Comment by aswegs8
1 month ago
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." - Socrates on Writing and Reading, Phaedrus 370 BC
If one reads the dialogue, Socrates is not the one "saying" this, but he is telling a story of what King Thamus said to the Egyptian god Theuth, who is the inventor of writing. He is asking the king to give out the writing, but the king is unsure about it.
Its what is known as one of the Socratic "myths," and really just contributes to a web of concepts that leads the dialogue to its ultimate terminus of aporia (being a relatively early Plato dialogue). Socrates, characteristically, doesn't really give his take on writing. In the text, he is just trying to help his friend write a horny love letter/speech!
I can't bring it up right now, but the end of the dialogue has a rather beautiful characterization of writing in the positive, saying that perhaps logos can grow out of writing, like a garden.
I think if pressed Socrates/Plato would say that LLM's are merely doxa machines, incapable of logos. But I am just spitballing.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j...
Phaedo != Phaedrus. One is the "writing" one, the other one is, well, about Socrates' execution (also extremely good dialogue!).
The one at issue:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j...
The public domain translations are pretty old either way. John Cooper's big book is probably still the best but im out of the game these days.
AI guys would probably love this if any of them still have the patience to read/comprehend something very challenging. Probably one of the more famous essays on the Phaedrus dialogue. Its the first long essay of this book:
https://xenopraxis.net/readings/derrida_dissemination.pdf
Roughly: Plato's subordination of writing in this text is symptomatic of a broader kind of `logocentrism` throughout all of western canonical philosophy. Derrida argues the idea of the "externality" of writing compared to speech/logos is not justified by anything, and in fact everything (language, thought) is more like a kind "writing."
Presenting this quote without additional commentary is an interesting Rorschach test.
Thankfully more and more people are seriously considering the effects of technology on true wisdom and getting of the "all technological progress clearly is great, look at all these silly unenlightened naysayers from the past" train.
Socrates was right about the effects. Writing did indeed cause us to loose the talent of memorizing. Where he was wrong though (or rather where this quote without context is wrong) is that it turned out that memorizing was by the most part not the important skill to have.
When Socrates uses the same warnings about LLMs he may however be correct both on the effect and the importance of the skill being lost. If we loose the ability to think and solve various problems, we may indeed be loosing a very important skill of our humanity.
You're misinterpreting the quote. Socrates is saying that being able to find a written quotation will replace fully understanding a concept. It's the difference between being able to quote the pythagorean theorem and understanding it well enough to prove it. That's why Socrates says that those who rely on reading will be "hard to get along with" - they will be pedantic without being able to discuss concepts freely.
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While there are dangers to LLMs -science fiction has been talking about this issue for decades (see below) and I think its overblown and the point of the Socrates quote is valid.
e.g the Matrix Reloaded: https://youtu.be/cD4nhYR-VRA?si=bXGBI4ca-LaetLVl&t=69 Machines no one understand or can manage
Issac Asmiov's Classic - the Feeling of Power https://ia600806.us.archive.org/20/items/TheFeelingOfPower/T...
(future scientists discover how to add using paper and pencil instead of computer)
I mean Big Paradigm shifts are like death, we can't really predict how humanity will evolve if we really get AGI -but these LLMs as they work today are tools and humans are experts at finding out how to use tools efficiently to counter the trade offs.
Does it really matter today that most programmers don't know how to code in assembly for example?
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That is interesting because your mental abilities seem to be correlated with orchestrating a bunch of abstractions you have previously mastered. Are these tools making us stupid because we no longer need to master any of these things? Or are they making us smarter because the abstraction is just trusting AI to handle it for us?
Does a student become smarter by hiring a smarter student to write his essays and take his tests for him?
We can also invert that by asking: does a student become smarter by writing their essay on their own?
I would argue that the answer to questions is no. It depends on how you define “smarter”, though. You would likely gain knowledge writing the essay yourself, but is gaining knowledge equivalent to getting smarter?
If so, you could also just read the essay afterwards and gain the same knowledge. Is _that_ smarter? You’ve now reached the same benefit for much less work.
I think fundamentally I at least partially agree with your stance. That we should think carefully before taking a seemingly easier path. Weighing what we gain and lose. Sometimes the juice is, in fact, the squeeze. But it’s far from cut and dry.
It's unclear if you've presented this quote in order to support or criticize the idea that new technologies make us dumber. (Perhaps that's intentional; if so, bravo).
To me, this feels like support. I was never an adult who could not read or write, so I can't check my experience against Socrates' specific concern. But speaking to the idea of memory, I now "outsource" a lot of my memory to my smartphone.
In the past, I would just remember my shopping list, and go to the grocery store and get what I needed. Sure, sometimes I'd forget a thing or two, but it was almost always something unimportant, and rarely was a problem. Now I have my list on my phone, but on many occasions where I don't make a shopping list on my phone, when I get to the grocery store I have a lot of trouble remembering what to get, and sometimes finish shopping, check out, and leave the store, only to suddenly remember something important, and have to go back in.
I don't remember phone numbers anymore. In college (~2000) I had the campus numbers (we didn't have cell phones yet) of at least two dozen friends memorized. Today I know my phone number, my wife's, and my sister's, and that's it. (But I still remember the phone number for the first house I lived in, and we moved out of that house when I was five years old. Interestingly, I don't remember the area code, but I suppose that makes sense, as area codes weren't required for local dialing in the US back in the 80s.)
Now, some of this I will probably ascribe to age: I expect our memory gets more fallible as we get older (I'm in my mid 40s). I used to have all my credit/debit card numbers, and their expiration dates and security codes, memorized (five or six of them), but nowadays I can only manage to remember two of them. (And I usually forget or mix up the expiration dates; fortunately many payment forms don't seem to check, or are lax about it.) But maybe that is due to new technology to some extent: most/all sites where I spend money frequently remember my card for me (and at most only require me to enter the security code). And many also take Paypal or Google Pay, which saves me from having to recall the numbers.
So I think new technology making us "dumber" is a very real thing. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing. You could say that, in all of my examples, technology serving the place of memory has freed up mental cycles to remember more important things, so it's a net positive. But I'm not so sure.
I don‘t think human memory works like that, at least not in theory. Storage is not the limiting factor of human memory, but rather retention. It takes time and effort to retain new information. In the past you spent some time and effort to memorize the shopping list and the phone number. Mulling it over in your mind (or out loud), repeated recalls, exposure, even mnemonic tricks like rhymes, alliterations, connecting with pictures, stories, etc. if what you had to remember was something more complicated/extensive/important. And retention is not forever, unless you repeat it, you will loose it. And you only have so much time for repetition and recall, so inevitably, there will be memories which won‘t be repeated, and can’t be recalled.
So when you started using technology to offload your memory, what you gained was the time and effort you previously spent encoding these things into your memory.
I think there is a fundamental difference though between phone book apps and LLMs. Loosing the ability to remember a phone number is not as severe as loosing the ability to form a coherent argument, or to look through sources, or for a programmer to work through logic, to abstract complex logic into simpler chunks. If a scholar looses the skill to look through sources, and a programmer looses the ability to abstract complex logic, they are loosing a fundamental part of their needed to do their jobs. This is like if a stage actor looses the ability to memorize the script, instead relying on a tape-recorder when they are on stage.
Now if a stage actor losses the ability to memorize the script, they will soon be out of a job, but I fear in the software industry (and academia) we are not so lucky. I suspect we will see a lot of people actually taking that tape recorder on stage, and continue to do their work as if nothing is more normal. And the drop in quality will predictably follow.
I like this commentary on that passage : https://detective-pony.tumblr.com/post/96180330151/pages-21-...
Yup.
My personal counterpoint is Norman's thesis in Things That Make Us Smart.
I've long tried, and mostly failed, to consider the tradeoffs, to be ever mindful that technologies are never neutral (winners & losers), per Postman's Technopoly.
And so we learn that over 2000 years before the microphone came to be, Socrates invented the mic drop.
In all seriousness though, it's just crazy that anybody is thinking these things at the dawn of civilization.
Well, the wisdom part is true.
He was right. It did.
Writing/reading and AI are so categorically different that the only way you could compare them is if you fundamentally misunderstand how both of them work.
And "other people in the past predicted doom about something like this and it didn't happen" is a fallacious non-argument even when the things are comparable.
The argument Socrates is making is specifically that writing isn't a substitute for thinking, but it will be used as such. People will read things "without instruction" and claim to understand those things, even if they do not. This is a trade-off of writing. And the same thing is happening with LLMs in a widespread manner throughout society: people are having ChatGPT generate essays, exams, legal briefs and filings, analyses, etc., and submitting them as their own work. And many of these people don't understand what they have generated.
Writing's invention is presented as an "elixir of memory", but it doesn't transfer memory and understanding directly - the reader must still think to understand and internalize information. Socrates renames it an "elixir of reminding", that writing only tells readers what other people have thought or said. It can facilitate understanding, but it can also enable people to take shortcuts around thinking.
I feel that this is an apt comparison, for example, for someone who has only ever vibe-coded to an experienced software engineer. The skill of reading (in Socrates's argument) is not equivalent to the skill of understanding what is read. Which is why, I presume, the GP posted it in response to a comment regarding fear of skill atrophy - they are practicing code generation but are spending less time thinking about what all of the produced code is doing.
yes, but people just really like to predict dooms and they also like to be convinced that they live in some special era in human history
It takes about 30 seconds of thinking and/or searching the Internet to realize that people also predict doom when it actually happens - e.g. with people correctly predicting that TikTok will shorten people's attention spans.
It's then quite obvious that the fact that someone, somewhere, predicts a bad thing happening has ~zero bearing on whether it actually happens, and so the claim that "someone predicted doom in the past and it didn't happen then so someone predicting doom now is also wrong" is absurd. Calling that idea "intellectually lazy" is an insult to smart-but-lazy people. This is more like intellectually incapable.
The fact that people will unironically say such a thing in the face of not only widespread personal anecdotes from well-respected figures, but scientific evidence, is depressing. Maybe people who say these things are heavy LLM users?
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We are very clearly living through a moment in history that will be studied intensely for thousands of years.
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I know managers who can read code just fine, they're just not able/willing to code it. Tho the ai helps with that too. I've had a few managers dabble back into coding esp scripts and whatnot where I want them to be pulling unique data and doing one off investigations.
I read grandparent comment as saying people have been claiming that the sky is falling forever… AI will be both good for learning and development and bad. It’s always up to the individual if it benefits them or atrophies their minds.
I'm not a big fan of LLMs, but while using it for day to day tasks, I get the same feeling I had when I first started the internet (I was lucky to start with broadband internet).
That feeling was one of empowerment: I was able to satisfy my curiosity about a lot of topics.
LLMs can do the same thing and save me a lot of time. It's basically a super charged Google. For programming it's a super charged auto complete coupled with a junior researcher.
My main concern is independence. LLMs in the hands of just a bunch of unchecked corporations are extremely dangerous. I kind of trusted Google, and even that trust is eroding, and LLMs can be extremely personal. The lack of trust ranges from risk of selling data and general data leaks, to intrusive and worse, hidden ads, etc.
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To understand the impact on computer programming per se, I find it useful to imagine that the first computer programs I had encountered were, somehow, expressed in a rudimentary natural language. That (somewhat) divorces the consideration of AI from its specific impact on programming. Surely it would have pulled me in certain directions. Surely I would have had less direct exposure to the mechanics of things. But, it seems to me that’s a distinction of degree, not of kind.