[roarcher]

The article's premise is "some animals are better at specific things than humans, therefore humans are not exceptional", or stated differently, "humans are only exceptional if they're the best at literally everything".

It seems obvious to me that this is a fairly useless definition of "exceptional" that would not be accepted in any context other than an ideological one.

Yes, HN is better without shallow dismissals. Perhaps we should extend that idea to shallow articles as well.

[dang]

That is by no means the strongest plausible interpretation of the article, so I think you're running into the same problem I mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44958944 and in the longer reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44966242.

[roarcher]

I think what I said is actually the strongest interpretation of the article's claim, just with the author's word games stripped away. You called out two claims from the article as being worthy of deeper thought, so I'll address both:

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

Let's use a different baseline then, let's say the visual acuity of birds of prey or the longevity of sea tortoises. Those animals win against humans in their respective categories. Use every animal as a baseline against which to compare every other animal and add up all the "wins" across all of those, and you will find that humans win in far more categories and to a much greater degree than any other single animal. This claim is just a convoluted way of saying what I said in my last comment. The language gives it an academic veneer, but that does not make it a profound claim.

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

This is the actual quote with a bit more context: "We study them under highly artificial conditions, in which they are often miserable, stressed, and suffering. Try caging human beings and seeing how well they perform on cognitive tests."

Does anyone honestly believe that a stressed out human would perform worse on a cognitive test than a perfectly content chimpanzee? It's a fair point that animals are often not "in their element" when we study them, but the idea that this accounts for the vast gap in intelligence and creativity between them and humans is laughable. Is the author claiming that animals behave with a sophistication whose utility rivals the utility of human behaviors, but conveniently only when we're not watching them? I'm pretty sure there's a Far Side comic about this.

On a meta note, you talk about how a lot of commenters dismissed the article by only engaging with the title. I would suggest that you did not engage with what those commenters were actually saying--they did engage with the article, but the article had no substance. It was you who reflexively dismissed the commenters, because you're sympathetic to the article's worldview.