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> But ... few people complain about how books corrupt our memory. Socrates absolutely did. > for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the lea

• pm90 9y ago
  Right but there is so much more information of every kind today than what used to exist at the time of Socrates. Attempting to remember all that information would probably be infeasible.
  • kornish 9y ago
    In the same way that reciting Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing is infeasible, right? (poking fun, but only a bit)
    • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      That's feasible. Barely, but feasible. Now try reciting the Library of Congress after one hearing. Or Wikipedia. That's a whole nother level of problem.
      • copperx 9y ago
        I really doubt it's feasible to memorize it in a single hearing without paraphrasing. The human brain couldn't have been different a few millennia ago, and we know that the greeks used the same memorization techniques we use today (e.g., the memory palace, chunking, ...).
        • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
          We also see in history specific people tasked with recitation, and high status coming through that ability. Suggesting it's a rare and learned characteristic.
          • majewsky 9y ago
            Nitpick: That only suggests that this ability is rare, not that it is learned. (Not saying it is purely talent; everything I know about the brain suggests otherwise. But not just the historical evidence.)
  • throwawaycopy 9y ago
    "More and more information, less and less meaning." - Jean Baudrillard "The more words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?" - Ecclesiastes 6:11 "Let's start from the premise that more information, more empowerment, is fundamentally the correct answer" - Eric Schmidt One of these two quotes is not like the others...
    • wil421 9y ago
      “I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book.” -Albert Einstein
      • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Which is clearly false: the meaning of words being readily looked up, for example, or common multiplications. Probably he meant "I never make effort to ...". Which IMO is foolish - for most people - but probably reflects more that he easily memorised facts without effort (something I was fortunate to experience in my youth and which is now sorely missed).
        • j9461701 9y ago
          He made that comment in reference to not knowing the speed of sound off hand, and it is not remotely foolish. It is a very bad student that wastes his time memorizing endless reams of facts, rather than trying to understand the deeper meaning of what they are reading. >Education Is Not the Learning of Facts, But the Training of the Mind To Think -Also Einstein Information is only useful insofar as it furthers understanding. It has no value outside that beyond parlor tricks or game shows, especially in the modern internet age.
          • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
            If you work on subject matter you commit it to memory simply through familiarity, this is a great boon as it simplifies many analyses to recall facts. What good knowing how to think without having the standard inputs; this enables focus on the wider problem rather than interrupting to feed in necessary facts. E=hf ... but hang on, does that make sense, the trained mind can analyse it. Sure you can look up energies, and Planck and frequencies but having any of those to hand makes your work more efficient. It doesn't just have to make theoretical sense except for v. v. few ... and I say that as an erstwhile theoretician. Don't get me wrong. Learning facts as a goal is inherently misdirected. But facts are the atoms on which the trained mind works. Moreover axioms are facts that can't be intuited or derived, they must be learnt of existing systems or defined of new ones. I think the position espoused in those quotes is hyperbolic.
  • Bakary 9y ago
    Only a small fraction of that information is actually useful in improving our lives or giving meaning to them.
    • copperx 9y ago
      Sure, but to get that tiny, useful portion you have to dig through mountains of information.
    • TeMPOraL 9y ago
      I think you'd be surprised. It's kind of like your house. The only necessary things there are the bed and the ceiling. And yet life would be much more miserable without all the random stuff you probably store in various cupboards.
      • Bakary 9y ago
        These days I think of it in terms of cost to benefit ratios. I've for instance spent countless hours on Reddit, and while I got some benefit from it it is clear that the overall cost was negative even if it is impossible to know the exact figures. It's still unclear to me which parts of the Internet provide a good ratio.
        • majewsky 9y ago
          I guess for most sites, the cost-benefit ratio is a function of the time spent, following a steep downward slope. When I spend 15 minutes on HN every workday, it provides me with interesting stories and insights. When I spend two hours, it ends up draining more energy than it replenishes.
  • iClaudiusX 9y ago
    Case in point: Tycho Brahe's exceptionally detailed and accurate astronomical observations. His recorded work on the position of Mars allowed Kepler to establish the laws of planetary motion using elliptical orbits around the sun. Without that data (and logarithm tables and trigonometry), it may have been impossible to test theories of celestial mechanics and physics that kick-started the scientific revolution.
• holografix 9y ago
  The insights and characterisations of human behaviour found in ancient records sometime shock me with their accuracy and depth. Human nature has not changed and it was well, if not better understood, Millenia ago.
  • d0100 9y ago
    Wouldn't that mean, then, that most all "doom and gloom" we get today is as irrelevant as those of old?
    • chillwaves 9y ago
      They didn't have nukes or climate change back then. Human nature + escalating technology is the scary formula we are exploring today.
      • ekianjo 9y ago
        The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did, and there was no way to stop it until people understood what spread it. Of course technology has bright sides as well. Without medicine and many other discoveries we would not be where we are today.
        • mcherm 9y ago
          > The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did No one is worried about the number of people who have ALREADY been killed by nukes, they are worried about the number of people who might be in the future. But I suppose I fundamentally agree with you. I think we may have more to fear from scientifically engineered diseases than we do from nuclear weapons.
          • thinkingemote 9y ago
            Exactly. Every people in their own time considers their time as the most important, crucial and urgent. they consider past times as less important. If you observe this then you can see that in the future people will look back at now and think the same. history tells us the same thing. it's human nature to think that doom and gloom now is much worse than before, simply because we are in this moment and without perspective.
• prophesi 9y ago
  For anyone who wishes to delve deeper into Socrates' arguments and the effects technologies have on our attention spans/memories, I recommend "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" by Nicholas Carr. I read it for a book report in a computer ethics course, and it does a great job at laying out the pros and cons of our constantly connected society. It was written 7 years ago, but it's still relevant as Android and 4G were rapidly rising in usage around then.
• Iv 9y ago
  I was in high school when I first read this opinion (I did not remember it was Socrates though). Also, I learned that Gaul, pre-roman France (where I lived), had a society where the priests/judges, the druids, were forbidden to write down their knowledge. It fascinated me. The idea that books, that were more or less revered depositories of knowledge, could have been seen as anti-intellectual at one time. It pushed me into memorizing stuff. I think it had an unanticipated effect. I thought it would help my overall cognitive capabilities and make me maybe better at science and maths but instead, it gave me a taste for poetry. If you learn poetry for the sake of it, not because you have a recitation exercise, after a while, it become easy. It is not like memorizing the digits of pi: good poetry has a flow. A flow of sounds, a flow of words, a flow of meanings and a flow of emotions. It is easy to dismiss them when you simply read it, but having to learn it makes you connect deeply to the meaning. Hearing it also has a different effect. I now understand why poems, that I used to find uninteresting when skimming over them in books were actually so highly regarded back in the time. That was an interesting experience, but Socrates missed a trend that continues nowadays: the volume of accessible information grows. We need faster processing modes. We need written text so we can skim through a page and dismiss it in a few minutes. We can't do that with oral transmission. That must not make us forget that deeper modes of thought exist. Once we have googled the words we did not know, wikipediaed the summary of the knowledge we lacked, we must fight the urge to keep the flow of information going, reach out to the off button, and dare to stay an hour or two with our mind. Thinking. We memorize things by exerting recalls. We understand things by banging our heads over what we don't understand about them. Acquiring the knowledge is just the first step of acquiring understanding. In this day and age meditation becomes popular amongst intellectuals for a reason, but even if you are not into meditation, do yourself a favor when you learn new things: think about them with only your brain for an hour or two. Thinking does take time but without it information gathering is useless.
  • cheapsteak 9y ago
    Recommendations on intro texts for poetry?
    • Iv 9y ago
      Do like most people these days: learn song lyrics! Songs are really poetry. Some have very deep meaning and good flow. Some will probably resonate with your own feelings. Otherwise I have only bad recommendations in French, but I learned almost all of Cyrano de Bergerac's play and still remember maybe a third of it. In it, "La ballade du duel" flows very well and "la tirade des nez" is a classic that is a very good exercise. I have no clue about English poetry. Despite having a decent written English level, I could never get into poetry in English. I think my pronunciation is not good enough and I have a hard time knowing how some more rare words, common in poetry, are actually pronounced. I would love to have the courage to get into Paradise Lost at one point.
• andrepd 9y ago
  The amount of information in existence today is so absolutely mindblowing it's not even funny. No meaningful comparison can be made with Socrates.
• hyperpallium 9y ago
  I have a terrible memory for arbitrary detail, so studying it is a waste of time for me. Instead I try to learn principles. Hopefully, Socrates would approve of this as learning "truth".
  • j9461701 9y ago
    Socrates would not have approved, but I do not see why we should care. He was a very important philosopher, but he wasn't flawless. His refusal to see the value in a permanent written record was a mistake, as was his over-valuing of memory. Heck, Socrates' own students ignored his teachings on this subject and wrote extensively. That they are what we know him from, and not some oral or memorized tradition, is pretty damning for his opinions on the subject IMO.