Socrates vs. the Written Word (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Socrates vs. the Written Word (2011)

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74 pointsspectraldrift57 comments

It's useful to remember that Socrates was contrasting the existing Oral culture vs the emerging Literate Culture (Plato) , and the _enormous_ social differences between them. i.e not just rejecting new technology because it's new.

Unlike Oral cultures where a point of view can be questioned and held accountable, a written version changes these expectations since it can only be conveyed one-way, i.e a trust-me mentality.

Secondly, humans having evolved in an oral world are used to much greater exertions and development of their memory (eg: recalling and narrating complex oral epics) which writing (and later computers) greatly weaken.

Ong makes a similar argument in Orality and Literacy (1982) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7182447-most-persons-are-su...

The quoted Seventh Letter limits the argument to writing about philosophy, not writing about other things: "There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another ..."

There's also the objection to "putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness". If I was being uncharitable I could say that he fears criticism, like he's saying the ideas will be ruined if taken outside of his Svengali-like reality distortion field. (Or more charitably, he wants a good faith environment to discuss them in, instead of exposing them to hostile trolls who just won't get it.)

(This is supposedly a letter written by Plato, but probably is more like fan fiction written by his contemporaries.)

This is more like a dancer or a martial artist refusing to write a book about his craft on the ground that the required understanding cannot be passed this way. With dancing this is more obvious than with philosophy, so writing on philosophy is more dangerous, as the reader may mistake the false knowledge for the truth.

Duke Huan was in his hall reading a book. The wheelwright P'ien, who was in the yard below chiseling a wheel, laid down his mallet and chisel, stepped up into the hall, and said to Duke Huan, "This book Your Grace is reading - may I venture to ask whose words are in it?"

"The words of the sages," said the duke.

"Are the sages still alive?"

"Dead long ago," said the duke.

"In that case, what you are reading there is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old!"

"Since when does a wheelwright have permission to comment on the books I read?" said Duke Huan. "If you have some explanation, well and good. If not, it's your life!"

Wheelwright P'ien said, "I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I chisel a wheel, if the blows of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slides and won't take hold. But if they're too hard, it bites in and won't budge. Not too gentle, not too hard - you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can't put it into words, and yet there's a knack to it somehow. I can't teach it to my son, and he can't learn it from me. So I've gone along for seventy years and at my age I'm still chiseling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn't be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old."

> Secondly, humans having evolved in an oral world are used to much greater exertions and development of their memory (eg: recalling and narrating complex oral epics) which writing (and later computers) greatly weaken

In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.

But the point about culture of questioning is an interesting one I hadn't heard before.

> In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.

Yeah, good point. At a cultural level, this was a change from an Oral world where _knowing_ what to recall, being able to, and being 'witty' about it mattered a great deal; to a Literate world where things could be cited, 'looked up', and compared.

I don't understand the Ong quote:

> Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274–7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato's Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind.

Wasn't Plato writing this stuff down? Why would he argue against what he was literally doing at that moment?

I think I'm also not clear on who "Socrates" is supposed to be here and his relation to Plato. The article attributes the argument to the actual person, while Ong seems to consider him not only as one of Plato's characters, but as some sort of self-insert for Plato, to ascribe the argument to Plato himself.

Socrates comes from a period, the tail end of that period, where all learning was oral. Writing was "new". He observed, which is provable and true, that learning from a written word perspective is a weaker form of learning than from an oral perspective. From the simple fact that when information is delivered orally, questions can be asked, it is a 2-way communication. Not so with writing. With writing, the student must follow their reading with additional oral use and trial uses of the information, or it is lost completely. While that same information initially gained in understanding via oral lessons can often be put to use immediately, the oral instructional path is more complete, it allows questions and answers during the learning process. While a written lesson requires human interactions to supplement that learning for it to hold.

This is absolutely, objectively false.

Spoken Q&A sessions are not neutral.

The origin of rhetoric is oral persuasion, not the transfer of objective information. Oral conversations are noisy AF, easy to dominate, allow speakers to lie with "I didn't say that", and to use persuasive rhetorical tricks to confuse and persuade instead of enlightening.

We've all been in meetings where people talk at each other, or everyone says their part with no connection to the rest, and previous points are forgotten almost immediately even if they're valid, true, relevant, and important.

Likewise lectures - good luck teaching anything scientific without allowing notes.

Writing gives the recipient time to stop, ponder, understand, and - on a good day - disagree and criticise.

It doesn't prevent questions at all. It encourages them, and gives them time to mature and deepen. You may not be able to ask the original writer - especially if they're dead - but you will always be able to find comments and opinions from others.

If you put all of these together you get an argument from status, not from effectiveness.

Being a teacher/philosopher was a career, and writing endangered that.

Superficial in-the-moment wit and memory were always better for entertainment than expanding human knowledge.

Well, spoken exchanges are not expected to be neutral. That's part of the nuance of communications. Yes, oral conversations are noisy, easy to dominate and speakers can lie, which is also part of the lessons within understanding how to communicate well. Lessons that somehow magically also teaches a person to plan their communications, to employ both critical analysis and secondary considerations in reflection of their audience. And to do that in real time while conversing.

Comparing the lax and informal communications of our modern experiences, it is no wonder that people cannot imagine the environment a community a quality communications creates.

Our collective communications experiences are argument from status, not from effectiveness, but that is not to say effective communications and the completely other environment it creates does not exist. Socrates speaks of that environment, not our modern failure to communicate above 5-grade levels.

>that learning from a written word perspective is a weaker form of learning than from an oral perspective

Yea, this isn't one that is proven from empirical data. The oral instruction path not more complete by any way possible. The combination of reading + writing at the same time is super powered in comparison. It stops the human brain from becoming a hallucination machine about the actions it took in the past, and allows more truthful retrospection.

> “Why would he argue against what he was literally doing at that moment?”

Plato’s writing style used historical and invented characters who argued in a dialogue.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/#WhyDia

“In some of his works, it is evident one of Plato’s goals is to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and the dialogue form is being used for this purpose.”

What more puzzlement than to follow the hero into confusion and doubt, only to be lead out by the brilliance of his later unfucked arguments?

I just a guess…

Socrates is a historical person and the mentor to Plato, but Plato uses him in his works to develop and deliver his arguments. Since we don't have much about Socrates outside of Plato its unclear how true Plato's rendition is true to what Socrates would've argued.

Also it should be noted that ancient writings did not include punctuation or whitespace, and presumably they were meant to be read aloud and listened to. Augustine (354 - 430 AD) mentions someone reading in his head as odd.

You should generally but not always read any statement by Socrates in a Plato dialogue as a statement that Plato is putting into the mouth of Socrates, not something Socrates himself said. There is a gradation, though. The Apology was probably very close to what socrates actually said, and some of the later dialogues (The Republic, for example) probably bear little relationship to anything Socrates said.

But, and this is important, Plato almost certainly did not agree with everything he had Socrates say in every dialogue. Sometimes he is just playing with ideas. Personally, I think Plato is just being provocative about books in this dialogue to push an idea as far as he can.

A dialectic with an imaginary person quite often.

not true all precde egyptians

> the _enormous_ social differences between them. i.e not just rejecting new technology because it's new

Isn't it always like that, every time?

Initially, I thought Socrates' stance on writing was some kind of eccentricity but now that I have seen first hand how the meaning of words can change over time and differ between people and places, I now have a better understanding of how much context is lost in writing.

When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.

When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.

Also, subjective experience-based words like 'difficult', 'easy', 'entertaining', 'funny' or even 'good' and 'evil' can vary widely between individuals. I didn't realize this until I met certain people who had very different values to mine. They had completely different definition of 'good' and 'evil' or 'right' and 'wrong'.

Talking to these people is strange and sometimes uncomfortable because you're using the same language and can 'understand' each other superficially, but you know you're not actually speaking the same language. You know they interpret what you're saying differently; they have fundamentally different goals and beliefs about the world and about you.

For example, some action or belief which might be second-nature to you, might actually be seen as strange and a weakness from the other person's perspective. But there are many, many distortions like this.

In fact, no two humans understand the same language in the same way. Often, what people believe, is shockingly different; you just never realized because you never discussed in depth and never defined your words and broke them down into their atomic parts... And in elite social circles, many taboos exist precisely to prevent any such exploration from occurring as such explorations might jeopardize relationships. Many relationships serve a strategic purpose and aren't about truth discovery.

Early on my corporate career, I quickly realized “have” had 5 distinct definitions.

Even corporations realized that the word "done" has many definitions.

Do you have those definitions?

He must have had them at one point.

Yeah, he would have had to have had them, hadn't he?

You had me with that one. (I don't mean had...you know what I mean.)

1. I'm the product owner, I can demo it for you. 2. I know who the product owner is, and I think it's live. 3. I think it's currently under development...or maybe we're still gathering requirements 4. Budget has been assigned, but work hasn't started 5. It's listed in a slide deck

I am putting these in the company manual

It makes you wonder about not just writing but language as a whole. In transcription we clearly lose important dimensionality such as tone, intent, or body language. Socrates seems to have been alluding to accessing information beyond what was merely initially offered as well, e.g. follow up questions.

What sort of dimensionality do we lose when thoughts go from ephemeral forms transcribed into concrete english language structures? Is this lingua franca holding us back in some ways from different thought patterns that might be better in some ways?

Dream states or psychedelics probably get you closest to this sort of "knowing without having the knowing put into discrete words" state of low level cognition. I wonder what might be there in our minds if we managed to strip our thinking of being bound by the limited framing offered through our languages?

At least currently it's thought we think across 3 core dimensional structures.

Inner speech/string of words.

Pictures/visual memory. Think more of the form of a picture a movie or camera works in.

Conceptual thought. In my mind this works more like simplified iconography with action/logic occurring but otherwise unspecified.

Also, and I found this idea in that newest translation of Homer, remembering is a kind of technology. We do not write books, poems, songs or tv shows to be remembered. But, when people relied on memory, they did structured knowledge so that it is easier to remember.

That is where rhyme and repetition comes from. We kind of lost how to do that.

But then again, when you talk to people who don't learn because "you can find it on the internet anyway", they come across as dumb. When you encounter people who can do basic arithmetic because calculator, there are situation where they are ... dumb and not useful. When you encounter people who use car to get everywhere, they cant really walk - they think 1km is a long hike. It is going to be the same with ai.

> When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.

On the one hand, yes, I agree with you.

On the other hand, I’ve played the game of telephone. I can’t imagine a game of telephone played over multiple generations has any sort of fidelity.

Perhaps if your imagination included a game of telephone which includes multiple error correcting codes/mechanisms, when instruction in those mechanisms is part of the teaching, and when preserving the wording is valued by most/all participants in the game/culture/conversation?

Here is one example where knowledge was well maintained over 12000 years.

https://indigenous.sl.nsw.gov.au/recent-updates/ancient-abor...

>valued by most/all participants in the game/culture/conversation

The question then becomes one of cultural stability over that length of time. I personally can't tell you anything about the cultural and technological stability of of the aboriginal cultures, all I can assume is they were far more stable than europe, north africa, and the middle east. These later groups I listed had an absolutely massive amount of cultural exchange, and other things like mass genocide over the centuries. The exchange of new concepts and ideas is a powerful force in shaping the stories we tell. When two groups of people exist together over longer periods of time with conflicting sets of stories one of the stories tends to fade and die, and most likely a mixed story is created (Christianity ate a lot of Pagan mythos this way).

> When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.

True, but I don't think leaving it unwritten makes it better.

Even in the quote given in this article, most instances of the word "word" are "logos" in Greek, which means something closer to speech, argument, reasoning, logic, etc. This doesn't really change the meaning of the quote dramatically, but some slight nuance is lost.

I share your sentiment. What you're describing here was also very eye-opening to me when I first realized it.

I'll restate these ideas in a more explicit claim. All symbols are defined via one's own subjective experience.

One's own understanding/definition of every word can be traced back to personal experience. Imagine your life as a timeline, like a video, from birth up until now. You can seek that timeline to find the moments/clips that contributed to your definition of any given word or even mathematical symbol. To give an example, when I say "apple", the corresponding idea in my head is based on every apple I've seen and every instance of the word "apple" I've seen being used or being taught to me in the past. Even when we try to define the phrase "this specific apple" while looking at the same apple on the same table in the same room, the light bounces off of it slightly differently from my angle of view vs yours, and we did not see the same sequence of "video frames" about the apple, and so our mental models of that apple would necessarily be slightly different.

This is probably why the hard problem of consciousness / unified theory of physics appear forever out of reach. If no two observers/observations are fully identical, then you cannot even define what an ideal observer is. But we tend to assume such an ideal definition exists.

This seems almost trivial in hindsight because "identical" can be defined as 1) "one and the same", based on one thing OR 2) "mostly similar", based on pairs of adjacent things one has seen in the past.

And to sort of echo the original post, it seems to me that a lot value comes from the interactive nature of argumentation. But I think the specific medium/modality of those interactions don't matter for most things, and even when it does, like in this case, valuable insights can still fall out of a discussion in text. I derived the precursor ideas which led to this conclusion of definitional non-equivalence in past offline arguments as well as simulated discussions in my head. And I derived the actual conclusion by arguing with people here on HN, which helped me truly internalize the idea that even the definition of consciousness/observation differs from one person to another. That comment thread can be seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338029

It's worth mentioning that I am not too proud of that specific interaction because I got needlessly defensive and adversarial, and lied about my subjective experience of having undergone general anesthesia even though I haven't really, and it was especially egregious in a discussion about consciousness. My original reflex/motivation was I felt that many other people would likely prematurely dismiss some of those ideas if I admitted that one of the tangential premises were wrong. And regretfully, by lying that time, I've introduced a cancer in my mental pathways when considering the problem of consciousness and adjacent philosophical problems because I'd always have this nagging feeling to try to justify that past mistake, even now. But in truth, I was just being an intellectually dishonest little shit trying to win an argument. And yet, something valuable came out of that interaction.

It feels historically vertiginous to see Socrates weigh in on <artificial> <intelligence> , 2000 years ago. [1]

"And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing"

[1] Because words are literally artificial marks on paper, and he's literally [2] questioning their intelligence here.

[2] Except he's not, is he? He's verbally questioning their intelligence, because he's actually opposed to doing anything literally literally. [3]

[3] This is getting me twisted in philosophical knots.

> He's verbally questioning their intelligence, because he's actually opposed to doing anything literally literally.

Well, we don't literally know that — we only know that Plato wrote that he said so, and as other have suggested, maybe Plato verballed him.

Besides, any argument regarding new technologies that starts with "well Socrates was against writing..." is bad because the new technology is not writing. Even if Socrates didn't have any real arguments and was simply hating "because it's new", that would have no connection to whatever technology you're making now. People have hated both good and bad developments. People have hyped both good and bad developments. Pointing at Socrates and saying "see, he was against writing" doesn't work because someone else can simply point at the steam-powered car or zeppelin or one of the countless other technologies that did end up going nowhere.

On a similar note, any argument along the lines of "well, the elderly have always thought the new generation was getting worse, just look at Socrates saying the youths have no manners" or something. Besides the fact that Athens did fall and lose its entire overseas empire right around when Socrates was old, and he thus may have had a point, it's also just... possible for things to get better or worse? New generations are growing up under completely different circumstances with different technologies, of course Gen Z and Gen Alpha will be doing better in some areas and worse in others than Gen X or Millenials.

Both arguments fall into the fallacy of "you are criticizing A. But 100 years ago, someone criticized B, and they were wrong" which is just like... yeah A and B are not the same thing. Young people 2000 years ago are not young people now, even if Socrates 2000 years ago was wrong in criticizing the youth of Ancient Athens, that has no bearing on modern arguments. Even if Socrates was wrong in criticizing reading, that has nothing to do with modern criticisms of social media, crypto, AI, video games, etc.

> Even if Socrates didn't have any real arguments

He had arguments though. And they were correct and irrelevant. Just like the arguments against calculators, computers, wikipedia, AI. Or against farmers diet (as opposed to hunters/gatherers diet).

Do technology makes as dumber? Always, at least in few ways. Does it matter? It hasn't mattered for last 10000 years, no reason to think this time it's different.

Well, when the resources and infrastructure to support a technology collapse, then you have to rediscover how to do it the old ways.

And its worth remembering that technologies change us in unexpected ways. They can fix a problem while creating new ones

>then you have to rediscover how to do it the old ways.

Depends on how many of the old ways are faithfully recorded in more permanent records. Language, and by follow up, reading are the most important technologies ever. As long as I have your language and instructions in writing almost anything can be accomplished.

In theory, but in practice there are some kinds of knowledge that are hard to develop without a mentor. And there's lots of little things that are so obvious that its not worth writing down, but then years, decades, centuries later those things are no longer obvious.

All of that translating written material from one culture to your own and then implementing it is by no means a trivial task and shouldn't be taken for granted

I don't think it's a fallacy to say "you're criticizing A, but 100 years ago someone criticized B, and they were wrong", assuming A and B have some related property that we're criticizing, like "A outsources skill X". The real fallacy would be to say "A is fine because B turned out fine."

With every emerging technology or change, let's assume any particular concern about the technology will likely live somewhere on the spectrum from real to unsubstantiated. It seems important to tell the difference, because how will we know where to spend our time, money and effort if we waste it equally on all apparent problems, real or not? So: how do we tell the difference? One way is to look at history, and learn from our mistakes when engaging with new technology. In many cases, real problems emerge which at first might look like tail risks. "Illusory" problems might look real early on, but often have to do with matters of tradition, appearances or status-quo bias.

Let's take an example: the steam engine. How much of the earliest criticism was about the greenhouse gas emissions? Nobody conceived it. And how much of it was about morals, religion, junk science, or protecting incumbents? If we can identify patterns across these, it might make us better at identifying problems in the future, too.

Tech today: after over a decade of hypes that either led nowhere or were mainly successful at facilitating frauds or damaging society, we take it personally when people hate our new hyped product.

So, we go to Socrates (without really knowing much about the guy other then 1-2 anecdotes) as he is our new hype salvation. Cause it is impossible for this our new hyped tech to cause harm, because writing and Socrates something something 2000 years ago. Also, it will destroy the world and replace people which means you have to give us more money now and celebrate us.

Well, for someone whose business was giving lectures it's natural to see the written word as a threat and to point out its only flaw (there's nothing more than what's written) instead of its virtues. Business wouldn't be booming as much if everyone could access knowledge at any time, anywhere.

Socrates was not “in business” as a teacher and did not charge fees for his conversations. Τhe Sophists typically taught rhetoric and other subjects for payment, whereas Socrates explicitly distanced himself from this. “Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting … if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence.”

His business was attention.

So let us hear how Socrates himself describes his “business”. From the Apology. “ if you say to me, Socrates, …, you shall be let off, but upon one condition, that you are not to enquire and speculate in this way any more, and that if you are caught doing so again you shall die;—if this was the condition on which you let me go, I should reply: Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting any one whom I meet and saying to him after my manner: You, my friend,—a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens,—are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all?”

It doesn't seem to counter what I said in any way. Just because it's attention doesn't mean it's wrong to want it.

Socrates deemed writing a 'pharmakon,' a word that can simultaneously mean both a remedy and a poison.

> hands are wrung that communication will become rife with error and misunderstanding because unlike the telegraph, the newfangled telephone leaves no written record!

Well let's not forget that early phone communication quality was ahem not-very-good, so of course errors were an issue.

Socrates was right in a sense, if you consider how for 2000 years Plato and Aristotle were seen as authorities on all matters, especially by the Church.

They are still considered by many people as the greatest philosophers of all time, especially by those who have never read them.

It took writers 2400+ years to solve Socrates' UX complaint, we can now talk to previously written text and it's pretty close to the original context. lets hope AI is a bit quicker in solving their own UX complaints.

From the linked article :

    And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing.

And now imagine that the only one and same thing the LLMs say is not only fixed, but intentionally steered as the biggest and most inflexible propaganda mechanism we have ever seen.

Especially given the lack of competition in the space, and people mostly using models from 2 or 3 providers.

Can't you argue that now, with llms, the written word speaks back?

Socrates had a point.

The written word is nothing like paying a rent to an oligarch across the ocean in order to get access to information that was stolen in the first place.

So please come up with another talking point. Not every historical anecdote where someone opposed some kind of progress can be applied to centralized data centers that contain stolen material.

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