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Cactus2018

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

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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.

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.

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