Socrates on the forgetfulness that comes with writing
newlearningonline.com
newlearningonline.com
6. Socrates on the Forgetfulness That Comes with Writing (newlearningonline.com) 33 points by indy 1 hour ago | hide | 5 comments
7. Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information (stackoverflow.blog) 329 points by TangerineDream 7 hours ago | hide | 189 comments
Socrates pupils listened and discussed his ideas with him directly and very in-depth.
Instead of him writing down statements to be misinterpreted, he instilled his philosophy into many people through direct conversation.
By talking with the person directly you're able to understand that reasoning much better vs interpretation.
I find Socrates a very fascinating character and Plato's dialogs very entertaining to read. He is such an expert troll (no wonder they sentenced him to death).
The first article is saying that A < B and Socrates is saying that B < C - and both of them use similar argumentation (essentially, that taking shortcuts to do it faster is counterproductive to proper understanding), there's no contradiction and no counterpoint.
Socrates was about the living of philosophy, not merely writing or reading it.
Memorization was an important technology of the time, and like most technologies it was used (and abused) to analogize and conceptualize abstract processes and phenomena, often to the point of equivocation. Failing to appreciate the role that memorization played back then is like failing to appreciate, for example, how the Internet and social media shape our understanding and debate of culture and politics in the early 21st century; the debates can all seem very esoteric, random, and confusing unless and until you have the historical anchor to contextualize things. Then much of the logic, presumptions, and emphases become easier to understand and translate into more familiar terms; banal even.
I'm reminded of this admonition against technological equivocation from a mathematics professor, E.C. Zeeman, discussing the role astronomy as reflected in the Antikythera Mechanism had in shaping ancient thought on the nature of the world:
> I would like to conclude by telling a cautionary tale. Let us try and place the Antikythera Mechanism within the global context of ancient Greek thought. Firstly came the astronomers observing the motions of the heavenly bodies and collecting data. Secondly came the mathematicians inventing mathematical notation to describe the motions and fit the data. Thirdly came the technicians making mechanical models to simulate those mathematical constructions, like the Antikythera Mechanism. Fourthly came generations of students who learned their astronomy from these machines. Fifthly came scientists whose imagination had been so blinkered by generations of such learning that they actually believed that this was how the heavens worked. Sixthly came the authorities who insisted upon the received dogma. And so the human race was fooled into accepting the Ptolemaic system for a thousand years.
> Today we are in danger of making the same mistake over computers. Our present generation is able to view them with an appropriate skepticism when necessary. But our children's children may be brought up within a society dominated by computers, that they may actually believe this is how our brains work. We do not want the human race to be fooled again for another thousand years.
http://zakuski.utsa.edu/~gokhman/ecz/gears_from_the_greeks.p...
I actually heard of this socrates piece when researching the art of memory. was really good timing because that is when that article about google making us dumb came out. Now i look back and laugh.
Is this the same book by Frances Yates mentioned by the GP? If so, can you point me to the relevant chapter? I just downloaded the book.
I believe we should be humbled by how deep the "elite" of some older civilizations may have understood "themselves" and "the human condition". We need to see through all that fossilized blinkered strata, and not just throw it all away.
We are so proud of our "information machines" and "neurocognitive psychology" advances. Simple things like "memory" still completely elude us today.
You will still have a "tunnel vision" (="fooled again for another thousand years") even if your tunnel (=technology) is grandiose and your vision is precise (=science).
Then he would have freaked out over smart phones. I've first hand seen what happens to e.g. sense of direction once use of the navigator-assist becomes habitual. Some auxiliary mental muscle atrophies in the brain.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_ancient_athens...
Also, Athens (Piraeus) was a major port and therefore had to have a nontrivial share of strangers roaming the streets.
A navigator of some sort means that I can make up for this shortcoming and that I can explore. It isn't perfect, but much better than my brain does on its own.
However, I still have to use mnemonics to remember which side is port vs starboard (my mnemonic for this is that when facing the bow, aka forwards, port is on the left, because they both have four letters). I imagine this is what you experience when you say you have to think about right vs left, is that pretty close?
Fun little anecdote, my cousin had “right” and “left” tattooed on their wrists because they will forget otherwise. At first I found that unbelievable, but I’ve come to realize how different people can be over the years.
If I pay attention, I can feel my heartbeat. I know that is my left side.
Presumably because the naval plans for the Battle of Aegospotami were written down instead of memorized.
Socrates opponents then kicked Sparta out, suffering and risking torture and death. And they then blamed Socrates teachings for what transpired. (Yes, the court that sentenced him was miscarriage of justice.)
People always jump to simplistic conclusions and forget all the nuances involved.
As another example, The Art of Memorization was highly developed in Ancient India in order to preserve and transmit the vast corpus of "Hindu Literature" consisting of Vedas/Puranas/Kavyas/etc. It is quite fascinating to see how important Memorization has been to Human development and progress across centuries.
Modern Science has now shown us that Memorization has distinct positive effects on the Brain too.
1) Extensive long-term verbal memory training is associated with brain plasticity : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8102627/
2) A Neuroscientist Explores the "Sanskrit Effect" : https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/a-neurosci...
3) Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers : https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.070039597
4) Cache Cab: Taxi Drivers' Brains Grow to Navigate London's Streets : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...
That looks like a classic Matthew 7:3 - Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
I think that makes this part of your reply an example of exactly what it’s criticizing.
It was quite clear from the GP's comment that no time has been spent on thinking through nuances and trying to reconcile the apparent contradiction. It was posted as a "gotcha" which added nothing of value.
So my criticism was aimed at that in particular and as a caution to others in general. Hence the use of the word "People" as a rhetorical device.
* Avadhanam : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam
* The Art of Avadhana : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDFSFJSt984
* Performance : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFg6Sinpks
It may seem coincidence but I came to understand that it's just the community digesting and reacting to the original idea very quickly
But that was never the point of writing. The point is to use some small fraction of sensory+cognitive function to give yourself access to a separable, durable, redundant, and location-independent form of information.
Not touched on here but in other recent books is the possible loss of sensory+cognitive function that comes with simply learning to read and write in the first place. It’s possible this is the origin of the myth of Odin sacrificing an eye to read the runes.
I don't doubt this is possible but I'd love a cite to find out what the case looks like.
"You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so."
Socrates is partially lamenting the expected loss of this super ability. And he was right: it is rare to memorize things reliably now since we have so much reference material
I think he underestimated how many ever-changing programming apis we would need to “learn” today — otherwise he might have more sympathy for the use of reference material
This 'super' ability, while impressive, offers far too little benefit for the effort necessary to achieve the memorization. A scholar who has a bunch of notes and books at his disposal will almost always outdo a scholar who has memorized 1% of the material contained in written form. That's why we don't memorize things and rely on externalized storage of knowledge. It is far more effective.
So the scholar who focuses on looking things up might be more effective today, but he wont get any deep knowledge in any domain, while the scholar who focuses on putting things in his mind will probably be less effective today but get much deeper understanding of domains. For deeper domains like math or physics the only way to get anywhere is to embed a ton of knowledge in your brain, there is just no way to get anywhere with shallow look ups.
The undeniable truth is that if memorizing everything Homer-style was effective in sciences, people would be doing it, achieving great results. But it doesn't happen, and it is easy to understand why: It is not effective.
In our field, we don't need to remember every single parameter of an API we use, we just need to know where to look when the necessity arises, while we focus on more important things.
And Socrates’ views on writing weren’t unique to him; many of that era felt the same. Socrates was a man of his time in this respect.
This is another really important point. Socrates believed in the dialectic, where you are engaged with your teacher and can ask questions and test your assumptions and get feedback.
Just reading the material doesn’t afford that opportunity. You can’t ask a dead author of a book questions and get answers back.
That’s why it’s nice to be provided solutions to solve problems in STEM texts. Interactive technology like with modern MOOCs help provide more sophisticated feedback. But still nothing comes close to having access to an actual professor like during office hours.
When you program you are constantly doing problem-solving. Having to tackle new problems every day pushes the memory of the solutions you came up in previous days out of your brain. There is just not enough room in the brain.
But writing down the code helps to rediscover your earlier discoveries if you take time to document your code. Still it may be difficult to figure out where such old code and documentation is stored.
It makes anything I done previously almost as good as if someone else did it and I need to rediscover it. Which is a good thing, because boy that guy couldn't code himself out of a well.
Using Copilot you can "remember" other people's discoveries too.
>one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are.
Definition of "Peer Review".
>introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own
Writing is an aide to Understanding which you still have to work at and internalize.
>You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding;
Exactly right.
>you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing.
This is so true in the Modern World where there is lots of information being created and consumed but few people understand what they have Read and/or Written.
>And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”
Is he describing HN ?
>When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not.
The bane of the Internet !
And once that report is written I struggle to remember anything about the case.
Put that report in front of me and seemingly without reading it I can recall it in detail that amazes me.
I do think there is a psychological archiving effect from writing. And that in the right circumstances it can help remember as well as declutter your mind.
Mind you I have no evidence for any of this other than personal experience.
It's fairly useless phenomenon but I imagine there is some words that prompt me subconsciously?
The reports are 5 pages long and titled date and subject. The first page is just details of where when what who.
I don't even consciously read it having it there somehow helps me remember.
I think that we tend to underestimate how much of generational knowledge is lost.
Writing can help, but not much. Most of what we know is uncommunicable with words, especially at the expert level.
At a minimum, it's a tad gnomic without some expansion.
One example would be chicken sexing - determining the gender of a young chick.
Check:
https://commoncog.com/chicken-sexing-and-perceptual-learning...
for a nice view on it.
Another rich field of examples come from sport training. There even if you can explain a skill, the explanation is often not much use in learning it effectively.
Anyone attaining true mastery in a field has obviously learned a lot, but they can rarely describe what it is, they see it, they feel it, they can show, but they can't explain.
Not anymore. We can record and distill it into models, the past knowledge gets to have a second life. Models can capture even what cannot be precisely put into words.
> Socrates did not write down any of his thoughts, however his dialogues were recorded by his student and protégé, the philosopher Plato (428 – 347 BCE).
Plato did not "write down" Socrates' dialogues. Plato wrote the dialogues. Though we do have some authentic ideas from Socrates, such as, "I know that I know nothing," the idea that wisdom begins with ignorance, and most scholars still accept The Apology as at least quasi-historical. Socrates must have made a great impression on Plato, but when we read The Republic, we are not reading Socrates. It is the humble and brilliant Plato, alone.
> SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not.
An eloquent writer or speaker may give the reader or listener the mistaken impression about the depth of his knowledge or of the validity of his assertions. But we can't know for sure unless those ideas are challenged in debate or in experimentation.
Similarly, someone who reads a book or two on C++ may come away with the mistaken impression that they know everything necessary to program well in it. Likewise, a person who reads Newton's works may think he has the requisite knowledge to be a scientist like Newton. Or that by reading all the great works on philosophy one can become a philosopher on par with the great philosophers.
Such thinking ignores all the hours and years of dedication and experience needed to attain true knowledge and understanding of a subject. Its starts out with reflecting on the problem of interest and coming up with solutions and then applying those solutions. When those ideas are inevitably challenged by ignored or unforeseen sub-problems - One must focus on and address each of those sub-problems. And so on and so forth in a feedback loop of continuous reflection , application and refinement. Lot of that context is lost when transferring the final end report into writing (or any other medium). As philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked, "the map is not the territory" and "the word is not the thing".
When reading Socrates criticism of writing, what's scary is not about how laughably wrong he was in hindsight. But that (as history has proven) even though the advantages of writing far outweigh the disadvantages, it still doesn't invalidate his original criticism which still stands today.
What does he even mean by listening to an oak? To my 21st c. ears, it is much more sensible to talk of listening to a text as if the author were really here, howsoever remote the text or the author be, than listening to a stone.
It immensely helped me to structure my mind and be more clear about my ideas. I highly recommend that to anyone.
> um "To be honest, i for my part for shure didn't know what the heck i had forgotten at all"
'For sure, that's the good thing..."
(-;
kratos means power, or ruling [3]
How big is the probability that somebody is named 'ruler of the wise' and then becomes arguably the most influential philosopher of all time?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristocracy_(class)#Etymology
Cute, but no one is really sure why.
So while his name seems a tad much, that in itself isn't enough to disprove he existed.
(This is even more true in cultures where names usually mean something - think Hebrew biblical names)
(also worth mentioning the Cratylus in this discussion; etymology was definitely something these people thought about)
You'll note that "Socrates" and "sophos" have different vowel sounds (omicron vs. omega), and that the accented syllable in "sophos" is missing from "Socrates."
The "-crates" suffix indeed derives from the word for "power," but it's common in ancient Greek names: Philocrates, Hippocrates, Crates of Thebes, etc.
Sigh. This is not how you cite Plato. Stephanus pagination exists for a reason.
Thanks for sharing
I don’t think Socrates really existed btw. He was likely a rhetorical device of Plato and Aristophanes, similar to Sherlock Holmes of Arthur Conan Doyle. And both authors say the same of their main character:
“He was the wisest, and the best, man I have ever known!”
We also have references to contemporary accounts by Antisthenes, Aischines of Sphettos, and Aristippos of Kyrene.
His trial was also mentioned by Aischines.
It's a popular theory on the web but it is a difficult one to justify when we have so much evidence to the contrary, and I'm aware of no serious historian who supports that view.
Now for Eupolis…