22
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
22 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2219 readers
204 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Lesswronger reads about Orcas the first time in their life. Decided that training them to become smarter than humans is now the next important step.
They made several posts about it, and just the opening bits are funny. I obv didn't read any of them an only looked at the opening statements. I will produce a quote from each.
Yes, the weird percentage is in the text, the [1] footnote says 15%, no idea why they can't edit their text normally.
And from the last article, two lines as a treat:
(Nice of the person to think of the orcas btw, just wish it was more preservation than 'how can we make these animals help us out).
E: apparently "An alternative approach to superbabies" is also about orcas, they just no longer stand behind it.
The last time someone looked into this it was with dolphins, did not go well, lead to more human-dolphin sex than communication, and ended in a dolphin suicide.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me
They're trying to be John Lilly, but with orcas and even more ketamine
That story mentions Carl Sagan but omits the detail that Peter the dolphin propositioned him. (It's in the William Poundstone biography, IIRC.)
All I need to know about HDI (human-dolphin interaction) (read: fuckin) is covered in many episodes of my favorite podcast Doughboys
Sadly, the orcas go after sailing boats not the big motorized yachts, less eat the rich and more eat the upper middle class.
That's because we haven't helped them achieve their full potential
FInally read the wikipedia page on orcas an hour ago, and boy do I have plans, let me start the wiki.
Larry Niven had a fixed idea about cetacean intelligence, and it showed up in mass-audience SF like Star Trek IV.
The story below is another example of really creepy things being done in the name of science in the postwar era.
I have three more examples of sapient marine mammals!
what have the orcas done to deserve this
Dolphins tend to be pretty good hackers.
So perhaps orcas can be too.
Image description.
Still from the movie Johnny Mnemonic (1995), on the left is Keanu Reeves playing Johnny Mnemonic in a black and white suit sitting in a chair with a large cyberpunk helmet on his face. He is gripping the chair tightly. On the right there is Jones the Dolphin, a model of a diseased looking dolphin swimming in a dirty small tank with a large cyberpunk implant on his face.Gotta be trolling.
Somebody on LW also thought so, and they replied they are 100% serious. Which still could be trolling. Lot of effort for no payoff however. Personally I think this person is just very young. I can get a teenager going all in on this. (a teenager being this much into IQ stuff is pretty bad tbh).
I was thinking this also, like it's the perfect parody of several lesswrong and EA memes: overly concerned with animal suffering/sapience, overly concerned with IQ stats, openly admitting to no expertise or even relevant domain knowledge but driven to pontificate anyway, and inspired by existing science fiction... I think the last one explains it and it isn't a parody. As cinnasverses points out, Cetacean intelligence shows up occasionally in sci-fi. to add to the examples... sapient whales warning the team of an impending solar flare in Stargate Atlantis via echolocation induced hallucinations, the dolphins in hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, and the whales showing up to help in one book of Animorphs.
there's having a favourite animal, then there's whatever this is
Ironically I just put down a deposit on a orca tattoo.
I haven’t clicked on any links here yet, this sounds like a bit, but because it’s LW I have to assume bad faith and that this is real.
E: lol real. Why wouldn’t they go for apes lol