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Gunnar Miller's avatar

The mental image of baboons *volunteering* for an academic study at a sign-up booth in the jungle, staffed by a bespectacled baboon in a lab coat, clipboard in hand, gave me a chuckle. One baboon in line whispers, "I heard the capuchins tried this, and now they're obsessed with data visualization." Fast forward to the experiment, where the baboons are diligently analyzing scatterplots on the screen. One baboon sighs to another: "They told us there’d be snacks. I didn’t sign up for this level of dot density.” Another baboon chimes in, “What’s the tenure track like for a research assistant position?”

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William Ho's avatar

So eventually there'll be the equivalent of a statistics department of baboons, where the oldest one (tenured) signs off the analysis of the younger ones (research assistants). And then you'll have those in the middle for mentoring and teaching (tenure track)

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Joachim Klement's avatar

Just wondering, would there also be a biology department where they perform tests on other bamboos? Or chimps?

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William Ho's avatar

The tests will be done by the baboons themselves and then given to the biology department after internal verification

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Scott Lichtenstein's avatar

No doubt most bonobos would be able to read a chart better than the mentally unfit TV host in the White House at the moment. Come to think of it, I'd trust a bonobo to run the country over the current bozo...

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Joachim Klement's avatar

Well, I think you are pretty optimistic about the skill set of one of the parties involved...

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Scott Lichtenstein's avatar

Can you imagine trying to explain a graph to Trump - I'd love to be a fly on the wall for that one!

Baring in mind we/the US government didn't have a functioning president for months under dementia victim Biden and the empire ran seamlessly, I think a bonobo would actually do a better job...and only requiring bananas for payment would considerably reduce the cost to the public purse!

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FrankFrank's avatar

Who calculated the correlation coefficient? The human group or the baboons?

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Joachim Klement's avatar

I think the computer...

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