11 ms·

This reads like Plato's warning (through Socrates' words) 2,400 years ago that writing will make people forgetful: "For this invention [writing] will produce f

• bombolo 3y ago
  Well he was right. Do you know anyone that knows a book by memory?
  • andy_ppp 3y ago
    We just use our brains differently now, mostly to find ways that support our default positions, that leave our minds unchallenged and certain.
    • bayindirh 3y ago
      The thing is our bandwidth is limited and we allocate it differently now. However, not all replacements are beneficial and adding external dependencies adds points of failure. Challenging yourself is conscious decision. Make choices to challenge yourself, and don't build an echo chamber.
    • RealityVoid 3y ago
      Hah, as if people 2000 years ago were more open to challenging ideas.
      • musicale 3y ago
        It's remarkable what some 200,000 people (maybe fewer?) in ancient Athens were apparently able to come up with.[1] They even did pretty well with computing with the Antikythera mechanism and its predecessors; though, like Babbage, they were limited by the manufacturing technology of the day. [1] https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1165/ancient-greek-inventions/ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1165/ancient-greek-inve...
        • lifeonlars 3y ago
          Not sure this is a representative sample of "people 2000 years ago".
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • maxbond 3y ago
      As I recall Socrates was put to death by the ancient Athenians for "corrupting the youth" by encouraging them to be critical of dogma.
  • dredmorbius 3y ago
    Books (largely) aren't written for memorisation these days, with possible exceptions of some poetry, or children's books. Classic oral literary traditions are based on rhyme, meter, repetition, simile, metaphor, and references to cultural touchstones and themes, for the most part, all of which strongly assist with memorisation. These are not only necessary for a literature which isn't written down and instead is passed on through generations orally, but also quite likely represents a survivorship bias in that works which didn't exhibit these patterns didn't survive. And of course the versions we know are the end of a long pipeline of transmission (or the world's largest and oldest game of telephone), captured in writing and then passed on to us as (among) the first written traditions. I've committed a few poems and homilies to memory, one example for nearly thirty years now. I do refresh that recollection from time to time (and realised I was dropping a stanza consistently). It's an interesting counterexample. Then again, I turned up a piece earlier today I'd written myself about eight years ago and had all but no recollection of.
  • lordnacho 3y ago
    Isn't it a thing of honor in the Islamic world to be Hafez (?), someone who has memorized the Quran? Of course I have no way to check whether it's done correctly, but from what I hear a lot of people have done this.
  • ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    The point was that with Plato (but also ~2,000 years before his time, with the Sumerians, who probably invented writing) we were already discovering that we don't have to bring the exterior into an inside which we call "self", memory, we can actually leverage stigmergically [1] the environment to enhance and extend the "self", i.e. by writing, leaving a mark; the Greek word grapho γράφω [2] meaning literally to carve. Not sure if LLMs will enhance our current "self" by themselves, but once we get a chip or two inside our brains, once we start controlling the cells to regenerate or grow specific limbs [3], we will surely consider our present "selves" as tiny as we consider the "self" of one of our cousins, the chimpanzee, in a zoo today. The journey and expansion of the "self" is merely starting. [1] "the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same or different agent", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy [2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B3%CF%81%CE%AC%CF%86%CF%89#Ancient_Greek https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B3%CF%81%CE%AC%CF%86%CF%8... [2] "HCN2 Rescues brain defects by enforcing endogenous voltage pre-patterns", https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03334-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03334-5
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • leroy-is-here 3y ago
    If we wrote entire books in song, they could probably be memorized. Shakespeare attempted some of that work.
    • EleanorKonik 3y ago
      Unironically one of my favorite uses of chatgpt is to tell it to rewrite things as a Homeric epic in the style of Tennyson so it's more pleasant to read aloud and I have a better chance of remembering it
• bayindirh 3y ago
  Plato's warning is true, actually. Since I started to write, I remember less and less about the things I have written down, because the brain replaces them with a pointer. However, writing for thinking and writing for storage is two different things, and it activates different parts of the brain. I'm an avid pen and paper user, and using a real pen on a paper allows me to think much more deeply. It regulates thinking speed, so things doesn't escape or my focus doesn't get derailed. Also it changes how brain works so it can think better. Also, blogging and writing documentation at work made me a much better thinker, because converting these abstract concepts to meaningful sentences with a context and easy to understand structure affects also how clearly you communicate in other parts of your life. Offloading this really robs you of the joys and power of meaningful communication on many mediums.
  • anon-3988 3y ago
    Perhaps having a conversation with an LLM will help thinking even further? I am prone to thinking out loud (in private) and it helps me a lot.
    • bayindirh 3y ago
      An LLM is not a conscious entity, and while it can babble and assemble meaningful sentences, it has no guarantee of correctness, a baseline honesty, and other small bits and pieces we value in a conversation. It's just a sentence builder. As a result, it can't replace a real human being backed by real experience and thoughts, hence it can't be as useful. I converse with myself, too, but it's not the same either with a different human being or an artificial construct which can babble meaningful sentences. Currently, we simply ignore or don't understand the fact that the meaning of a sentence is not solely built with word order. There are higher orders of information carried implicitly, and they are not articulated in words. Hence an LLM can not replace, even mimic a real human being in a conversation.
      • hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Whilst by no means a new idea, physical and digital zettelkasten may interest some folks more than conversing with an LLM. Some people describe it as conversing with yourself or having a second brain. I don't find discourse with an LLM to be productive, but I do find surfing my zettelkasten to yield new and novel ideas, especially when it comes to problem-solving and research. However, I'm still on industry forums and communities like HN to hopefully have new and conflicting thoughts thrown my way by peers. That's my primary concern with LLMs, a lack of fresh perspective that has all the nuance of experience and understanding behind its output.
• nstart 3y ago
  > For this invention [writing] 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; That is correct. I mean, some of that is exactly why I write at least 5000 words a day of journal notes while working. Because I want to offload everything from memory to a written form that is indexed. > and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant... This part is where we veer into prediction of how it will alter people and it is both right and wrong. I think the education system has shown us it's possible to have a great memory and to remember many facts and still be ignorant. At the same time, there's so much material that can be consumed and people have surface knowledge of many things and once you dig into a conversation with them on it, the ignorance pops up and it turns out that they don't know much about the topic. I know this. This has been me on many occasions and is still me on some occasion. >... and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise. Again, there's some truth to this. I think about the times where I've jumped into a conversation about politics with some half baked knowledge that I read somewhere but failed to understand or recall correctly and I think I must have a looked a fool at those times. But then again, I've course corrected here and there and I've spent time writing and sharing thoughts with others where I've used previous writings to pull up facts and my own synthesis, and I feel like I've been a better participant at times like that. In that way, writing has helped me steer away from ignorance. I can't comment further though on the quote because I've never read the rest of the context so I may be missing out on some stuff. I think Paul is on to something here though. I can't count how many thoughts I've had that I thought were clever but when I started to write the thoughts down and organize it on my own, I discovered for myself that either I didn't have enough evidence to prove myself entirely or that I was just flat out wrong. Writing is a form of thinking in my opinion. And if we don't write, we do lose that side of thinking too. I do appreciate though that Paul doesn't go further into predicting the consequences as Plato's warning does here. But I'll be willing to bet that Paul is right that there will be some negative consequences for sure.
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• marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Plato's criticism is very true on an individual basis. What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances. It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his warning against false wisdom is more relevant than ever today when it feels like half the people you talk to online are just googling up wikipedia articles to base their world view upon on the fly. --edit-- sometimes me not grammar good
  • largepeepee 3y ago
    It's also useful to point out that historical verbal tradition trained a very specific type of memory recall but that doesn't automatically make anyone wise. Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you now have the wisdom to apply that in a particular circumstance. Very much like early AI models.
    • marginalia_nu 3y ago
      I think the contrast should be between studying and internalizing a subject versus having the ability to look up a subject. That seems the most true to Plato's intention. It's common and easy to fall into considering the things you could look up as things you already know. What's the difference, one might ask? What's the problem with offloading some of this knowledge and free up space in your head? Well the thing when you learn something is that it doesn't just permit access to the information, it also permits synthesis of new ideas. The sum of knowledge is greater than its parts. A very concrete example: As someone who only speaks English one may look up the Latin terms 'manus' (hand) and 'facere' (to act/do/make); but unless you actually do, you'll probably not immediately grok the etymology of the English term 'manufacture'.
      • _glass 3y ago
        Exactly. My compsci prof was forcing us to learn so much by heart, but then it's internalized and you start to think in those terms. Right now I am writing my PhD thesis in management and in the beginning I didn't have all of those papers really in my head. But now slowly that knowledge accumulates and I can think through things I couldn't think before. But on the other hand, I now think, how could I not understand that, it's trivial. And to add, it is the same for literature and poems. If you know a poem by heart, it's not just fancy to recite it, but that you start to really incorporate part of that language.
• Arisaka1 3y ago
  I can only begin to wonder what would his opinion on Google search would be since we (developers) always practice the "don't memorize what you can easily search", and there's a sizeable amount of people claiming that memorization shouldn't even be a concern most of the time, and that's an advice given to people who are new in the field (like myself).
  • marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Do people really practice this? Like I usually physically unplug my computer from the network as I develop as it's such a distraction to have emails and stuff popping up. Doesn't really feel like a limitation to not be able to look stuff up.
    • Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      I go in the completely opposite direction nowadays. I have chatgpt [*] up, I use google searches, I have online api documentation and tutorials open. I log on to IRC and chat with (other) skilled developers. (psst... I even read stack overflow ... sometimes [*]) ... so ... I definitely use the internet a lot while developing. As mentioned above, I do try to research things to the point of understanding. Which is something human contact definitely helps with. To stay on topic: ChatGPT is obviously less good, but is often good enough, is patient, and guaranteed to answer you in a couple of seconds. [*] My exact workflow would not quite fit into this footnote, but I seldom cut-and-paste answers, unless it's for something exceptionally non-critical. I try to understand what is written and then type out my own version (which should be very close), or at very least I type it across by hand rather than use ^C-^V. (the latter is an edge case). In general, there's this AI-koan about how some things only work if you also understand them, which has a kernel of truth to it. ( http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html first one about tom knight)
  • Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    I think understanding is more important than both. Even if you're cut off fro the internet somehow, you can still re-derive things if only you understand them. And understanding also allows you to solve novel problems.
• BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
  Plato turned out right. I'm not extremely old and I still remember time before the Internet, when to know something, you had to look it up, which took ages, so you simply had to know it. Yourself. We measured intelligence by the things you knew. We still have shows with questions based on this concept. This concept no longer makes sense in the modern world. But it used to. Writing is a crutch, Internet even more so, and AI even more so. Eventually you can build the entire thinker out of those crutches and you need no humans anymore.
  • yawnxyz 3y ago
    We measured intelligence by the number of memorized facts we'd internalized, but little did we know that collecting more facts doesn't make us more intelligent
    • BulgarianIdiot 3y ago
      Well, "intelligent" has always been a murky term, and as tech is rapidly surpassing us in every way, it'll become even more meaningless as times goes on.
• dalbasal 3y ago
  This is perhaps abstract and tangent but.... Especially for this quote, I like attributing it to Socrates as Plato did. We obviously don't know the details and nuances. However, I feel it captures the (perhaps inexact) tension between Socrates' old, mostly oral tradition of philosophy and Plato's newer tradition of written philosophy. It's ancient Marshall McLuhan. Oral philosophy and written philosophy create different philosophies, not just a different medium for the same philosophy.
• yason 3y ago
  Plato had it easy... When we were young, there was no memory. You had to work everything out yourself, each time. And it was a hard life having none of that fancy thing of memorizing but, frankly, life was better for it.
• nforgerit 3y ago
  Plato.. wasn't that the guy who invented the acronym "IIRC"?
  • asimpletune 3y ago
    I think that was actually homer. “Speak muse tell us the deeds of…” (or something to that effect)
• Borrible 3y ago
  Remembering changes memory. It embeds what is remembered in a current context. Did Plato take this into account?
• Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  There were the same warnings about the printing press, both books and newspapers; "kids don't play anymore, they read books all day", or "people don't share news anymore, they all read their own newspapers". I'm not going to deny it's a change, but it's too early to decide if it's a bad change. Every generation has its own big shift in the past 100-200 years, and every generation complains about the change.
• rodelrod 3y ago
  Most of the comments here are assigning this as Plato's opinion. I'd just like to point out that Plato very rarely wrote in his own voice so it's very hard to say if it's his views or not that are being expressed. In this case however, this is almost certainly an expression of Socrates' views, not Plato's. Not only because it's in the voice of Socrates but also by what's transparent in their actions: Socrates didn't leave anything in writing and Plato left us arguably the most important written corpus of classic Greek philosophy. Maybe he felt ambivalent about it, but he certainly thought there was a value in the writing.
• tim333 3y ago
  It may be true that writing makes people worse at remembering unaided, but better if they can check their diary. I imagine ChatGTP type things may likewise make people lazier at unaided thinking but better at AI aided thinking. I tried asking ChatGTP what it thought and it came back with >... it's also important to note that technology is a tool, and its impact largely depends on how it's used. For instance, AI writing tools ... can be used to augment human creativity and productivity, rather than replace it. These tools can help writers brainstorm ideas, overcome writer's block, write more quickly, and even learn to write better by providing examples and suggestions. >Moreover, the use of AI tools might also stimulate new forms of thinking. Just as calculators didn't eliminate the need for mathematical understanding but rather allowed for more complex problems to be tackled, AI writing tools could help individuals refine and expand their thinking, enabling them to tackle more complex writing tasks or express ideas more effectively. Which is kind of interesting - I didn't think of writers block on my own for example. Also lazy thinks at the moment probably tend to just go along with what they see in the media. AI aided thinking could improve on that.
  • happycube 3y ago
    Yeah - so much of writer's block is looking at an empty page/screen. It's very often easier to fix something bad than to write something good.
• bravura 3y ago
  I’ve argued that if ChatGPT means that motivated students spend less time doing expository writing, and more time: * learning to ask good questions * learning to fact check * learning to edit the writing of others Then they have truly learned the Socratic method. Which is a much more valuable tool than writing from scratch solipsistically: being able to actively engage with the writing of others.
• EGreg 3y ago
  Actually, I always found this part much more interesting: You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever. Because it is now not the case, and AI trained on a corpus of many books can in fact say something new. That and Meno's paradox!
• derrida 3y ago
  It's true. People can memorize 100'000s of words of text and this ability was common place among learned people. The pali canon is an example. I found myself remembering huge amounts, having just read a text, with no intentional effort to recall after a month in a forest monastery and in the 4 months I was there but afterwards when exposed to the internet and sensory stuff again found my ability to recall texts had gone. "What is the cause of people forgetting texts they had learned before?" I can't remember the precise answer but that was one such line in the texts. Today if you say that you sound kinda crazy.` but like socrates there's still a few orders of wandering mendicant homeless-like orders out there (the theravada forest tradition being an example)
  • mananaysiempre 3y ago
    > [W]hen exposed to the internet and sensory stuff again [I] found my ability to recall texts had gone. The overstimulation could be part of it as well, couldn’t it? There isn’t a lot of other information-rich inputs in a monastery. Holding a summer school in a forest or on an isolated resort seems like exploiting a similar idea, and it does work quite well (for a month or so, before isolation sets in).
• samuell 3y ago
  Whether this applies depends on what situation you are supposedly replacing by writing. If you replace intense IRL dialogue and discussion, with writing, this might be the case. On the other hand, if you replace just letting your thoughts fade in the void, with writing them down as coherent though out ideas in writing, I would argue that the writing has actually both triggered retention from memory (thus exercising the memory), and helped you critically assess and make your own thinking clearer. Thus, I think writing is an extremely helpful tool for processing your thoughts for most knowledge workers who are not already involved in constant dialogue with others (which is most of us I guess).
• NoWizards 3y ago
  I have seen this happen before my eyes: When i was young (~17 y.o) i was able to remember all my family IDs, my friends phone numbers and a lot of data about them. Now i rely a lot on my smartphone to tell me their phone numbers, their birthdays, their address, etc... (Sadly today i dont even know the phone number of my gf, out of pure laziness). As i have become more and more lazy and let the tools do their job i'm losing my own skills on it "because i need my brain for bigger things - sure".
• jjk166 3y ago
  Good thing Plato disregarded Socrates' advice and wrote that down
• euroderf 3y ago
  So like, if writing is one of many extensions of man, then Plato is an anti-McLuhan.
• beepbooptheory 3y ago
  Maybe kinda pedantic but, this is not Plato/Socrates saying this here, but Socrates telling Phaedrus what King Thamus said to Thoth. It's kinda important I guess, because Socrates is ultimately somewhat ambivalent by the end of the dialogue on this issue. Consider also Derrida's thoughts on these matters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy)
  • ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    Sure, the game of différance [1] can be played till the end of the universe. Socrates is well known as an aporia [2] lover, but at the end of the day even he had to take an executive decision, leave the agora, and go home to the nagging wife [3]. Ancient Greek misogyny aside, Xanthippe can be interpreted as Socrates' aporia solver, in the same manner his 'daemon' [4] would only tell him "No", Xanthippe would tell him "Yes". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthippe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthippe [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon#Socrates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon#Socrates