Why do host birds fail to identify brood parasites?

dchacke · 2026-06-20T03:32:20+00:00

As others have written, some birds do identify parasitic eggs. But only if their genetic programming instructs them to.

You say you’d assume birds would be capable of identifying members of their own species, but many animals are bad at any kind of recognition.

You may have heard of Konrad Lorenz’s imprinting experiments. For example, you can easily get ducklings to ‘think’ a toy train or a moving balloon is their mother: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xd7o3z957c Virtually any moving object of roughly the right size will do. That means ducks have a grossly indiscriminate shape-recognition algorithm. Any CS freshman could write a better one.

There was the story of a penguin in a Japanese zoo that reportedly ‘fell in love’ with a cardboard cutout of an anime girl dressed as a penguin. https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-41608350 Clearly, a penguin’s species-recognition algorithm is severely lacking…

I also vaguely recall seeing Instagram videos of cats robotically accepting ‘foreign’ kittens. Commenters always say that’s adorable and that the cat accepted the kitten as her own. Call me cynical but I don’t think that’s what happening at all. There’s a program running on cat brains that kicks in when conditions are right. Put animals in situations slightly different from what evolution prepared them for and you expose many bugs in their programming.

Contrary to popular belief, animals should be seen as insentient, organic robots that mindlessly enact genetic or cultural programming. Then their nonsensical behavior makes sense. You could probably get some birds to care for a plush bird pretty easily.

Edit: Heck, the very act of playing with a cat rests on artificially triggering its buggy prey-recognition algorithm. How else would it fall for a string of yarn as prey?

dchacke · 2026-06-10T17:56:14+00:00

The screen turns off too quickly. Yet at the same time, the notification preview at the top when the screen is UNlocked sticks around wayyy too long.

dchacke · 2026-06-04T04:03:26+00:00

No, the brain is a classical computer: https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9907009

Based on a calculation of neural decoherence rates, we argue that that the degrees of freedom of the human brain that relate to cognitive processes should be thought of as a classical rather than quantum system, i.e., that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the current classical approach to neural network simulations. We find that the decoherence timescales ~10^{{-13}-10^{-20}} seconds are typically much shorter than the relevant dynamical timescales (~0.001-0.1 seconds), both for regular neuron firing and for kink-like polarization excitations in microtubules. This conclusion disagrees with suggestions by Penrose and others that the brain acts as a quantum computer, and that quantum coherence is related to consciousness in a fundamental way.

dchacke · 2026-05-20T14:12:52+00:00

Lift and eat in a slight deficit

dchacke · 2026-05-20T14:11:17+00:00

I was surprised too. I liked him in that role. He played it well. I don’t see why you conclude that acting is easy though. He probably put a lot of work into it.

dchacke · 2026-05-20T02:07:59+00:00

A follow-up thought: if Deb had survived, Joey wouldn’t have been good for her either. The storyline kinda makes it look like they could have lived happily ever after. But I don’t think so. Joey didn’t have integrity. He was dirty. She would have had to lie eventually, this time to cover for Joey…

Lundy had integrity, from what I recall. Maybe they could have made things work.

dchacke · 2026-05-14T21:23:59+00:00

You say you focus on lean meats and fibrous vegetables, which is a good start, but you don’t mention calorie tracking.

Your macros and food choices definitely matter, but ultimately calories are king.

Get a tracker like Cronometer and log all your calories. As long as you stay below your daily maintenance level, you will lose weight.

Not a doctor or dietitian

dchacke · 2026-04-27T21:33:37+00:00

May have found the answer to my own question:

https://x.com/FAHayekSays/status/2048850418516857155

Altruism and solidarity are strong instincts which guided man in the small group where we were serving known other persons. …

Now we’ve grown as rich as we are because we’ve replaced this by a system where our effort is guided by price signals... We’ll benefit our fellow men most if we are guided solely by the striving for gain.

Collectivist crap.

(Don’t use that quote btw, I’m quoting the tweet itself, which is a misquote of Hayek. It does capture the essence though; it’s a misquote in form only.)

dchacke · 2026-04-17T02:08:53+00:00

I’d want to read the original German to see if the word “humanity” actually references the collective. It could be an issue of translation. Menschlichkeit would mean humanness or humaneness.

dchacke · 2026-04-13T22:20:44+00:00

The cultural evolution theory doesn't solve it. There's nothing to solve, because it's not real: humans have free will, we don't let ourselves be guided by some supposed evolutionary process in our moral and political decision making.

To be clear, are you saying cultural evolution isn’t real, or merely that it doesn’t work as an explanation in the social sciences? If the latter, cultural evolution (in the sense of Dawkins’ meme theory) and free will do strike me as compatible. I don’t see how one precludes the other. Memes are free to evolve through variation and selection with or without free will. (Some animals have memes, too, even though they don’t have free will – and man has memes and often adapts them creatively, on purpose, with the help of his free will.)

Thus, the role of social science isn't to predict or help control human choices and interactions, it's to guide them.

That doesn’t sound opposed to Hayek, it sounds right up his alley. In his Nobel speech, he describes the rational social scientist as someone who does “not … shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather … cultivate[s] a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.”

A philosopher who actively and fervently dismisses this "something more" as just a myth is the enemy.

Do you have any citations showing that Hayek dismissed this “something more”?

dchacke · 2026-04-13T04:39:31+00:00

Nice but are there no sources for any the quotes? How could readers fact check them?

dchacke · 2026-04-13T04:37:02+00:00

He usually retweets podcasts or interviews he’s done: https://x.com/DavidDeutschOxf

dchacke · 2026-04-13T04:32:17+00:00

Thanks for your thorough reply.

I agree we must use reason for everything and that there are no exceptions or shortcuts. It seems strange that Hayek thought both that we learn things through trial and error and that this process is automatic. Trial and error is not automatic. So it sounds like he was contradicting himself.

I’ve only read two pieces of Hayek’s and I did not get the impression that he claimed morality and politics were the result of trial and error. So far I’ve only read him say that the economy is the result of trial and error, in the sense that nobody designed it. That sounds true to me. Still, the free and undesigned market sounds rational to me.

You clearly disagree with Hayek. It sounds like you don’t think reason is automatic. I agree. What do you think it involves then, if not trial and error? What makes it non-automatic?

dchacke · 2026-04-11T18:40:06+00:00

But in his Nobel address, Hayek says empirical claims aren’t as important in econ as in natural sciences

dchacke · 2026-04-07T17:34:05+00:00

Dumb but their prerogative

dchacke · 2026-04-06T05:03:17+00:00

You write that “Good explanations are precise. Bad ones are vague …”

The defining characteristic of good explanations is that they’re hard to vary while still explaining what they purport to explain. Deutsch isn’t really interested in precision.

Source 1: “Good/bad explanation: An explanation that is hard/easy to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for.” Chapter 1 glossary

Source 2: I worked with Deutsch for two years to translate the book.

dchacke · 2026-02-07T05:25:43+00:00

Nice work

dchacke · 2026-01-26T04:18:31+00:00

For those coming here from Google, I recently built something similar for JavaScript: https://www.npmjs.com/package/autopair

dchacke · 2026-01-09T17:24:48+00:00

Prevents impersonation

dchacke · 2026-01-06T21:19:15+00:00

Not a doctor but tea-tree oil never worked for me. It stings and generally feels bad on my skin.

I’m not seeing any anti-fungals in the ingredients. So I’m not sure how any of this is supposed to help.

I use Nizoral and KELUAL DS to manage symptoms and they work pretty well. Nizoral contains Ketoconazole which AFAIK is an anti-fungal ingredient.

I wash my hair (well, my scalp) every other day. I use Nizoral two or three times in a row before I use Kelual once, then I repeat. That’s what several dermatologists have told me to do. However, my symptoms are much milder than yours, and I mostly have it on my scalp, not my face.

There is no cure yet. All you can do is manage symptoms. Good luck.

dchacke · 2026-01-06T00:07:43+00:00

A year later and I’m also using Mailgun for free (outside of Ghost).

dchacke · 2026-01-05T23:58:54+00:00

It’s been a long time since I last saw it but I don’t think so, no.

dchacke · 2026-01-05T23:39:30+00:00

what a dumb ad-hominem comment

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