Comment by jjk166
13 hours ago
"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
-Socrates
offloading thinking is a little/lottle bit different than writing to preserve your thoughts versus memorization. it's more analogous to skipping the writing, plugging your ears, and closing your eyes, while you wait for the answer to be presented before you.
yeah, the centralization and concentration of knowledge and ability through reliance in this manner enables the teacher to escrow all your states pencils at any given moment for whatever reason.
once embedded i can see whole classes of industry dos'd.
logistics, dos'd. it, dos'd. military planning, dos'd. medical, dos'd.
pay us this fee so you can update your nvidia drivers.
it's the unholy marriage of the surveillance and petrol states pushing this.
edit: what happened with vmware?
This offloading was present even with pre-LLM googling. Sufficiently powerful search allows you to forget enough of the story to rely on imprecise recall. This is a form of thought atrophy.
I think this is probably what Socrates meant. He wasn't wrong, it's just that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
Even the "calculators make you forget how to do math" people seem antiquarian to me. But I totally get it when people talk about googling, and AI is another step change in the wrong direction.
To follow that arc backwards in time, maybe Socrates was right after all.
Also telling your expert employees/servants to do something for you.
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Yes, that's the point Socrates is making here
GP's point is that Socrates' argument is not fairly comparable to the one made in TFA.
I don’t suppose he was entirely wrong. I would probably be able to recall a lot more (verbatim) if it all had to be stored in me noggin. I think the trade off worthwhile, however.
Im 45, and i can tell you getting a cell phone absolutely destroyed my ability to memorize phone numbers. During the 90s when i was in highschool i has all my friends numbers, parents work numbers, etc... memorized, i only know my parents and wife now.
If you don't use a skill, that skill atrophies
> If you don't use a skill, that smo atrophies
I don't think the _ability_ to memorize phone numbers is what atrophied here by getting a cell phone. The _need_ did. It's harder to memorize phone numbers today because we lack the practical application of the memory (e.g. only when something fails do we actually try to put that memory to practice). I bet anyone would quickly pick up on memorizing phone numbers if they had to both remember and type in the phone numbers every time they wanted to make a call or text.
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I still remember to this day our house phone number and the numbers of my family, friends and even a payphone down the road, all from 30+ years ago.
I don't even know my partner's number, or email address...
...which can come in handy. Sometimes your cellphone battery dies. I still know my parents' numbers from memory (as well as some of my friends' parents' numbers, though that isn't super useful) but I am concerned about it sometimes.
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> I think the trade off worthwhile, however.
But what if it isn't? Like, if you didn't have the written word to rely on as a crutch, what more could you have accomplished if you didn't have that? Maybe nothing, but maybe much, much more! Who can say in retrospect?
I've always wondered how we'd fare in battle against an extrasolar civilization which achieved technology without writing. They'd be a hell of a lot scarier than we are, in my view.
Being able to pass on precise information without writing them down would be hella impressive in of itself. Currently we fail with simplest ones after a few hops.
He was right, we did that and we now have a society organised around writing to remember.
The thought of reading someone’s writing without having to meet with them and discuss interactively probably evoked the same fears as using AI instead of working with another person interactively.
Then taking writing as the source of truth… who even knows if the author is the original sayer. They could just write things down they heard other people say - the birth of IP theft! And yet, journalism
very interesting perspective, i remember reading thyucledies and he complains about how historians before him would report the first tale they heard, by comparison he worked dilligently to confirm his history (though since he was inventing this process his standards were not quite modern, meaning he didn't rely as much on documentary evidence, and he had a penchant for writing speeches down when it is impossible they are word for word what someone said).
We know Socrates warned us about writing because someone wrote it down.
There's this fallacy where one defends a modern idea by citing criticism to an old idea, thus positioning their modern idea as revolutionary as the classical one that survived the filter of time.
Ha, indeed! I misguidedly turned to Reddit somewhat recently when the activity on the programming forum I spent most of my time on died down thanks to LLMs. As I got sucked into reading various shit posting on AI, there are multiple quotes daily along these lines. Many are written in a way as if it's the first time anyone has said it (probably most of them are bots). I finally deleted my Reddit account.
Anyway, a particularly funny one I read recently was "Ya, it's just like how musicians who didn't accept synthesizers got left behind." This person apparently believes there have been successful musicals acts based purely around traditional instrumentation since the ~80s.
The modern world has way too much content to commit to memory. Our brains would explode. Maybe 2500 years ago it was still possible to functioned as an adult without writing things down.
If we didn't have writing we wouldn't have to memorize that much stuff. The world would probably be worse for it. But that wouldn't have been obvious in Socrates' time.
He was kind of on point though.
I think it was only after I had familiarised myself with hermeneutics that I really understood why the written word is problematic and what Socrates took issue with in writing.
I would love to hear more about this, could you expand?
And you know he was right
I mean, was he really wrong though?
We see this posted weekly here. Give it a break. It's old and worn out now.