Pioneer Press staffers who cover the Vikings take a stab at predicting Sunday’s outcome against the Packers in Green Bay:

Dane Mizutani

Packers 24, Vikings 13: It’s going to be pretty hard to pick the Vikings to win any game until J.J. McCarthy shows massive improvement. He’s been the worst quarterback in the NFL by virtually every meaningful metric. It’s hard to argue with facts.

Jace Frederick

Packers 20, Vikings 14: The Vikings offense struggled at home against a horrible defense last week, so playing against Micah Parsons and Co. at Lambeau doesn’t figure to go well.

John Shipley

Packers 31, Vikings 18: We’ll see what the Vikings are made of emotionally on Sunday. Did the Bears loss break their spirit, or do they have some fight left? This has the makings of an ambush.

Charley Walters

Packers 27, Vikings 17: Look for Packers’ QB Jordan Love to wear out Vikings’ cornerbacks.

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A memory from Nov. 18, 2017, popped up in my Facebook feed the other day.

We were ice fishing on a small lake atop 6 inches of solid ice so smooth it looked like glass.

Not this year. We’ve still got a ways to go before there’s enough ice to convince me to venture out.

Time was, Thanksgiving weekend was kind of the benchmark for venturing out on early ice. I can remember a handful of successful Thanksgiving weekend outings on small lakes in Itasca County of northern Minnesota, but that’s a few years ago now.

A few, as in nearly three decades.

Smaller, shallower lakes are definitely icing over, and YouTubers in some areas already are weighing in with “crazy” and “insane” early ice fishing action in the annual race to be first. As Matt Henson of WDAY-TV reported on Nov. 19, authorities in Lakes Country rescued two teenage boys on Tuesday, Nov. 18, after they broke through thin ice on Straight Lake in Osage, Minn.

This is a tough time of year for those of us who fish. Here in the Northland, we’re in that nasty “tween time,” when most anglers have put away their boats because it’s too cold to sit in a boat – “ice in the eyelets cold,” we used to call it – but it’s not cold enough to make good, solid ice.

And with highs in the upper 30s and even 40s – and lows barely below freezing in the forecast as I write this – safe ice by Thanksgiving is going to be a stretch just about everywhere in this part of the world.

Best-case scenario, early December is probably the more likely option – and that’s provided we get an extended cold snap with temperatures in the single digits or even below zero. On the bodies of water I fish, mid-December, or even closer to Christmas, is the most likely scenario for getting out on early ice.

As the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources clearly states on its website, “there really is no sure answer” when it comes to judging when ice is safe.

“You can’t judge the strength of ice just by its appearance, age, thickness, temperature or whether or not the ice is covered with snow,” the DNR says. “Strength is based on all these factors – plus the depth of water under the ice, size of the water body, water chemistry and currents, the distribution of the load on the ice and local climatic conditions.”

The Minnesota DNR’s ice safety recommendations. (Courtesy of Minnesota Department of Natural Resources)

With that as a backdrop, the DNR and numerous other agencies offer these safety guidelines for clear ice:

Under 4 inches – Stay off.
4 inches – Foot travel only.
5 to 7 inches – Snowmobile or small ATV.
7 to 8 inches – Side-by-side ATV.
9 to 10 inches – Small car or SUV.
11 to 12 inches – Medium SUV or small truck.
13 inches – Medium truck.
16 to 17 inches – Heavy-duty truck.
20+ inches – Heavy-duty truck with wheelhouse.

And if it’s white, cloudy ice, double the thickness guidelines, the DNR says.

I obviously wasn’t following those clear ice guidelines in November 2000, when I got talked into joining a couple of ice fishing pros onto a small lake somewhere between East Grand Forks and Bemidji. These guys have plenty of “cred,” and we wore life jackets, carried ice picks, and used a spud bar to check the ice thickness as we inched our way out to a spot about 100 yards offshore.

Everywhere we walked that sunny November afternoon, the ice thickness was in the “stay off” category. Here’s how I described the experience in the Sunday, Nov. 26, 2000, edition of the Grand Forks Herald:

“I don’t know the physics behind the phenomenon, but early ice makes one of the creepiest sounds known to human ears when it encounters weight. Every jab with the ice chisel sends a ‘ping-like’ sound rocketing from the point of impact and across the frozen horizon. Certain body parts pucker at the sound.”

For this exercise in bravery – foolishness might be the better word – we were rewarded with a few small perch in about four hours of fishing. Two of us crept our way back to shore before dark, while one of the diehards, who stayed past sunset, landed a 13½-inch crappie.

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As creepy as that long-ago encounter was, I felt relatively safe – relatively being the key word here – because I was on the ice with people I trusted, knew what they were doing and carried safety gear.

I ended the story like this:

“If you don’t have that luxury, I’d suggest you wait a little bit longer. There’ll be plenty of time to fish through holes in the ice.”

Then as now, those are words to live by.

For something so admired, so synonymous with merit, the concept of intelligence is remarkably poorly understood.

Our society operates on the assumption that people with greater intelligence deserve access to better schools and better jobs. Many people believe that animals with higher intelligence deserve to be treated more humanely, or at least not used for food. Our tech leaders obsess over comparing human intelligence with the latest AI systems. Many claim that once these systems surpass us in intelligence, they will quickly enslave us, destroy us, or solve all our problems.

How can we compare human and machine intelligence when we can’t decide which species — cats or dogs — is more intelligent?

Scientists who study human or animal behavior and brainpower tend to view intelligence differently, breaking it down into abilities they can actually measure. What impressed them was a recent paper providing experimental evidence that chimpanzees can use reasoning to weigh different strengths of evidence, draw rational conclusions, update beliefs, and recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their own knowledge.

This finding refutes centuries of philosophy that equated reason with human uniqueness, but it makes sense in evolutionary terms, given our relationship to chimps and the understanding that human traits were inherited and shaped by natural selection rather than bestowed by gods. “It’s the strongest evidence yet that we share the planet with another rational being,” said Duke University evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare, who praised the new research in a commentary piece for Science. The significance isn’t about measuring the amount of chimp intelligence, but in understanding how our animal relatives think.

Intelligence is a little like the concept of nobility, said Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has pioneered techniques for studying the cognitive abilities of babies and children. Nobility is a social construct that conflates social status with positive character traits and has been used for centuries to justify the hoarding of power and wealth.

Gopnik explained that in our culture, intelligence is often seen as a mysterious, magical substance people are born with in varying quantities. “It’s this really funny kind of folk idea, and it’s very prevalent among AI researchers,” she said, “and it doesn’t make any sense from the cognitive science perspective.”

What does make sense, she said, is the latest evidence showing that animals can reason. The project was similar in some ways to experiments she’s conducted with preschool-age children. The researchers worked with orphaned chimps rescued from the wild and living at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda. Participation was voluntary — interest varied, but in each of the five parts of the study, between 15 and 23 eager subjects participated.

The chimpanzees were asked to choose between two canisters that might contain a treat, such as apple slices. In some cases, the researchers used a transparent window to let the chimps see where the treats were, while in others, they shook the containers so the animals could hear whether anything was inside.

Sometimes the researchers would add, remove or alter evidence, then give the chimps a chance to change their minds and choose the other canister. In one case, they even presented the chimps with “fake news,” revealing a picture of fruit rather than the real thing. The chimps then discounted the false evidence, recalled other weak clues, and used them to get the correct answer.

Many animals update their beliefs through learning, said Gopnik, but this experiment demonstrated something new; the animals were not just learning but weighing evidence, both new and remembered. And they combined all that information to decide whether they had good reason to change their minds. That requires what Gopnik calls metacognition — the ability to evaluate what they know and what they don’t.

Hare, the Duke anthropologist, agreed that chimps were demonstrating metacognition — to succeed in the task, the animals had to reflect on what they didn’t know.

Coincidentally, this month, Science reported that ChatGPT and similar systems are programmed to lack strong metacognition. As many users have noticed, these systems often give confidently incorrect answers rather than admitting they don’t know. The training, as Science reported, is designed to “reward confident guesses and penalize honest uncertainty.”

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If intelligence is like nobility, that doesn’t mean it’s non-existent, but rather that it’s subjective. Cats are better at some tasks and dogs at others, and which species we consider more intelligent depends on the abilities we value most. Chatbots might have superhuman language skills and instant access to vast amounts of accumulated human knowledge, but they lack curiosity and the kind of probabilistic logic that’s critical for sound judgment. (And with all their overconfidence and sycophancy, they’re proving to be somewhat ignoble.)

Perhaps the reason we’re so obsessed with ranking the intelligence of animals, people and AIs is that such behavior is instinctive for hierarchical primates like us. We’re driven to equate higher rank with dominance, and so it feels natural to assume that if intelligence determines rank, and AI climbs above us, it will dominate — or even drive us to extinction. That’s what we’ve come close to doing to chimpanzees. But then, destroying or crowding out animals that have so much to teach us about ourselves isn’t very intelligent.

F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.

The Minnesota high school football season concludes Saturday, with the final three state football champions being crowned at U.S. Bank Stadium.

Games will be televised on KSTC-Ch. 45 and can be streamed for free at kstp.com/45tv/prep45/mshsl-tournaments/

9-Player: Hills-Beaver Creek (12-0) vs. Hillcrest Lutheran (12-0), 10 a.m.

How much of a wagon is Hills-Beaver Creek? Its 30-14 semifinal win over Fertile-Beltrami marked the first time all season it won a game by fewer than 25 points, and also marked the first time this postseason it allowed first-half points.

Hillcrest Lutheran duel-threat quarterback Ethan Swedberg gives the Comets a shot — he has nine total touchdowns in two state tournament bouts — but they face an uphill battle

Our pick: Hills-Beaver Creek 28, Hillcrest Lutheran 20

3A: Annandale (12-0) vs. Waseca (12-0), 1 p.m.

Two different paths to undefeated records: Annandale has won every-game by double digits, while Waseca has played in four one-score games, including a semifinal thriller against Dilworth-Glyndon-Felton.

Which one bodes better for championship game success? Perhaps Waseca’s propensity to pull out close games. But its defense will have to contain Annandale enough to let the game get that far.

Our pick: Annandale 21, Waseca 13

5A: Spring Lake Park (12-0) vs. Chanhassen (11-1), 4 p.m.

Spring Lake Park has shown the ability to win in multiple ways already in this state tournament. After holding a lethal Alexandria offense to just 12 points in a state quarterfinal victory, the Panthers ran all over St. Thomas Academy in the semis.

Chanhassen has overcome slow starts to win in each of its first two state tournament games, but will likely have to get out of the gates quicker Saturday.

Our pick: Spring Lake Park 21, Chanhassen 17

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