Hacker News Reader

Comment by trymas | Hacker News Reader

Socrates would have drawn the line at writing and reading texts.

I always find this argument dubious at best. It's akin to saying "A dude was wrong once 2000 years ago, anything new is progress, and progress is desirable".

Maybe we are talking about the same thing, but my intent was to say that original quote was in the theme of "kids these days...".

Not all progress is desirable, of course, and smartphones have their own problems, but same was told about younger generations and internet, TV, newspapers, etc. But those generations grew up out of it and personally I'd argue that smartphone addiction is not only young people problem.

Socrates said no such thing, no writing of Socrates has survived. He was just a character is Plato's book, Phaedrus. Please do find the original paragraphs before accusing Socrates of this. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j... Of course, you can read and interpret that same book a thousand different ways, like he was talking about knowledge not being the same as writing things down, or whatever you want. But we don't even pretend to read the things we talk about. We just repeat nice narratives we have supposedly read somewhere else, digested by someone else, somehow.

And he would've been right. Any new advancement in technology brings societal change, and it is possible to reach a point of diminishing return, where the bad sides outweigh the positives.

I wish we could, as a society, have a serious conversation about this effect without resorting to name calling ("Luddist nonsense") and straw men ("but what about penicillin?")

Second that. I see that as a failure of society or democracy as a whole - that we are no longer able to have that broad, public conversation and act accordingly. Why should every "innovation" be shoved down our throats, if we don't want to?

I would place this blame on academia. They're the ones that are supposed to think difficult questions, and drive change. I guess today any serious discussion would just get lost in the ocean that is the Internet. Only echo chambers get reinforced.

Blaming academia is misguided, and "drive change" has never been in their job description until Progressivism took hold. The problem is each one of us: we want to numb out more than we want to do something hard. The problem is also philosophical/religious: we have collectively decided that virtue is following our animal desires (what makes you happy), which is the opposite of historical virtue. I think this can be traced back to the prevailing nominalist utilitarian view: matter is just what we make of it, and since there is nothing higher than matter, the only ethic is greatest happiness. So now, as a society, we do not really have any way to articulate the problem we intuitively feel, because the problem is that our underlying philosophy does not work, but we have even forgotten (societally) the other philosophy that has historically worked, so we cannot easily get back. I think this accounts for the interest in Stocism and traditional Christianity (especially Eastern Orthodoxy), since both unequivocally say that being enslaved to your passions (animal desires) is not the good life.

Huh. I blame it on the influence of money. Money flows easier when hysteria (really any level of un-rationalized fear) and its peers abound. It is hard to have honest rational objective discussions these days without the influences of earning another buck being just over the cognitive horizon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com