[JoelMcCracken]

Don’t get me wrong, this is very interesting, but there is something very funny about the idea that “give a chimpanzee stuff and see if they like it” is academic research.

This could absolutely be a headline on The Onion.

[manarth]

    there is something very funny about the idea that “give a chimpanzee stuff and see if they like it”

This is the premise behind the "Ignobel prize" – awards for scientific research which at first-glance may appear to be an April Fool's prank, but genuinely advance the cause of scientific research.

    "the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza"
    "what a nursing baby experiences when the baby’s mother eats garlic"
    "some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize

https://improbable.com/ig/winners/

[pinkmuffinere]

I love the ignoble prizes, receiving one is a bucket-list item for me! I’ll need to step up my game though and do more weird things, I’m hoping I can put this off till the last 5-10 years of my career.

[pseudohadamard]

That was my reaction as well, they're really shooting for an Ig Nobel with this one.

[omegared8]

Sure seems stupid on first glance but most science seems pointless. It’s only when several loosely interconnected ideas that prove something MIGHT be commercially viable do we find out that it was the first curious question that … again seems stupid… was the seed of inivation

[matusp]

Some would say that science can be valuable even when it does not produce commercially viable results. Making money is not the pinnacle of human experience.

[scoofy]

There are plenty of scientific results that make us lose money. Un-leading our paint and gasoline, climate change, even just eating fresh fruits and veg.

The main reason why the uninteresting results in science are always valuable is that negative knowledge is still knowledge. Every idea that gets kicked around and tested was something that would probably have been interesting, so knowing that it's most likely a dead end is worth knowing.

Long live the Ig Nobel Prize! I wish we had a Epic Fail prize equivalent where to honor genuinely nonsensical, failed science experiments because they're often still worth doing.

[buttermeup]

What are some examples of questions that at first seemed stupid yet became brilliant when connected with other seemingly stupid ideas?

[chao-]

Rather than a singular "question" that seems stupid, consider prime numbers. People toyed with prime numbers for centuries, asking all sorts of questions, with little-to-no impact on the vast majority of humans. Fast forward to the age of telecommunications: suddenly massive innovations in cryptography are being built on knowledge of prime numbers that previously was a novelty.

[vharuck]

Yeah, math has a lot of ideas that seemed like silly puzzles when first explored. The term "imaginary numbers" was originally an insult (from Descartes!) for math involving the square root of negative numbers.

[Retric]

A lot of early work into physics seemed like dumb questions at the time. When taken to the extreme “Do heavy objects fall faster?” tells you quite a bit about how the world works. And critically people intuited the wrong answers to many such questions before careful experimentation.

[buttermeup]

Obviously we have the benefit of hindsight, but “do heavy objects fall faster” doesn’t seem like a stupid question to me in the same way that “do chimpanzees like crystals” does.

[Retric]

I think we can call them both stupid in they are malformed.

Let go of a feather and brick on the ISS gets a different result than doing so on top of Mount Everest. Similarly understanding chimpanzees behavior is a deeper question here noticing some chimps find some crystals interesting in some situations and moving on.

[harimau777]

My understanding is that much of discrete mathematics was considered to be purely academic until computers were invented.

[iberator]

Microwaves were invented as hamster defrost machines. Seriously!

[gardncl]

And it worked, but unfortunately humans are too big for it to work on us.

They were able to freeze hamsters entirely then reanimate them with a microwave.

[buttermeup]

While that sounds like an interesting tidbit, it also doesn’t appear remotely true based off of the history sections in the wiki pages for microwaves and microwave ovens.

[Retric]

That article is somewhat revisionist.

> In 1945, the heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was independently and accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer

Sure, meanwhile using microwaves to heat stuff up dates back to the 1920’s. WWII soldiers would regularly stand in front microwave equipment to warm up. The resonant-cavity magnetron was a British invention that finally made microwaves far more efficient to produce.

The story about noticing a candy bar melting in his pocket is also kind of funny as that’s what normally happens to candy bars in your pockets, further it means he didn’t notice he himself warming up.

[radishingr]

The Tom Scott video(https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y) did a pretty good summary of the Percy Spencer microwave (a giant commercial oven) and the later parallel development by J. E. Lovelock of a small microwave to reheat small mammals for experiments with cryorevival (replacing lamps and hot paddles).

[kayo_20211030]

Great comment. It's bananas. Chimps like bananas too, right?

[oniony]

I thought it was fruit flies.

[ramon156]

Fruit can't fly, silly

[jdougan]

Time flies like a banana.

[iberator]

Imagine if monkeys could communicate using crystals. That would be interesting - human - animal language!

Research could lead into shit like cows TELLING us when feeling sick or know something etc. Food production, pets, police animals - a lot of potential uses.

The same as literally chemistry and rocks gave us transistors.

Almost no study is crazy.

Playing with glass gave us telescopes and microscopes.

[Razengan]

"Breaking: Animals Have Preferences"

[dmix]

> But he’s also very interested in “the impact of crystals on the history of art and the history of mind,”

This made my eyes roll a bit.