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Comment by ppsreejith | Hacker News Reader

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...

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> 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.

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."

> 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?

not true all precde egyptians

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