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Comment by hamburga | Hacker News Reader

Socrates famously complained about literacy making us stupider in Phaedrus.

Which I believe still does have a large grain of truth.

These things can make us simultaneously dumber and smarter, depending on usage.

Socrates was correct. In his day memory was treasured. Memory was how ideas were linked, how quotes were attained, and how arguments were made.

Writing leads to the rapid decline in memory function. Brains are lazy.

Ever travel to a new place and the brain pipes up with: ‘this place is just like ___’? That the brain’s laziness showing itself. The brain says: ‘okay I solved that, go back to rest.’ The observation is never true; never accurate.

Pattern recognition saves us time and enables us too survive situations that aren’t readily survivable. Pattern recognition leads to short cuts that do humanity a disservice.

Socrates recognized these traits in our brains and attempted to warn humanity of the damage these shortcuts do to our reasoning and comprehension skills. In Socrates day it was not unheard of for a person to memorize their entire family tree, or memorize an entire treaty and quote from it.

Humanity has -overwhelmingly- lost these abilities. We rely upon our external memories. We forget names. We forget important dates. We forget times and seasons. We forget what we were just doing!!!

Socrates had the right of it. Writing makes humans stupid. Reduces our token limits. Reduces paging table sizes. Reduces overall conversation length.

We may have more learning now, but what have we given up to attain it?

This is an interesting argument. I’m not convinced but I’m open to hearing more. Don’t we only know about Socrates because he was written about? What evidence do we have that writing reduces memory at all? Don’t studies of students show taking notes increases retention? Anecdotally, the writers I know tend to demonstrate the opposite of what you’re saying, they seem to read, think, converse, and remember more than people who aren’t writing regularly. What exactly have we given up to attain more learning? We still have people who can memorize long things today, is it any fewer than in Socrates’ day? How do we know? Do you subscribe to the idea that the printing press accelerated collective memory, which is far more important for technology and industrial development and general information keeping than personal memory? Most people in Socrates’ day, and before, and since, all forgot their family trees, but thankfully some people wrote them down so we still have some of it. Future generations won’t have the gaps in history we have today.

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