4 ms·

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
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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

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