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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Wasn’t there a Greek philosopher who lamented how the youngs are losing their ability to remember because this newfangled invention called “writing” is making them lazy?

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Plato's Phaedrus (c. 360 B.C.E.)

> ... If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written ...

http://www.umich.edu/~lsarth/filecabinet/PlatoOnWriting.html

The irony of reading this, over two thousand years later, translated into a different language, presumably by someone who is, even after all this time, still able to read the original--it's almost like writing helps us remember, as a species, in ways that would have otherwise been almost completely impossible.

If there's one thing technology is good at disrupting, it's tradition

I'd say the opposite. The fact that a species memory has been created by the written word and the printing press means that nothing ever dies, and initial mistakes and the achievement of local maxima can be preserved forever. The tyranny of Aristotle over the Dark Ages was no joke.

Natural senility as an individual is probably no more than the accumulation of calcified habits, rather than completely biological - the ability to abandon old, wrong knowledge is a sign of youth and indispensable to the learning process. The written word has enabled us to achieve senility as a species.

Yes - and writing is a way to extend your memory as well. You can work more complex ideas with yourself, using the paper as storage for what you have already thought through.

Can you imagine doing some even simple Calc-type proofs without paper? Not possible. Many things are like that.

You give up maybe better memory in your head in exchange for being able to make progress that your couldn’t have made without the tool of writing.

Humans are ultimately tool-using animals more or less... makes sense that we use tools that are valuable.

If only they could solve a simple challenge, like summing all letter codes (and one free letter) in a particular way, to find a number with least significance, and the next document would include it. Then tampering with history would be infeasible and easy to check.

Yes. For those who haven't come across this factoid, it actually wasn't Plato, but Socrates who famously lamented the harmful effects of writing on memory and teaching. Socrates was a big fan of knowledge transmission through dialogue and discourse.

Socrates never wrote anything down, but Plato did, so ironically now we know about Socrates' disdain of writing through Plato's writings (in this case, the Phaedrus). Quoting a paraphrase from Wikipedia [1]

"... writing can do little but remind those who already know. Unlike dialectic and rhetoric, writing cannot be tailored to specific situations or students; the writer does not have the luxury of examining his reader's soul in order to determine the proper way to persuade. When attacked it cannot defend itself, and is unable to answer questions or refute criticism."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#Rhetoric,_...

It's really not obvious how much of ‘Socrates’ in Plato is actually Socrates and how much is Plato trading on Socrates' name.

Socrates being probably the most quoted person of all time who never wrote anything (giving Homer the benefit of doubt since he did leave a couple of epic poems).

True, what Socrates is purported to have said in the Phaedrus could well be a concoction of Plato's -- we'll never know for sure.

However we do know at least by virtue of the existence of the Phadrus that Plato himself did not subscribe to the position attributed to Socrates in the Phaedrus.

In a way Socrates was exactly right. Consider Buddhism, a philosophy that lasted orally for hundreds of years before the first texts were written. Even today, buddhist monks use chanting and repetition to memorize these teachings, internalize them, and live them.

Sure, you could read these teachings and move on with your life, but can you recite what you just read, or even what you just wrote? Not a chance. Your memory of text is fleeting compared to if you gave focused mental effort committing that text to memory through oral repetition.

Yes but its us that live in era of weaponized attention grabbing.

People are being paid millions to figure out how to hijack your attention, how to use yourself (body, mind functions) against you.

Writing is a tool, it doesn't try to work against you, or have an agenda that might not be aligned with yours.

Greek oration was all about weaponized attention grabbing and getting people to join your school not those other terrible terrible oh so bad schools.

We’ve had weaponized attention grabbing as long as wemve had humans I bet.

It was an art of oration.

Not a science driven exploitation of basic human instincts.

They didn't have a focus groups A-B testing and neurological studies back then.

That's a bit like saying that the impact on climate change back 1000 years ago and now is the same, as in both cases we are releasing carbon into atmosphere.

It was the closest they had to a science, and it was aimed at manipulating the listener in a predetermined way.

The fact that it was mostly applied at civil politics tells more about their society than about the tool...

Writing is a technology. It's disputable if any technology is inherently neutral or not:

“One of the most dangerous things you can believe in this world is that technology is neutral.”

from https://thecompassmagazine.com/blog/is-technology-morally-ne...

True but slippery slope and all. We need some basic ability lest we devolve control to things not us. We should still be able to get by without technology in emergency situations (natural events causing power outages, etc). We should not be rendered helpless.

Remember that fire was also a technology at one point. Our species is sustained by technology and there's no going back. There's always going to be some baseline we can't live without.

How do you know he wasn’t right and writing indeed worsened our memory? Maybe you’d remember who it was if not for knowing it is written down somewhere.

And that's the question.

Is there more value in being able to remember who the specific philosopher was, or more in knowing how to find that information quickly and easily?

To take it a step further - is there more value in individuals remembering the specific philosopher, or in society, anyone in society being able to find out that same information?

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