Can reasonable people agree that humans are more intelligent than crows?

Generally. Conditionally.

There are a rare few people who are, and I mean this without exaggeration or irony, not smarter than a typical crow.

But if you want a semi-ironic response anyway:

Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open—you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it’s actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it too complex and people can’t get them open to put away their garbage in the first place. Said one park ranger, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”

Some Humans are more intelligent as Crows, without a doubt.

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I would however argue that the average crow is smarter than the average hacker news commenter.

I think it's like with bears, where parks have the issue of designing a trashcan that is easy for humans to open but hard for bears to open - there's a significant overlap between the dumbest humans and the smartest bears. I'd argue it's the same with crows.

There are some things that crows can do that we can’t that require brainpower. They’re not included in our definition of intelligence, but that’s only because we base that off of what we are capable of.

When we talk about athleticism, we rarely talk about neck rotation, but if we wanted an unbiased comparison with an owl, we’d probably have to start.

Similarly, we’d likely need to start assessing the ability to differentiate, recognize, and remember individuals of different species based on seeing their faces once, if we wanted to be at all fair to crows. They can do that to us pretty consistently, and we are capable of very little in that area. I’ve spent many hours looking at my beloved cat, but if another black, green eyed cat of the same size and with the same level of snout snuck in through my window, I’d need to count toes or rely on sound/behavior cues to tell them apart (though I feel weirdly guilty admitting that).

I think we’re probably smarter than crows are (and definitely, if we use the current definition of “smart”), but I also think they’re probably better suited to the core skill that drives our intelligence, pattern recognition. I suspect that they’d also be better than llms are now, if we could figure out a proper interface for them, but I don’t think they’d enjoy that very much.

I don't have any credentials that make this an informed opinion.

With that disclaimer, have you ever trained dogs?

You hear things being said like a dog is as smart as a toddler, and it's supposed to indicate that the dog is really smart.

Have you ever trained toddlers? They aren't as smart as most dogs.

But smart how? Problem solving? Language acquisition? Logic?

Intelligence isn't one thing. It's a complex of systems that allow an entity to navigate and hopefully thrive in a given environment. Part of that isn't even conscious. It comes from how our brains deal with memory, and there's only so much you can do about it.

In any real sense that matters, no; crows aren't are smart as humans. But it's only a matter of degrees of complexity from the various articles and documentaries about the little buggers. They seem to think in similar ways, just not with the same capacity in any given way. Like, they seem to understand the basics of comparison of numbers, but they don't do math.

But they do learn new things amazingly fast. Faster than some humans I've known. A lot actually. That's one part of intelligence. A big part.

I genuinely believe that if environmental conditions ever favored them developing a similar kind of intelligence as we have, they wouldn't take that many millennia to be taking on basic algebra. They're one of the animals that seem like a candidate to do what humans have done, evolving brain power to be maximized as a survival trait. A lot of what humans are, physically, is in support of the kind of thinking we can do.

Like I said, I don't have a background that qualifies me to speak with authority about this kind of thing. But I do have the type of intelligence that could. Crows don't, so I'll take that as a win ;)

Don't mistake inability with lack of intelligence.

Crows haven't had the need to evolve the same way we did. They can fly and thus don't need jumbojets and such.

There's plenty of animals that show signs of extremely high intelligence. But if you're measuring an animals intelligence by it's ability to build a functional nuclear reactor, it will fail miserably. As would most humans for that matter.

Which is why we measure intelligence with problem solving skills. And Crows have shown themselves remarkable at problem solving.

Like utilizing waterdisplacement to reach water, Cars to crack nuts and even basic bartering skills to trade trinkets for food with other species (like humans).

Crows, in general, are very smart. Not all humans are.

If one species is constantly and for the most part reliably able to trick the other species, then it's more intelligent than the one getting tricked.

Now Crows and Humans trick each other all the time, but (for now) humans come out (mostly) on top.

No idea about the raw idealized intelligence. However one of the biggest advantages humans have as far as societal living and advancement is language, both spoken AND written. Spoken languages are fairly niche amongst species of the world though there is evidence of many mammalian species that have at least the basics of it.

However written language is unique to humans. That alone regardless of any other measurable aspect of "intelligence," has placed human society firmly at the top of the earthly animal kingdom.

It really depends on how you judge being smart. Imagine if you have wings instead of arms and hands, and a beak instead of a mouth. What would you be able to achieve as an organic entity? I'm not sure there's an easy answer on this. I think some animals are smarter than humans, but they just have different bodies, so that's not a fair comparaison to judge on what the human specy has achieved as a whole.

That's a philosophical question at the heart: how can you estimate anything like intelligence with neither collaboration nor a common understanding of intelligence?

That's the gust of it from my understanding: cows show patterns that we interpret as intelligence on w human level. Everything after that is by its nature is human centric.

Personally I'm with you but it's impossible to disprove the existence of intelligence on any other scale they doesn't include human motivation. (I.e. the cow has s higher intelligence than any human but we don't know any way to force or motivate it to show it in a way that we could understand.)

It's easier to grasp as a sci-fi concept for me: what happens if aliens come to earth but we cannot figure out their behavior, motivation, tech or thought. And they don't (want to) manage to close the gap. How could we assess intelligence beyond the tech we see? Perhaps they just found it after all.

I would never venture to guess what goes on in the mind of another non-human creature. I can't agree