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ppsreejith 9 hours ago [-]
It's useful to remember that Socrates was contrasting the existing Oral culture vs the emerging Literate Culture (Plato) , and the _enormous_ social differences between them. i.e not just rejecting new technology because it's new.
Unlike Oral cultures where a point of view can be questioned and held accountable, a written version changes these expectations since it can only be conveyed one-way, i.e a trust-me mentality.
Secondly, humans having evolved in an oral world are used to much greater exertions and development of their memory (eg: recalling and narrating complex oral epics) which writing (and later computers) greatly weaken.
> Secondly, humans having evolved in an oral world are used to much greater exertions and development of their memory (eg: recalling and narrating complex oral epics) which writing (and later computers) greatly weaken
In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.
But the point about culture of questioning is an interesting one I hadn't heard before.
ppsreejith 4 hours ago [-]
> In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.
Yeah, good point. At a cultural level, this was a change from an Oral world where _knowing_ what to recall, being able to, and being 'witty' about it mattered a great deal; to a Literate world where things could be cited, 'looked up', and compared.
WCSTombs 3 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the Ong quote:
> Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274–7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato's Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.
Wasn't Plato writing this stuff down? Why would he argue against what he was literally doing at that moment?
I think I'm also not clear on who "Socrates" is supposed to be here and his relation to Plato. The article attributes the argument to the actual person, while Ong seems to consider him not only as one of Plato's characters, but as some sort of self-insert for Plato, to ascribe the argument to Plato himself.
xtiansimon 1 hours ago [-]
> “Why would he argue against what he was literally doing at that moment?”
Plato’s writing style used historical and invented characters who argued in a dialogue.
“In some of his works, it is evident one of Plato’s goals is to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and the dialogue form is being used for this purpose.”
What more puzzlement than to follow the hero into confusion and doubt, only to be lead out by the brilliance of his later unfucked arguments?
I just a guess…
bsenftner 2 hours ago [-]
Socrates comes from a period, the tail end of that period, where all learning was oral. Writing was "new". He observed, which is provable and true, that learning from a written word perspective is a weaker form of learning than from an oral perspective. From the simple fact that when information is delivered orally, questions can be asked, it is a 2-way communication. Not so with writing. With writing, the student must follow their reading with additional oral use and trial uses of the information, or it is lost completely. While that same information initially gained in understanding via oral lessons can often be put to use immediately, the oral instructional path is more complete, it allows questions and answers during the learning process. While a written lesson requires human interactions to supplement that learning for it to hold.
TheOtherHobbes 13 minutes ago [-]
This is absolutely, objectively false.
Spoken Q&A sessions are not neutral.
The origin of rhetoric is oral persuasion, not the transfer of objective information. Oral conversations are noisy AF, easy to dominate, allow speakers to lie with "I didn't say that", and to use persuasive rhetorical tricks to confuse and persuade instead of enlightening.
We've all been in meetings where people talk at each other, or everyone says their part with no connection to the rest, and previous points are forgotten almost immediately even if they're valid, true, relevant, and important.
Likewise lectures - good luck teaching anything scientific without allowing notes.
Writing gives the recipient time to stop, ponder, understand, and - on a good day - disagree and criticise.
It doesn't prevent questions at all. It encourages them, and gives them time to mature and deepen. You may not be able to ask the original writer - especially if they're dead - but you will always be able to find comments and opinions from others.
If you put all of these together you get an argument from status, not from effectiveness.
Being a teacher/philosopher was a career, and writing endangered that.
Superficial in-the-moment wit and memory were always better for entertainment than expanding human knowledge.
card_zero 7 hours ago [-]
The quoted Seventh Letter limits the argument to writing about philosophy, not writing about other things: "There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another ..."
There's also the objection to "putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness". If I was being uncharitable I could say that he fears criticism, like he's saying the ideas will be ruined if taken outside of his Svengali-like reality distortion field. (Or more charitably, he wants a good faith environment to discuss them in, instead of exposing them to hostile trolls who just won't get it.)
(This is supposedly a letter written by Plato, but probably is more like fan fiction written by his contemporaries.)
Mikhail_Edoshin 4 hours ago [-]
This is more like a dancer or a martial artist refusing to write a book about his craft on the ground that the required understanding cannot be passed this way. With dancing this is more obvious than with philosophy, so writing on philosophy is more dangerous, as the reader may mistake the false knowledge for the truth.
scotty79 15 minutes ago [-]
> the _enormous_ social differences between them. i.e not just rejecting new technology because it's new
Isn't it always like that, every time?
fehu22 2 hours ago [-]
not true all precde egyptians
joinHNtheysaid 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
djaro 38 minutes ago [-]
Besides, any argument regarding new technologies that starts with "well Socrates was against writing..." is bad because the new technology is not writing. Even if Socrates didn't have any real arguments and was simply hating "because it's new", that would have no connection to whatever technology you're making now. People have hated both good and bad developments. People have hyped both good and bad developments. Pointing at Socrates and saying "see, he was against writing" doesn't work because someone else can simply point at the steam-powered car or zeppelin or one of the countless other technologies that did end up going nowhere.
On a similar note, any argument along the lines of "well, the elderly have always thought the new generation was getting worse, just look at Socrates saying the youths have no manners" or something. Besides the fact that Athens did fall and lose its entire overseas empire right around when Socrates was old, and he thus may have had a point, it's also just... possible for things to get better or worse? New generations are growing up under completely different circumstances with different technologies, of course Gen Z and Gen Alpha will be doing better in some areas and worse in others than Gen X or Millenials.
Both arguments fall into the fallacy of "you are criticizing A. But 100 years ago, someone criticized B, and they were wrong" which is just like... yeah A and B are not the same thing. Young people 2000 years ago are not young people now, even if Socrates 2000 years ago was wrong in criticizing the youth of Ancient Athens, that has no bearing on modern arguments. Even if Socrates was wrong in criticizing reading, that has nothing to do with modern criticisms of social media, crypto, AI, video games, etc.
scotty79 10 minutes ago [-]
> Even if Socrates didn't have any real arguments
He had arguments though. And they were correct and irrelevant. Just like the arguments against calculators, computers, wikipedia, AI. Or against farmers diet (as opposed to hunters/gatherers diet).
Do technology makes as dumber? Always, at least in few ways. Does it matter? It hasn't mattered for last 10000 years, no reason to think this time it's different.
Kim_Bruning 10 hours ago [-]
It feels historically vertiginous to see Socrates weigh in on <artificial> <intelligence> , 2000 years ago. [1]
"And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing"
--
[1] Because words are literally artificial marks on paper, and he's literally [2] questioning their intelligence here.
[2] Except he's not, is he? He's verbally questioning their intelligence, because he's actually opposed to doing anything literally literally. [3]
[3] This is getting me twisted in philosophical knots.
perilunar 28 minutes ago [-]
> He's verbally questioning their intelligence, because he's actually opposed to doing anything literally literally.
Well, we don't literally know that — we only know that Plato wrote that he said so, and as other have suggested, maybe Plato verballed him.
thisisauserid 44 minutes ago [-]
Socrates deemed writing a 'pharmakon,' a word that can simultaneously mean both a remedy and a poison.
PowerElectronix 5 hours ago [-]
Well, for someone whose business was giving lectures it's natural to see the written word as a threat and to point out its only flaw (there's nothing more than what's written) instead of its virtues. Business wouldn't be booming as much if everyone could access knowledge at any time, anywhere.
georgearvanitis 3 hours ago [-]
Socrates was not “in business” as a teacher and did not charge fees for his conversations. Τhe Sophists typically taught rhetoric and other subjects for payment, whereas Socrates explicitly distanced himself from this.
“Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting … if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence.”
1298ahg 11 minutes ago [-]
The written word is nothing like paying a rent to an oligarch across the ocean in order to get access to information that was stolen in the first place.
So please come up with another talking point. Not every historical anecdote where someone opposed some kind of progress can be applied to centralized data centers that contain stolen material.
jongjong 11 hours ago [-]
Initially, I thought Socrates' stance on writing was some kind of eccentricity but now that I have seen first hand how the meaning of words can change over time and differ between people and places, I now have a better understanding of how much context is lost in writing.
When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.
When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.
Also, subjective experience-based words like 'difficult', 'easy', 'entertaining', 'funny' or even 'good' and 'evil' can vary widely between individuals. I didn't realize this until I met certain people who had very different values to mine. They had completely different definition of 'good' and 'evil' or 'right' and 'wrong'.
Talking to these people is strange and sometimes uncomfortable because you're using the same language and can 'understand' each other superficially, but you know you're not actually speaking the same language. You know they interpret what you're saying differently; they have fundamentally different goals and beliefs about the world and about you.
For example, some action or belief which might be second-nature to you, might actually be seen as strange and a weakness from the other person's perspective. But there are many, many distortions like this.
In fact, no two humans understand the same language in the same way. Often, what people believe, is shockingly different; you just never realized because you never discussed in depth and never defined your words and broke them down into their atomic parts... And in elite social circles, many taboos exist precisely to prevent any such exploration from occurring as such explorations might jeopardize relationships. Many relationships serve a strategic purpose and aren't about truth discovery.
v9v 2 hours ago [-]
Even in the quote given in this article, most instances of the word "word" are "logos" in Greek, which means something closer to speech, argument, reasoning, logic, etc. This doesn't really change the meaning of the quote dramatically, but some slight nuance is lost.
asdff 9 hours ago [-]
It makes you wonder about not just writing but language as a whole. In transcription we clearly lose important dimensionality such as tone, intent, or body language. Socrates seems to have been alluding to accessing information beyond what was merely initially offered as well, e.g. follow up questions.
What sort of dimensionality do we lose when thoughts go from ephemeral forms transcribed into concrete english language structures? Is this lingua franca holding us back in some ways from different thought patterns that might be better in some ways?
Dream states or psychedelics probably get you closest to this sort of "knowing without having the knowing put into discrete words" state of low level cognition. I wonder what might be there in our minds if we managed to strip our thinking of being bound by the limited framing offered through our languages?
WCSTombs 3 hours ago [-]
> When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.
True, but I don't think leaving it unwritten makes it better.
r3trohack3r 6 hours ago [-]
> When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.
On the one hand, yes, I agree with you.
On the other hand, I’ve played the game of telephone. I can’t imagine a game of telephone played over multiple generations has any sort of fidelity.
ds_opseeker 3 hours ago [-]
Perhaps if your imagination included a game of telephone which includes multiple error correcting codes/mechanisms, when instruction in those mechanisms is part of the teaching, and when preserving the wording is valued by most/all participants in the game/culture/conversation?
Here is one example where knowledge was well maintained over 12000 years.
Early on my corporate career, I quickly realized “have” had 5 distinct definitions.
antman 9 hours ago [-]
Do you have those definitions?
Andrex 7 hours ago [-]
He must have had them at one point.
Terr_ 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, he would have had to have had them, hadn't he?
WCSTombs 3 hours ago [-]
You had me with that one. (I don't mean had...you know what I mean.)
jongjong 10 hours ago [-]
Even corporations realized that the word "done" has many definitions.
watwut 6 hours ago [-]
Also, and I found this idea in that newest translation of Homer, remembering is a kind of technology. We do not write books, poems, songs or tv shows to be remembered. But, when people relied on memory, they did structured knowledge so that it is easier to remember.
That is where rhyme and repetition comes from. We kind of lost how to do that.
But then again, when you talk to people who don't learn because "you can find it on the internet anyway", they come across as dumb. When you encounter people who can do basic arithmetic because calculator, there are situation where they are ... dumb and not useful. When you encounter people who use car to get everywhere, they cant really walk - they think 1km is a long hike. It is going to be the same with ai.
watwut 6 hours ago [-]
Tech today: after over a decade of hypes that either led nowhere or were mainly successful at facilitating frauds or damaging society, we take it personally when people hate our new hyped product.
So, we go to Socrates (without really knowing much about the guy other then 1-2 anecdotes) as he is our new hype salvation. Cause it is impossible for this our new hyped tech to cause harm, because writing and Socrates something something 2000 years ago. Also, it will destroy the world and replace people which means you have to give us more money now and celebrate us.
antoni4040 4 hours ago [-]
Socrates was right in a sense, if you consider how for 2000 years Plato and Aristotle were seen as authorities on all matters, especially by the Church.
They are still considered by many people as the greatest philosophers of all time, especially by those who have never read them.
casey2 6 hours ago [-]
It took writers 2400+ years to solve Socrates' UX complaint, we can now talk to previously written text and it's pretty close to the original context. lets hope AI is a bit quicker in solving their own UX complaints.
4gotunameagain 6 hours ago [-]
From the linked article :
And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing.
And now imagine that the only one and same thing the LLMs say is not only fixed, but intentionally steered as the biggest and most inflexible propaganda mechanism we have ever seen.
Especially given the lack of competition in the space, and people mostly using models from 2 or 3 providers.
Unlike Oral cultures where a point of view can be questioned and held accountable, a written version changes these expectations since it can only be conveyed one-way, i.e a trust-me mentality.
Secondly, humans having evolved in an oral world are used to much greater exertions and development of their memory (eg: recalling and narrating complex oral epics) which writing (and later computers) greatly weaken.
Ong makes a similar argument in Orality and Literacy (1982) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7182447-most-persons-are-su...
In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.
But the point about culture of questioning is an interesting one I hadn't heard before.
Yeah, good point. At a cultural level, this was a change from an Oral world where _knowing_ what to recall, being able to, and being 'witty' about it mattered a great deal; to a Literate world where things could be cited, 'looked up', and compared.
> Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274–7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato's Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.
Wasn't Plato writing this stuff down? Why would he argue against what he was literally doing at that moment?
I think I'm also not clear on who "Socrates" is supposed to be here and his relation to Plato. The article attributes the argument to the actual person, while Ong seems to consider him not only as one of Plato's characters, but as some sort of self-insert for Plato, to ascribe the argument to Plato himself.
Plato’s writing style used historical and invented characters who argued in a dialogue.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/#WhyDia
“In some of his works, it is evident one of Plato’s goals is to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and the dialogue form is being used for this purpose.”
What more puzzlement than to follow the hero into confusion and doubt, only to be lead out by the brilliance of his later unfucked arguments?
I just a guess…
Spoken Q&A sessions are not neutral.
The origin of rhetoric is oral persuasion, not the transfer of objective information. Oral conversations are noisy AF, easy to dominate, allow speakers to lie with "I didn't say that", and to use persuasive rhetorical tricks to confuse and persuade instead of enlightening.
We've all been in meetings where people talk at each other, or everyone says their part with no connection to the rest, and previous points are forgotten almost immediately even if they're valid, true, relevant, and important.
Likewise lectures - good luck teaching anything scientific without allowing notes.
Writing gives the recipient time to stop, ponder, understand, and - on a good day - disagree and criticise.
It doesn't prevent questions at all. It encourages them, and gives them time to mature and deepen. You may not be able to ask the original writer - especially if they're dead - but you will always be able to find comments and opinions from others.
If you put all of these together you get an argument from status, not from effectiveness.
Being a teacher/philosopher was a career, and writing endangered that.
Superficial in-the-moment wit and memory were always better for entertainment than expanding human knowledge.
There's also the objection to "putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness". If I was being uncharitable I could say that he fears criticism, like he's saying the ideas will be ruined if taken outside of his Svengali-like reality distortion field. (Or more charitably, he wants a good faith environment to discuss them in, instead of exposing them to hostile trolls who just won't get it.)
(This is supposedly a letter written by Plato, but probably is more like fan fiction written by his contemporaries.)
Isn't it always like that, every time?
On a similar note, any argument along the lines of "well, the elderly have always thought the new generation was getting worse, just look at Socrates saying the youths have no manners" or something. Besides the fact that Athens did fall and lose its entire overseas empire right around when Socrates was old, and he thus may have had a point, it's also just... possible for things to get better or worse? New generations are growing up under completely different circumstances with different technologies, of course Gen Z and Gen Alpha will be doing better in some areas and worse in others than Gen X or Millenials.
Both arguments fall into the fallacy of "you are criticizing A. But 100 years ago, someone criticized B, and they were wrong" which is just like... yeah A and B are not the same thing. Young people 2000 years ago are not young people now, even if Socrates 2000 years ago was wrong in criticizing the youth of Ancient Athens, that has no bearing on modern arguments. Even if Socrates was wrong in criticizing reading, that has nothing to do with modern criticisms of social media, crypto, AI, video games, etc.
He had arguments though. And they were correct and irrelevant. Just like the arguments against calculators, computers, wikipedia, AI. Or against farmers diet (as opposed to hunters/gatherers diet).
Do technology makes as dumber? Always, at least in few ways. Does it matter? It hasn't mattered for last 10000 years, no reason to think this time it's different.
"And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing"
--
[1] Because words are literally artificial marks on paper, and he's literally [2] questioning their intelligence here.
[2] Except he's not, is he? He's verbally questioning their intelligence, because he's actually opposed to doing anything literally literally. [3]
[3] This is getting me twisted in philosophical knots.
Well, we don't literally know that — we only know that Plato wrote that he said so, and as other have suggested, maybe Plato verballed him.
So please come up with another talking point. Not every historical anecdote where someone opposed some kind of progress can be applied to centralized data centers that contain stolen material.
When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.
When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.
Also, subjective experience-based words like 'difficult', 'easy', 'entertaining', 'funny' or even 'good' and 'evil' can vary widely between individuals. I didn't realize this until I met certain people who had very different values to mine. They had completely different definition of 'good' and 'evil' or 'right' and 'wrong'.
Talking to these people is strange and sometimes uncomfortable because you're using the same language and can 'understand' each other superficially, but you know you're not actually speaking the same language. You know they interpret what you're saying differently; they have fundamentally different goals and beliefs about the world and about you.
For example, some action or belief which might be second-nature to you, might actually be seen as strange and a weakness from the other person's perspective. But there are many, many distortions like this.
In fact, no two humans understand the same language in the same way. Often, what people believe, is shockingly different; you just never realized because you never discussed in depth and never defined your words and broke them down into their atomic parts... And in elite social circles, many taboos exist precisely to prevent any such exploration from occurring as such explorations might jeopardize relationships. Many relationships serve a strategic purpose and aren't about truth discovery.
What sort of dimensionality do we lose when thoughts go from ephemeral forms transcribed into concrete english language structures? Is this lingua franca holding us back in some ways from different thought patterns that might be better in some ways?
Dream states or psychedelics probably get you closest to this sort of "knowing without having the knowing put into discrete words" state of low level cognition. I wonder what might be there in our minds if we managed to strip our thinking of being bound by the limited framing offered through our languages?
True, but I don't think leaving it unwritten makes it better.
On the one hand, yes, I agree with you.
On the other hand, I’ve played the game of telephone. I can’t imagine a game of telephone played over multiple generations has any sort of fidelity.
Here is one example where knowledge was well maintained over 12000 years.
https://indigenous.sl.nsw.gov.au/recent-updates/ancient-abor...
That is where rhyme and repetition comes from. We kind of lost how to do that.
But then again, when you talk to people who don't learn because "you can find it on the internet anyway", they come across as dumb. When you encounter people who can do basic arithmetic because calculator, there are situation where they are ... dumb and not useful. When you encounter people who use car to get everywhere, they cant really walk - they think 1km is a long hike. It is going to be the same with ai.
So, we go to Socrates (without really knowing much about the guy other then 1-2 anecdotes) as he is our new hype salvation. Cause it is impossible for this our new hyped tech to cause harm, because writing and Socrates something something 2000 years ago. Also, it will destroy the world and replace people which means you have to give us more money now and celebrate us.
They are still considered by many people as the greatest philosophers of all time, especially by those who have never read them.
Especially given the lack of competition in the space, and people mostly using models from 2 or 3 providers.