Shots In The Dark: We Miss Alex, the Talking Harvard Parrot

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

We Miss Alex, the Talking Harvard Parrot

In the Times, George Johnson writes quite a nice piece about just how intelligent Alex, the talking Harvard parrot, may have been.

Skeptics have long dismissed Dr. Pepperberg’s successes with Alex as a subtle form of conditioning — no deeper philosophically than teaching a pigeon to peck at a moving spot by bribing it with grain. But the radical behaviorists once said the same thing about people: that what we take for thinking, hoping, even theorizing, is all just stimulus and response.

Here's Alex on a PBS show. Not only smart, but cute!

¶ 6:13 AM

Comments:

Enough with that parrot, Richard, and this can help get you over it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H6DSoqZz_s

Dead parrots and sharks sad enough, but don't let them push out Blackwater shoot-ups of several Iraqis and three, I think it was, dead Marines today.

# posted by Richard Thomas : September 19, 2007 12:31 AM

A Foundation has been set to honor Alex and support similar research on other parrots:

http://www.alexfoundation.org/contacts.htm

# posted by Anonymous : September 19, 2007 9:39 PM

not sure what to make of this?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/education/19gift.html?hp

maybe not too god for Harvard when donors state that they are giving to other educational institutions because of 'Harvard's mistakes'. This better NOT become a trend.

# posted by Anonymous : September 19, 2007 9:44 PM

Professor Thomas: would you please have more respect for the deceased and those who grieve him? Are you aware of how much Alex contributed to our knowledge of the capacities of the African Parrot?

This may enlighten you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)

# posted by Anonymous : September 19, 2007 9:46 PM

I'm fully aware of how important Alex was to research (a different point), and of how beloved he was, and no disrespect meant to any of those who worked with him, and were fond of him, but my closing sentence of 9/19, 12:31 stands.

You can call Alex a deceased parrot by the way, but you can't under any usage I'm aware of include him among "the deceased", a collective noun reserved for dead humans.

# posted by RT : September 19, 2007 10:33 PM

Read the story you post, 9:44. Columbia should be much more miffed than Harvard. Columbia (unlike Harvard) accepted Buffett, but the daughter of the Columbia professor who was behind the acceptance gave her money to her own high school -- which I think is great -- not to Columbia (which she herself attended)! Harvard's (HBS, not FAS, I note) only failing here was a lack of oracular powers in reading Buffett's business school application, back whenever.
Looking very bad for the Sox.

# posted by RT : September 19, 2007 10:56 PM

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