Things That Can't Possibly Be True: Study Says Bees Know How To Do Basic Math

NYP- Bees apparently have a grasp of basic math, including addition and subtraction, a new study has discovered. The study, published in Science Advances, reveals that bees have incredibly powerful brains for their size and suggests that more animals than we thought can do math. Scientists trained individual honeybees to recognize colors as plus or minus symbols — and armed with this knowledge, they went on to solve basic mathematical problems set by the scientists. The bees completed the tasks with a success rate of up to 75 percent. So what’s the point of this new discovery? Understanding how a tiny bee brain can do arithmetic could lead to better artificial intelligence (AI) systems, according to the Australian and French team. The study’s author, Professor Adrian Dyer from RMIT University in Australia, said: “Our findings suggest that advanced numerical cognition may be found much more widely in nature among non-human animals than previously suspected.

Nope. That’s not true. I didn’t even read the article because it can’t possibly be a real thing that’s even worth considering. Bees don’t know how to basic math. Bees don’t even know what math is. Math is a construct created by humans beings to better understand the world around us and then these researchers are gonna tell us that the maths know shit like 2 + 2 = 4? Get the fuck outta here. Lemme ask you this. Could I walk up to a bee hive with a bunch of flash cards and get answers outta the bees? No. No I could not. That means they don’t know how to do basic bath. Game, set, match, I win.

You know what I think? I think these researchers did this for publicity. Their jobs are so boring and they get such little traffic with the public that one of them was finally, “Fuck it. Bees can do math.” It’s a great plan because it gets the people taking AND no one can prove them wrong. People like me can say it’s not true or real but then they can be like, “Prove us wrong. Do it. Prove that bees CAN’T do basic math” and they’ve got me. I can’t prove that bees can’t do basic math. I’m not gonna spend my time trying to prove that bees can’t do math so they win. People will write articles about this for a day, it’ll go through the cylce and be gone. People are really out here believing that bees can do math. Couldn’t be me.