So I'm reading about Bernd Heinrich, considered by many to be the world's leading authority on raven intelligence, and these experiments he's doing, that he's written up in this book, Mind of a Raven. It's about how some ravens are capable of solving non-instinctual intelligence and memory problems.

Example: A piece of salami hanging from a string, tied to a perch. The only way for a raven to get the meat is to haul the string up from where it is tied around the perch. Some ravens don't know what the Hell to do, and sit there. Other ravens fly over, check out the string, and haul the salami right up. Hauling salami off sticks isn't in a raven's instinctual knowledge, it's some kind of corvus problem solving.

My point is that it is possible that some ravens are smart enough to think outside of the box, to problem solve on a level most people don't associate with birds.

I'm not really sure what to think about people whose life parabola tops out with happy hours and power lunches and making money. Sure, ravens are smart enough to pull meat up from a thread, but give these same smart ravens another problem domain, and they'll do just as well. These people I see commuting in the mornings are not so adaptable, I think. Put them in the Peace Corps instead of the financial district, and will they do so well?

These people are more like rats that figure out how to run a maze, how to work a single problem, than they are ravens that solve problems. Just like the "in" crowd in high school, these young professionals at the top of their life parabola are king in their tiny little structured world.

Just ranting, sorry.

Update:
If you're going to criticize my grammar, go ahead and put an of between many and these.

And yeah, I know lots of people that are what I describe above. They love their job and they love their money and that's what they're into. I'm referring exclusively to a certain subset of young professionals: not all. I don't care about that so much; each to his or her own.

What bothers me is that they don't understand other people for whom profit isn't a measure of happiness. This guy I know works in the financial industry in NYC, makes a six figure salary, and is blocks from the poorest school district in the nation, in the South Bronx.

He thinks that my friend who is a teacher there is an idiot for not doing something more profitable... with more "upside" was the word (I think) he used. I don't care about big salaries or financial industries or upsides or anything like that, you want to make money, so go crazy, man. But I think the least this guy can do is exhibit a little more tolerance for people that aren't like him. I don't know anything about you personally, so I'm not going to comment on that (which didn't stop you from commenting on me though, did it?), but do you agree?

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