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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Plato's criticism is very true on an individual basis. What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances.

It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his warning against false wisdom is more relevant than ever today when it feels like half the people you talk to online are just googling up wikipedia articles to base their world view upon on the fly.

--edit-- sometimes me not grammar good

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I think it's better to think of these as different, rather than superior... especially given our times' proliferation of mediums with differing cognitive implications.

Is Twitter > books? Is HN > podcasts? Every medium has its tendencies... positive, negative and complicated. We don't actually choose between them. It's useful to keep an eye on losses, not just gains.

Oral traditions, for example, naturally evolve and diversify. A fairy tale can literally spread over the whole world, and develop thousands of versions. Each one adapted and localised. Written stories also spread, but remain identical... even more-so after printing.

This is, largely, the story of monotheist religions. Whether or not they had sacred scrolls in ancient times, the religions were mostly based in folk traditions, temple authority, prophets, judges... people. As the moved from oral tradition to authoritative canon, the religions became extremely stiff an unyielding.

> This is, largely, the story of monotheist religions. Whether or not they had sacred scrolls in ancient times, the religions were mostly based in folk traditions, temple authority, prophets, judges... people. As the moved from oral tradition to authoritative canon, the religions became extremely stiff an unyielding.

The Catholic Church is interesting counterpoint. Their religious teaching still openly draws upon tradition, institutional church authority and individuals like the Pope.

But the body of canon law would have been impractical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word.

See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in medieval times (admittedly, the Catholic Church was also much more a political-nation-religious entity then vs now)

I largely agree about the administrative difficulty although I‘d emphasise the written word over the printed word in this context.

Using thousands of monks to copy documents by hand instead of using printers was incredibly resource expensive, but affordable for the Medieval Church.

It'd be fascinating to see a conversion to person-hours to copy one book in medieval times.

And I mean fully-loaded, so how much time needed to be spent {farming/military/political administration} to give a monk time to learn to read and write, and then allow them time to copy the book itself.

It's an interesting thought. Challenging because of the fixed costs though. The cost to produce one book would be almost identical to the cost to produce 1000 books; it is the infrastructure more than the marginal resource cost per book.

Could see it going either way. Agricultural efficiency (in terms of person_fed : person_farming) in Europe was pretty low. So the dedicated headcount (monks) might dominate the net cost, which would make it scale more linearly with number of books.

The market price 1 medieval book was roughly the same price for 5 pigs according to this analysis [1]

Price of 7 books = £5 = 100s -> 14s per book / Price of 1 Pig in London = 3s

14 / 5 => roughly 5 pigs per book

Note £1 = 20s

[1] http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html

Paper was also a huge cost--maybe more than the monks' labor depending upon how you want to value their real cost.

Today I learned! Thanks!

I think they viewed the transcription itself as a form of meditative/devotional practice and didn't prioritize efficiency as much. The illumination on some of these manuscripts can get pretty elaborate and, sometimes, kind of whimsical. So they were clearly doing some creative expression while doing it.

I'm not following. The parent, I believe, was not talking about canon law specifically (which is changing and to be distinguished from doctrine which only undergoes development, but never revision). I also don't understand what papal crises have to do with anything in this context. And what is meant by "political-nation-religious entity"? The Church is a religious institution whose bishops (including the pope) have also exercised distinct secular political authority in addition to religious authority. It was never "national" in character, only supranational (hence, "catholic").

Parent was observing that the Catholic Church was an exception to GP's point that the written word stiffened and froze monotheistic religious practice, as it blended oral and written transmission.

I was observing that the modern Catholic Church (post-printed word) has offified in exactly that way, with the printed word allow direct dissemination of the "agreed" canon (i.e. pope / hierarchy) to the entire church, thereby unifying them into a single practice.

In counterpoint I offered the number of papal crises and schisms that abounded during the medieval and pre-medieval period (i.e. before printed material became cheap and available).

Ergo, the use of the printed word allowed the Catholic Church to unify and standardize in a way it had not before -- GP's point.

It's indicative that the majority of monotheistic religious splits within Catholicism happened before the printing press, when intervening human parties could reinterprete the canon as it flowed through them.

For political-national-religious entity, the Catholic Church / Holy Roman Empire partnership allowed the Church to become a nation in all but land, by the power its blessing conveyed upon a chosen leader.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_law#Catholic_Church

> But the body of canon law would have been impractical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word.

Would it? The Bible, which is much larger, was practical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word, and its not like there was a proximate relationship between the availability of printing (presumably with movable type, in the 15th century) and the codification of canon law in the 20th. The idea that this was waiting on printing is…hard to defend.

> See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in medieval times

The really durable schisms after the 11th Century emerged after or just before (and became crystallized because of) printing, though.

> The Catholic Church is interesting counterpoint. Their religious teaching still openly draws upon tradition, institutional church authority and individuals like the Pope.

IIRC this was their main contention against the Protestant reformation. They believed that just pointing at scripture without some practice of custom and tradition to ensure you're properly interpreting it in a sensible way would lead people to folly and extremism/fundamentalism.

Granted it's sort of a pick your poison deal. You either get the fundamentalism of hardline scripturalists or you get the corruption that comes with a hierarchical institution that requires people to offloading some of their critical thinking. Or you can blend them together and get the worst of both worlds by creating something that looks like the more noxious elements of the American Evangelical movement.

> You either get the fundamentalism of hardline scripturalists or you get the corruption that comes with a hierarchical institution that requires people to offloading some of their critical thinking.

I don't think it is fair to say the latter leads to "corruption" or "offloading some of their critical thinking". This phobia is largely a feature of radical individualism and the lack of humility that the notion of radical self-sufficiency (intellectual or otherwise) entails. The paradox of individualism is that it actually weakens the ability to be an individual. Human beings are social animals whose lives are relatively short and therefore whose experiences are limited. And because individualism atomizes the individual, the effect is that this social animal becomes subject to greater levels of fear and stress about his isolation, and when isolated from the social and from tradition, he becomes easy prey for weird ideologies.

In this specific case, scriptural canon was compiled by the Catholic Church. You obviously cannot appeal to the canon to codify the canon, so some extra-biblical body of knowledge and understanding must exist that would allow such a canonical body of scripture to be identified. This body of knowledge and understanding is called Tradition, and it is guarded, refined, and transmitted by an unbroken chain of authority found in the apostolic succession. (Tradition is the basis for the transmission and development of all knowledge in human history; there is likewise a scientific tradition without which there could be no science.) The notion that an individual could do better alone without relying or drawing on tradition is belied by the presence of over 40,000 Protestant sects in the US alone, each claiming to be able to interpret scripture. And how do they interpret scripture? However they want! In most cases, it means interpreting it according to whatever happens to be fashionable at the time. So much for "critical thinking". This is very visible in the mainline Protestant churches that, not so incidentally, are shrinking very rapidly. Where this Protestant mindset has leeched into Catholic circles, it has produced the same deadly effect.

> This is, largely, the story of monotheist religion.

This is largely the story of religions, especially old pagan religions. Myths and folklore came about. The moment when religions went scriptural, the message became firm and technical. And gave rise to law as a study.

Not really, that only really happened in the reformation for Christianity.

The romans were already pretty good at law.

I had judaism in mind.

I don't get it. You mean that old Judaism was pagan before scripture?

Judaism preceded the pagan Roman kingdom. Judaism is a scriptural religion. Judaism gave rise to law as a study.

Non scriptural religions had evolving myths and folklore like Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. Those religions did not contribute to law like the prior comment mentions.

Not really get your point. The Roman law system was pretty advanced without the influence of Judaism.

India developed complicated law system before Judaism. Seems like it's part of human societies that grow in complexity, not something special to Judaism.

Protestantism definitely had a big impact on the development of western empirism and probably modern law. In general our current Western individualistic skeptic mindset is the heritage of the reformation.

> The Roman law system was pretty advanced without the influence of Judaism.

Roman law development is thought to be put together by judaic influence. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1452148

Indian development is beyond my understanding.

Protestantism led to direct literacy and scholarship in Bible studies. Again, this is influenced by religion. The adoption of literacy is what led to Northern Europe's success.

It's also useful to point out that historical verbal tradition trained a very specific type of memory recall but that doesn't automatically make anyone wise.

Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you now have the wisdom to apply that in a particular circumstance.

Very much like early AI models.

I think the contrast should be between studying and internalizing a subject versus having the ability to look up a subject. That seems the most true to Plato's intention.

It's common and easy to fall into considering the things you could look up as things you already know.

What's the difference, one might ask? What's the problem with offloading some of this knowledge and free up space in your head? Well the thing when you learn something is that it doesn't just permit access to the information, it also permits synthesis of new ideas. The sum of knowledge is greater than its parts.

A very concrete example: As someone who only speaks English one may look up the Latin terms 'manus' (hand) and 'facere' (to act/do/make); but unless you actually do, you'll probably not immediately grok the etymology of the English term 'manufacture'.

Exactly. My compsci prof was forcing us to learn so much by heart, but then it's internalized and you start to think in those terms. Right now I am writing my PhD thesis in management and in the beginning I didn't have all of those papers really in my head. But now slowly that knowledge accumulates and I can think through things I couldn't think before. But on the other hand, I now think, how could I not understand that, it's trivial. And to add, it is the same for literature and poems. If you know a poem by heart, it's not just fancy to recite it, but that you start to really incorporate part of that language.

I think of it in terms of computer memory levels.

There are some computations (synthesis) that require so many (non-front loadable) memory accesses that it's impractical to do them from memory with significant delay (books), because the number_of_accesses * access_time dominates the project time.

Instead, you must have a working set of core information (or at least pointers to information) in low-latency memory (your brain).

Example: How much longer would it take me to do a multi-digit multiplication if I had to look up the process for multiplication in a book for every digit multiplication I did? And what if that multiplication were just one of many in the higher-level math problem I was trying to solve? (Then generalize to any problem that requires a core base of knowledge)

It is very similar to caching performance impacts. And like you say, sometimes performance is just faster, and sometimes it actually enables functionality…

> also useful to point out that historical verbal tradition trained a very specific type of memory recall

I'm genuinely curious, why do you think this is relevant? How would you differentiate "specific types of memory recall" scientifically?

Cued recall in the form of verbal tradition is often criticised to be subject to inaccuracies as, for one example, stories accrue embellishments over time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_(memory)

In Appalachia that's just called storytelling. :)

Strong memory is almost always an indicator of exceptional skill. Whether it's chess players, musicians, writers or poets, mathematicians or also programmers, people who excel generally have astonishing ability to recall.

That's not an accident. Wisdom emerges out of practice and the effortlessness that comes with it. The genius piano player isn't that good because of some pie in the sky wisdom about music, just like the AI they just played tons of scales and training pieces. Literally meaningless stuff. This rejection of rote memorization as some sort of lower skill, that students should be 'smart and lazy' is one of the stupidest modern tendencies.

>Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you now have the wisdom to apply that in a particular circumstance.

It's much more likely that you can, that someone who would only look them up "on demand", however, as you at least are aware of the possibilities in those domains.

This is actually what Plato also mentions, a few paragraphs later:

> He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an utterly simple person, and in truth ignorant of the prophecy of Ammon, if he thinks written words are of any use except to remind him who knows the matter about which they are written.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

plato is specifically thinking of the social impact but he's also not actually arguing against writing. after all, he's making his argument in writing. he's trying to push the reader to look into their souls for the truths that he thinks are already there. "remembrance" here is specific, so is "memory". It doesn't mean, to remember facts and things that happened, but to reach back into ones mind beyond sensation and to "remember" the eternal forms.

Thanks for this context. In this light, I am reminded of Emerson’s “Self Reliance.”

> Trust thyself

Ironically, we'd never know what he said had it not been written down.

Yeah, and then some.

Tired Alfred North Whitehead quotes aside, he's basically the single most influential author in the western tradition, arguably even eclipsing the bible.

Plato gives multiple hints across his works about the esoteric, unwritten teachings [1]. We can only speculate about the content; for me, they were surely tied with the Eleusinian Mysteries [2]: early, myths-driven psychonautics based on ergot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries

I also think he had a bunch written teachings that were intended only for his students. Obviously they’re lost to time.

With some luck and intelligence maybe we will discover more about the past in the future [1].

[1] https://scrollprize.org

Yeah, I've been excited about this because we're only about a month away until the ink detection deadline.

We would, if we retained an oral tradition (as in the case in that Platonic dialogue).

And even better, we would know it by heart.

Assuning we considered it important of course. But that would be another benefit: it would also filter unimportant works over time.

Of course not everybody would know it by heart. That's a third benefit: only people interested and caring enough would know Plato. Not dilletantes.

I disagree with all of the above.

If we never had writing, would the Huns have carried forth Platonic wisdom? Would it really have survived thousands of years of cultural evolution and the decline of Greek civilization itself? Who even is the "we" who should consider it important?

> that would be another benefit: it would also filter unimportant works over time.

How would it even be possible to know what's been lost in the oral tradition without anyone writing things down? Only takes one autocrat to massacre followers of a specific tradition to effectively erase it. Things get filtered based on their ability to survive, which is partially a function of "importance", whatever that actually means at a given time.

> a third benefit: only people interested and caring enough would know Plato. Not dilletantes.

This just seems like unabashed elitism. A "benefit" of the oral tradition is that knowledge is reserved for the deserving? No thanks.

> people you talk to online are just googling up wikipedia articles to base their world view upon on the fly.

Well you're lucky if they do; often they just make stuff up on the fly depending on what they saw on some dubious media or social network.

Well that's the human brain for you. It's very good at extrapolating new information from things it's seen and heard that may not be true, without actually telling you that it's basically making shit up as it goes. It's yet another reason why education matters.

I can’t tell if that’s a tongue in cheek criticism of the panic over AI hallucination. Bravo either way.

Would this be different in a world without writing? We generally synthesize incoming information into a knowledge base and a set of beliefs - I'm not convinced we're less susceptible to that when all knowledge is oral.

What's the difference between having read something last year and believing it, vs having heard someone tell you something last year and believing it? Would people stop in a conversation and go try to find the source of their information if they had to track down a specific person?

Socrates (for it is he who was opposed to writing) did not appreciate how the act of writing exercises our abilities of both memory and reasoning, at least as much as speaking and certainly more than listening. Someone who has written extensively on a topic is almost certainly well-versed in it, and more so than when they began (even crackpots are generally masters of their own flawed theories.)

I'm sorry, Plato wasn't thinking about the effects of the written word on social issues over time and space?!

The whole point of his writing all it down, the very literal foundations of ~2500 years of philosophy and the bedrock of Western (and others) civilization, was so that he could have an effect on social issues over time. That was the whole point! He is super clear about this in his writings and throughout his life and travels.

> You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding;

> What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances.

Why would his words be less potent when applied to billions of people, as opposed to only a few? Are those billions not just as susceptible to fallacy as the elite few?

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