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Comment by shawxe | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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