I have had this on my mind for days, someone please help:
Why are dogs dogs?
I mean, how do we see a pug and then a husky and understand that both are dogs? I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a picture of a breed of dog I hadn’t seen before and wondered what animal it was.
Do you want the Big Answer or the Small Answers cos I have a feeling this is about to get Intense
Oooh okay are YOU gonna answer this, hang on I need to get some snacks and make sure the phone is off.
The short answer is “because they’re statistically unlikely to be anything else.”
The long question is “given the extreme diversity of morphology in dogs, with many subsets of ‘dogs’ bearing no visual resemblance to each other, how am I able to intuit that they belong to the ‘dog’ set just by looking?”
The reason that this is a Good Big Question is because we are broadly used to categorising Things as related based on resemblances. Then everyone realized about genes and evolution and so on, and so now we have Fun Facts like “elephants are ACTUALLY closely related to rock hyraxes!! Even though they look nothing alike!!”
These Fun Facts are appealing because they’re not intuitive. So why is dog-sorting intuitive?
Well, because if you eliminate all the other possibilities, most dogs are dogs.
To process Things – whether animals, words, situations or experiences – our brains categorise the most important things about them, and then compare these to our memory banks. If we’ve experienced the same thing before – whether first-hand or through a story – then we know what’s happening, and we proceed accordingly.
If the New Thing is completely New, then the brain pings up a bunch of question marks, shunts into a different track, counts up all the Similar Traits, and assigns it a provisional category based on its similarity to other Things. We then experience the Thing, exploring it further, and gaining new knowledge. Our brain then categorises the New Thing based on the knowledge and traits. That is how humans experience the universe. We do our best, and we generally do it well.
This is the basis of stereotyping. It underlies some of our worst behaviours (racism), some of our most challenging problems (trauma), helps us survive (stories) and sharing the ability with things that don’t have it leads to some of our most whimsical creations (artificial intelligence.)
In fact, one reason that humans are so wonderfully successful is that we can effectively gain knowledge from experiences without having experienced them personally! You don’t have to eat all the berries to find the poisonous ones. You can just remember stories and descriptions of berries, and compare those to the ones you’ve just discovered. You can benefit from memories that aren’t your own!
On the other hand, if you had a terribly traumatic experience involving, say, an eagle, then your brain will try to protect you in every way possible from a similar experience. If you collect too many traumatic experiences with eagles, then your brain will not enjoy eagle-shaped New Things. In fact, if New Things match up to too many eagle-like categories, such as
* pointy * Specific!! Squawking noise!! * The hot Glare of the Yellow Eye * Patriotism?!? * CLAWS VERY BAD VERY BAD
Then the brain may shunt the train of thought back into trauma, and the person will actually experience the New Thing as trauma. Even if the New Thing was something apparently unrelated, like being generally pointy, or having a hot glare. (This is an overly simplistic explanation of how triggers work, but it’s the one most accessible to people.)
So the answer rests in how we categorise dogs, and what “dog” means to humans. Human brains associate dogs with universal categories, such as
* four legs * Meat Eater * Soft friend * Doggo-ness???? * Walkies * An Snout, * BORK BORK
Anything we have previously experienced and learned as A Dog gets added to the memory bank. Sometimes it brings new categories along with it. So a lifetime’s experience results in excellent dog-intuition.
And anything we experience with, say, a 90% match is officially a Dog.
Brains are super-good at eliminating things, too. So while the concept of physical doggo-ness is pretty nebulous, and has to include greyhounds and Pekingese and mastiffs, we know that even if an animal LOOKS like a bear, if the other categories don’t match up in context (bears are not usually soft friends, they don’t Bork Bork, they don’t have long tails to wag) then it is statistically more likely to be a Doggo. If it occupies a dog-shaped space then it is usually a dog.
So if you see someone dragging a fluffy whatnot along on a string, you will go,
* Mop?? (Unlikely – seems to be self-propelled.) * Alien? (Unlikely – no real alien ever experienced.) * Threat? (Vastly unlikely in context.) * Rabbit? (No. Rabbits hop, and this appears to scurry.) (Brains are very keen on categorising movement patterns. This is why lurching zombies and bad CGI are so uncomfortable to experience, brains just go “INCORRECT!! That is WRONG!” Without consciously knowing why. Anyway, very few animals move like domestic dogs!) * Very fluffy cat? (Maybe – but not quite. Shares many characteristics, though!) * Eldritch horror? (No, it is obviously a soft friend of unknown type) * Robotic toy? (Unlikely – too complex and convincing.) * alert: amusing animal detected!!! This is a good animal!! This is pleasing!! It may be appropriate to laugh at this animal, because we have just realized that it is probably a … * DOG!!!! Soft friend, alive, walks on leash. It had a low doggo-ness quotient! and a confusing Snout, but it is NOT those other Known Things, and it occupies a dog-shaped space! * Hahahaha!!! It is extra funny and appealing, because it made us guess!!!! We love playing that game. * Best doggo. * PING! NEW CATEGORIES ADDED TO “Doggo” set: mopness, floof, confusing Snout.
And that’s why most dogs are dogs. You’re so good at identifying dog-shaped spaces that they can’t be anything else!
I feel like this explains why Very Young Kids call every unknown foru-legged creature a Dog
This is something I’ve been mulling over for a while now, but I think I know why the whole ‘anti’ thing on here never really had a snowball’s chance in hell of ensnaring me, at least not as an adult. Because my approach to fandom and fannish activities is fundamentally different than that of a substantial number of younger people on Tumblr. To them, fandom’s both primary and overriding function is that of an activism space. Whereas either twenty years ago or now, my approach has always been:
Fandom is for pleasure.
I’m not saying that it can’t or shouldn’t also be a space for activism – it often is for me as well. What I’m saying is that my primary motivation when approaching fannish activity isn’t activism in and of itself. It’s being pleased. The two aren’t diametrically opposed. To wit:
I ship queer ships because that’s what pleases me, that’s what makes me happy;
I scowl at love triangles and write polyamory instead because I had shoddily-written, eye-rolling-inducing, heteronormative love-triangles shoved down my throat for years and now can’t stand them, whereas poly ships make me grin from ear to ear;
I read and write about politically powerful, complex, conflicted, morally gray women because I love them and went through a dearth of them in far too many mediums
So on and so forth. You might be wondering why I’m even pointing this out and going ‘both roads lead to the same thing for you, same difference.’ Not exactly – and Tumblr itself is amply showing the difference. By not basing my approach solely on a form of activism, I’m effectively not limiting myself in the kinds of things I read or write or enjoy. Not all my queer ships need be all fluff and sunshine and rainbows and healthiness. Not all my women protagonists need be shining beacons of morality (most aren’t). I’m a lifelong educator when it comes to consent culture, but that doesn’t mean I’m obligated to renounce my ravishment fantasies, either in my head, my reading or when practiced in the consensual, communication-first environment of a kinky relationship.
The difference came into sharp focus for me a few months ago, when a post written against the Prince Lotor/Lance pairing of Voltron went something along the lines of ‘shipping this abusive ship is bad because it’s horrible representation for MLM!’ The bedrock assumption underlying the whole thing was that all fannish activity had a moral duty to exist for the express purpose of validation and good representation. Therefore Lotor/Lance wasn’t seen as something in bad taste, to give an example, but rather as a moral failing. This clashes head-on with my own approach, because I’ll ship healthy, meant-to-aspire to dynamics when they please me – but I also go for messy, broken, terrible ones when they also please me.
For me, the overriding question in fandom isn’t ‘what is the most Perfectly Progressive Thing here so I can focus on that.’ It’s ‘what’s the Thing That Pleases Me Most in here.’ That the progressive things largely end up overlapping with what makes me happy is due to my experiences with marginalization and all its associated shit. This, however, doesn’t change the fact that the non-overlap section also includes other things that do it for me (that cater to my kinks, to my darker preferences when it comes to fiction, etc).
The disconnect, I think, comes from the fact that for me (and other older people who’ve also done a lot of hands-on activism work out in meat-space) fandom has always been a place to temporarily break away from how bleak and fuckingexhausting activism can get – to relax and unwind and just lose ourselves for a while, when our IRL projects seem to just be spinning their wheels in the mud. Fandoms that are nothing but activism spaces, where everything must be sanitized and pre-approved and healthy and Pure are a nightmare for me specifically because it would mean I’d have to live my life primarily as an activist 24/7, until I’m completely burnt out.
However, a lot of young people on here haven’t done any on-the-ground activism work – their first meeting with activism was on the Internet and in fandoms and the only place where they could stretch their legs as activists was fandom. Therefore, they take this one step farther and naturally view fandom as primarily a place for activism. I don’t even have to describe how horribly that clashes with what I described above – you can see it at work on Tumblr every day, in the myriad of posts going ‘how dare you ship this?!’ or ‘how dare you get off on that?!?!’ or ‘how dare you support this kink!’
This is why it’s so difficult for a lot of people of my age to find any common-ground with antis. Our starting points are radically different and even when we have more in common than different in regard to fannish preference, we’ll still never see eye to eye, because whole sections of this place have taught themselves that it’s a supposedly horrid thing to approach fandom from any angle that’s not based on a very strict, narrow sort of morality.
“Have you seen most of the plus-size sections out there? It’s horrifying. Whoever’s designing for plus-size doesn’t get it. The entire garment needs to be reconceived. You can’t just take a size 8 and make it larger. In my travels, I’ve been an advocate for larger women. I’ve been talking to designers, but only a half-dozen make an effort. Most say, ‘I don’t want a woman who’s a size 10 or 11 wearing my clothes.’ Well, shame on you! It’s not realistic
Love him.
“You can’t just take a size 8 and make it larger.”
Praise Jesus and all the saints for him saying this because damn, most “PLUS SIZED” clothing is fugly.
Amen. The plus sized clothing out there is crazy and makes me just…
I’m not surprised he said this. Ever since the first season, when they’ve had to do garments for everyday people who aren’t models, there’s always one designer (at the very least) who flips out as though they’ve never in their life considered that people who aren’t a size 0 might wear their clothes. Tim always looks at them like he wants to drown them in a lake.
I love Tim Gunn so much and this is just one of the reasons. The other is that he is asexual and has copped a lot of flack for it in the media but he isn’t ashamed of what he is/is completely happy with who is. Next to Diane Von Furstenberg, he is one of my favourite people in the fashion industry.
My mom got to take a class taught by him and I AM FOREVER JEALOUS.What a cool guy
I DID NOT KNOW TIM GUNN WAS ASEXUAL
THIS IS SO WONDERFUL
IM GONNA CRY
WELCOME MY ACE BRETHREN
We do not, as a world, deserve the goodness that is Tim Gunn. My mom (a large woman in her late-fifties at the time) met him at a lecture and he spent several minutes complimenting her dress (which she made herself) and discussing why she’d had to start making ALL her own clothes (could no longer find nice, pretty things in her size) and then laughing over being the oldest people in the room (since it was a university lecture largely attended by students). My mom hasn’t felt good about her weight in years, but Tim Gunn made her proud of knowing how to dress for her shape and her taste in fabric patterns. According to my brother who witnessed all this, she was beaming.
I would die on a battlefield for Tim Gunn.
Just confirmed the ace thing, I hadn’t heard about it but it looks like he came out in an interview!
The dog has an issue where his esophagus doesn’t work right; it doesn’t get food in there right because it’s all stretched out and stuff. So what dog owners (and cat owners and I guarantee you the cat ones look goofier) do is make a highchair and feed them upright so gravity can be a hero. It’s also really cute.
The disorder is called Megaesophagus.
Here is a cat with the same disorder in his eatin’ sock.
You walk into the barn at 10 p.m. for night check, expecting everyone to be sound asleep or munching on hay. But no! There’s your show horse on his tablet. He’s gotten good at this game—he just earned another point, and another carrot.
Is this some a science fiction scenario? Believe it or not, it’s closer to reality than you might think. Japanese researchers have developed and tested touch-screen technology for horses, in which the four-legged players really do earn “points” and hear a noise when they make the right choice with their muzzles on the screen. They also get an automatically distributed carrot.
However, this is not just some elaborate high-tech new stable toy. Touch-screen computers could be changing the way scientists carry out equine research—most of all, taking out any risk of human influence in equine decision-making and actions.
“Clever Hans was a famous horse of the early 19th century that appeared to be able to count and calculate, but we now know he was reacting to unconscious behavioral cues made by the trainer,” said Masaki Tomonaga, PhD, associate professor in the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute’s Language and Intelligence Section, in Aichi, Japan.
“This sensitivity to behavioral/social cues in horses itself should be examined more from the perspective of contemporary comparative cognitive science, but we should carefully avoid such inappropriate responses,” he said. “One of the best ways is to use computer-controlled systems.”
Using the touch-screen system that Tomonaga and colleagues have already used successfully in chimpanzees, the team tested three ponies’ abilities to discriminate shapes and sizes. They also investigated what’s important to horses in making distinctions between one shape and another.
Each pony stood before a 42-inch LCD touch-screen computer monitor that displayed two choices. If the pony chose the “right” size or shape (one he was previously trained to recognize) with his nose, the computer registered the right response and rewarded the pony. The reward was a signal (a sound) followed by the automatic distribution of a carrot into a bowl under the screen.
The researchers tested size discrimination by having the ponies choose between two sizes of black circles. The difference between the sizes varied from very similar to obviously different.
To test shape discrimination, the ponies had to choose among eight geometric shapes—specifically, large letters. They started with just two choices (X and O) and gradually moved to choosing between X and other letters (X always being the wrong choice) and then other combinations. The researchers evaluated the accuracy of the ponies’ responses for the 28 possible pairs of letters.
Humans and chimpanzees also participated in the experiment, for the sake of comparison in the ability to discriminate between shapes and sizes, the researchers said.
The researchers found that the horses learned how to use the monitors—and get their carrots—very quickly, Tomonaga said. And the equipment was well adapted to them, aside from one minor issue.
“Sometimes even when the pony did not touch the screen with her mouth, the screen ‘detected’ a touch response,” he said. “After careful examination, we recognized that the saliva was causing a wet area and that the screen was recognizing that as a touch. So we had to wipe the screen with a cloth every two or three minutes.”
They also found that ponies had more difficulty than chimpanzees and humans in choosing the right-sized circle when the sizes were similar, said Tomonaga. The closer the two circles were in size, the higher their error rate compared to the other species. This could be related to poorer eyesight when viewing the screen, he said.
However, like humans and chimpanzees, horses relied more on diameter than area when detecting the size differences of circles, he said.
As far as shape difference is concerned, the ponies’ performance didn’t vary much from that of chimpanzees and humans, Tomanaga said. Still, there were a few trends regarding the kinds of angles and shapes that were specific to the species, he said. For example, ponies had a harder time distinguishing “closed” shapes—like O or D, or squares and triangles.
In future studies, Tomonaga said computer screens will allow researchers to get more “into the mind” of the horse, helping us see what he sees as he watches videos, for example. Above all, the greatest benefit of the computer screen is the control of the experiment that takes the human out of the equation.
“Using PCs, we can strictly manipulate the stimuli for the horse experiments, such as size, color, brightness, and we can easily modify the testing task in reaction to the achievement levels for each horse,” Tomonaga said. “Of course, we can collect ‘objective’ data. It is not necessary to write down the results on the notebook for every task; the computer can do that.”
Executive dysfunction is basically going “Okay one two three go. And now. Aaaaaaannnnnnnd we’re goinnnnng now.” for like three hours before the thing happens
…so, like trying to merge and you’re like “I’m going… now. Now. And…NOW. Nevermind they’re going to fast. How about…NOW.”
Three hours later, even you are fed up with yourself “Ok, this looks like a good clear spot.”
Or you’ve just turned around and gone home to nap.
Luke: I believe what you were meaning to say is ‘thank you’.
Rey: Thank you?
Luke: You’re welcome!
Rey: What? no-no-no, I didn’t… why would I?
Luke: Okay okay *chuckles*
Luke: ♫ I see what’s happening here You’re face-to-face with greatness and it’s strange You don’t even know how you feel, it’s adorable Well, it’s nice to see that Padawans never change Trust in the force, let’s begin Yes it’s really me, It’s Luke, breathe it in I know it’s a lot: the hand, the sight! When you’re staring at a Jedi Knight! ♫
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