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"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, calli
by jjk166 29d 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
- jimbooonooo 29d agooffloading 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.
- 27183 28d agoThis 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.
- tosapple 28d agoyeah, 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?
- unrented7977 28d agoYes, that's the point Socrates is making here
- zahlman 28d agoGP's point is that Socrates' argument is not fairly comparable to the one made in TFA.
- simonklitj 28d agoI 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.
- 27183 28d ago> 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.
- UpsideDownRide 28d agoBeing 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.
- walt_grata 28d agoIm 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
- sodapopcan 28d ago...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.
- sakjur 28d agoI still dial my parents by number rather than using their contact largely to keep that memory fresh and flexed.
- whattheheckheck 28d agoAnd you know he was right
- wcfrobert 28d agoThe 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.
- mitxela 28d agoIf 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.
- lelanthran 28d agoWe see this posted weekly here. Give it a break. It's old and worn out now.
- TZubiri 28d agoThere'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.
- sodapopcan 28d agoHa, 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.
- sodapopcan 28d agoD'oh, haven't been successful
- plastic-enjoyer 28d agoI 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.
- vermilingua 28d agoI would love to hear more about this, could you expand?
- mitxela 28d agoHe was right, we did that and we now have a society organised around writing to remember.
- scotty79 28d agoHe was kind of on point though.
- twistedpalm 28d agoThe 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
- tehjoker 28d agovery 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).
- rpcope1 28d agoI mean, was he really wrong though?
- vtowntim 28d agoWe know Socrates warned us about writing because someone wrote it down.
- confidantlake 28d agoHe wasn't wrong.
- burnt-resistor 28d agoThis is the key danger of worshipping LLMs as false gods or oracles. They do not have superior answers, only random noise generated to appeal to simplistic, expedient deference of lazy people. All answers thus generated fall victim to an implicit appeal to authority fallacy.