be more interesting. But to do this, one would have to take in a larger working set of information.

Comments that engage with only the title of an article or the tip of its iceberg tend to be rather boring, and also reflexive/indignant. On HN, a good comment is reflective rather than reflexive [1], and engages with specifics rather than just being a generic reaction to a generic claim (like "humans are/aren't exceptional") [2].

One way to "engage with specifics" is to dig beneath the top of the abstraction heap (i.e. the title or top-level claim) until you hit a layer of substance of the relevant work or argument. In this case that's pretty easy to do: there are two paragraphs which, in their first sentences, get more specific:

  * when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline

  * our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals [...] study them under highly artificial conditions

One can disagree or debate the significance, but a response on this level is likely to be less reflexive and therefore more interesting.

To me the noteworthy thing in this HN thread is how rapid the reflex is to wholly dismiss the article (and the research it's about) and also how shallow that reflex is—how little information is processed before doing the dismissal. Strong emotional conditioning means little information can be tolerated before a reaction needs expressing. This thread is such a clear a case of that, that it points to how deeply what is called "human exceptionalism" lives in us.

Edit: actually, I was describing what I saw in the thread last night. Having looked it over again, there are a least some more substantive subthreads. That's good, and it's also common for those to take longer to appear, as described at [1] and [3].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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

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