Comment by WCSTombs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WCSTombs | Hacker News Reader

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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…

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.

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.

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