At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

▲ palmotea 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Oh no, not that tired thing again. I suppose your point is: people once were critical of the technology of writing, so all criticism of the technology-at-hand is illegitimate. You don't actually make a point, so one has to assume.

Some points:

1. Technological inventions are not repetitions of the same phenomenon. Each invention is its own unique event, you cannot generalize the experience with previous inventions to understand the effects of the latest ones.

2. Socrates may have been in large degree right. Imagine that you and your society has been locked in the sewers, condemned to wade in shit for so long that you and your ancestors long ago forgot what fresh air feels like. What would you think about your life? Would you think "this is horrible" or "this is fine"? Or maybe "I enjoy smell of shit and we're so much better off because we don't have to worry about sunburn"?

▲ _verandaguy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

While I agree with your rebuke of the GP, Socrates was materially wrong about writing (or at least, about the ability to persist information beyond any single human lifetime).

Cumulatively, knowledge work (including, in particular, curating knowledge) is exceptionally energy intensive from an evolutionary standpoint. It does pay dividends, clearly, but to get compounding effects from it, being able to efficiently pass down big corpora of facts, ideas, processes, etc., is an absolute necessity.

Writing systems are the fundamental way through which we can do this. They worked for us for millennia, and we eventually built upon them to develop encodings used today to store information remarkably densely.

▲ bluGill 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The larger win from writing is passing down things that are not commonly needed. If you hunt antelope every year I can teach my kids. If we know there are antelope "over there", but they are easy to over hunt to so we only hunt in 100 year droughts - nobody in the village will know how to hunt them when we need to and so we need writing. (never mind how we figure out that they are easy to over hunt)

▲ bonesss 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

▲ _verandaguy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I agree that those are all ways of preserving knowledge in a somewhat inter-generational way, a few thoughts.

- None of these are as flexible as writing. They're more expressive, more engaging (arguably, at least to some), and might even be good at succinctly saving certain specific types of knowledge.

  Knot systems typically parallel the abacus, having been used for accounting and to keep a record of tax levies. Certainly this isn't the *only* thing they were used for, but this was the case in a number of indigenous civilizations in the Americas, as well as in some Asian civilizations. Certain dances might be good at representing the motions you have to go to while working fields or performing other societal tasks, sure. But a good writing system, in its relative blandness, is incredibly versatile, and can encode not just a wide breadth of information, but also include information about *why* the information is what it is, to the extent that the authors knew.

- Many of these systems tend to either disappear or change over time while relying on largely-unwritten rules, implied social context, and other informational artifacts that themselves don't have a very long shelf life in the event of significant social change. Where destroying the written word (especially in the wake of the invention of the printing press) is a long-term, conscious, coordinated action; dances, songs, and stories can fall victim to everything from fashion, to counterculture, to human migrations, to hostile invasions.

- I don't understand what you mean by things like "stories with self-correction." In many cultures with an oral tradition, the stories do get distorted because of people misremembering, or through conscious changes in response to social conditions at the time of a retelling; if a 1,000-year-old story with no written record backing it is told today, it's almost certainly not the original story, but the culmination of a thousand years and dozens of generations of sometimes-subtle, sometimes not reinterpretation.

	▲	bonesss 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Honestly I can’t be bothered with the ignorant downvotes, I will delete soon, but in fair discussion: you are proving what I was saying. Stripping information and encoding from proven persistence formats to argue for modern bias despite overwhelming historical counter-evidence. I said writing is great, but we have a modernity bias. Knot systems are not writing systems, they have a far deeper and historically more proven record. Archeologically those are the primary persisted form of knowledge for humans, paper is new. The lack of astrological information and social information in your reasoning makes me think you are googling to rebut, not aware of or engaging with the wild depth modern computer driven research has revealed from those systems. Also, no: an abacus counts, knots record. Whole empires accountings, whole societies developments, astrology and climate information. Trade, documents, generational transmission, with knowledge/cultural/spiritual baked into and on top of it. Symbolic recording. Wildly more intricate than you’re giving credit, and mostly lost to time. Ie the presumption is that we’re underestimating it, perhaps by magnitudes, perhaps many magnitudes. Your take on dances is selling far, far, short the anthropology and known encoding systems in those dances. “Might be good for fields” … bro, that is degrading and ignorant. No, whole social dramas and histories, secret rituals and encoded spiritual stories. Think kabuki or Homer, only rhythmically encoded in ways that can be rhythmically verified. Stories, fables, rituals, and also cryptographically encoded social secrets requiring multi-party keys to decode (talismans, codes, colours, dance, and rhythm). “Hotel, motel, holi…”, can only end a few ways, fewer still in context, fewer still in ritualized context. Self-correcting stories, ie with error correction in their telling and encoding, are a basic archeological fact of the single oldest consecutive and persistence of human knowledge. They encode their words like we do PGP messages, only using human meat hardware. The oldest astronomical observations in humanity, spanning major climate disturbances. They aren’t catchy tunes, it’s a structured performance that reveals errors and maintains strict form. Like how Hebrew and English work differently over vast timescales. You are saying “many” ignoring I am pointing to specifics. The many tens of thousands of years old stories of Australian Aboriginals (documented scientifically), and their specific transmission format that keeps them consistent, is not commensurate with hand waving about “stories” in general. Archeologically we are 1 of 1, the digital black hole is a thing. If you accept that information theory is about signals and encoding/transmission, science shows human brain meat is awesome at more than just reading (a trained skill). Music is math, cryptography didn’t start with crypto.

▲ programjames 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

▲ gallerdude 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

1. You can't understand the nuances, but there is a general pattern: new inventions may make us slightly less proficient at specifics, yet more powerful overall

2. Imagine a hunter gatherer is time travelled to 2026. You have lunch go to a cafe with him, and he learns that food is cheap, delicious, and abundant. He sees your house, and thinks it's amazing compared to his cave. He thinks that 2026 must be absolute paradise. You explain to him, well kinda, but also not really. Is the hunter gatherer right?

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AlecSchueler 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Alternatively he sees that you live in your house alone and feel lonely all the time. Maybe you have a small family and a few friends but it's nothing compared to the tribal life he knows.

He sees you spend your day working but rarely get to go outside or do anything active. Even when you're not working you sit behind a desk staring at a screen.

He wonders why you bother will all the technology when it made your life worse. Is he right?

	▲	jagged-chisel an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Alternatively, he sees you alone and thinks how excellent to not have to deal with tribesmen- the elders and their rules, the children and their needs, the others hunters and their mind numbing chatter … This future man has paradise indeed.
	▲	gallerdude 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I agree partially, but also misses the wonder he would have for: relaxing bathtubs, funny livestreams, wireless earbuds, huge libraries, and even globes. And yeah, you could make a list of struggles we have today he never did. But that’s kind of my point - it’s complicated.

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tadfisher 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The hunter-gatherer will wonder why you spend so much time working. He only spends 2-3 hours a day gathering and preparing food, maybe an hour maintaining tools and shelter; with the rest dedicated to leisure and social activities.

▲ DiscourseFan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As to 2., the whole of this narrative in the Phaedrus is ironic, considering it depends on the written word for its transmission, this dialouge being fully reported by Plato, filled with literary allusion, dramatic setting. Cf. "Plato's Pharmacy," by Derrida, and the work of his student, Bernard Stiegler.

▲ quirkot 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

regarding #2: how many serfs came home after re-digging the toilet hole to eat a meal of hand-milled grain bread and old vegetables with the members of the family that survived infancy and thought "life just doesn't get any better than this"? Probably almost all of them

▲ partyficial 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

he(zozbot234) could also be agreeing with OP, not disagreeing.

I don't remember phone numbers anymore. If I were to lose my phone, or the cloud, I'm SOL re-adding everyone.

	▲	pixl97 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I mean, it's most likely because you have an absolute shit load of numbers/contacts in your phone. In the old days people just had rolodexes filled with numbers and if that disappeared they were just as screwed. I remember a few numbers of my most direct contacts and depend on backups for everything else.
	▲	rrr_oh_man 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> he(zozbot234) could also be agreeing with OP, not disagreeing. This is how I for one understood this.

▲ jareklupinski 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> What would you think about your life? Would you think "this is horrible" or "this is fine"? Or maybe "I enjoy smell of shit and we're so much better off because we don't have to worry about sunburn"?

id probably start with "who locked us in this sewer?"

▲ hibikir 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's quite the uncharitable view. Let's try a better one.

Changes on what humans need to remember what to do have, for as far as we have written records, changed the skills humans hone over time. They change our fitness function. Some of those changes are bad for a while, and then get better. Others are just far better at all times. Others might get rejected. Either way, it takes a long time before we know what the technology does to us: See how cheap printing is directly linked to wars of religion.

So it's not that AI could not be bad in the short run, or even in the long run: It appears to be the kind of technology where one cannot evaluate without significant adoption, and at that poing, we are in this rollercoaster for a while whether we want it or not. See social media, or just political innovation, like liberal democracy or communism. We can make guesses, but many guesses made early on look ridiculous in hindsight, like someone complaining about humans relying on writing.

▲ tbrownaw 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Writings are fixed once written, and don't update themselves as the world changes.

Writings are subject to known biases such as publication bias, and so relying on them reduces the range of what you can consider.

Therefore, writing is bad for the same reasons that this post thinks that AI is bad.

	▲	quirkot 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

▲ alwa 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

(From Socrates’ dialog with Phaedrus)

https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html#:~:text=there%2...

	▲	xg15 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Phaedrus: Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country. Looks like even back then, they went "cool story bro" on that text...

▲ hdndjsbbs 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The irony of quoting this particular story without providing any of the necessary context for readers. Truly an aid to reminiscence and not memory.

▲ charonn0 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

This could be describing an internet argument where both parties google for expert articles that seem to support their point of view without really understanding anything about the subject.

▲ oytis an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a valid critique though. We sacrificed a lot of memory and perception capacity to literacy.

▲ butlike 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's just a story. Doesn't mean it's wise.

▲ eaglelamp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're misinterpreting the quote. Socrates is saying that being able to find a written quotation will replace fully understanding a concept. It's the difference between being able to quote the pythagorean theorem and understanding it well enough to prove it. That's why Socrates says that those who rely on reading will be "hard to get along with" - they will be pedantic without being able to discuss concepts freely.

Likewise with AI the appearance of reasoning without the substance could lead to boring exchanges of plausible slop rather than meaningful discourse.

	▲	pixl97 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I mean Socrates said enough stuff that was wrong or didn't have any scientific understanding either. Simply put at humanity wide scales written information is by far the most important thing you can have. There is kind of a Sortie's paradox occurring where you have individual knowledge that can be held by one person conflicts with systems knowledge that has to be redundant and can be easily transferred.

▲ user3939382 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is actually a great criticism. Post Enlightenment we’ve come to worship the written word as a source of truth. It’s not. Thoughts, wisdom, understanding, exist primarily (and by necessity primarily) as a continuous structure in our minds. By writing, we distill and collapse this rich continuous structure into a discrete 2D slice. It’s portable which has many benefits but we tend to forget that this written word we worship in academia is a low fidelity copy created out of necessity, not because it’s optimal. In fact, much is lost this way. The hazard is that we often end up testing for mastery of this low fidelity discretization rather than the knowledge structure it shadows.

	▲	DangitBobby 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		We would literally not have access to this criticism without the written word. It would have long been lost to time. And so it is with enumerate other thoughts that happily have been recorded. Before written word, the uneducated had to just take the words of the (apparently) wise as an authority on all matters, and the only access to their knowledge was through conversation with them. That's gatekeeping and siloing in one go. And authorities' thoughts themselves often form 2D slices of knowledge once they stop continually updating themselves in the know on SotA. Even if they do keep themselves updated, each conversation you've had with (what a layperson can recollect of it) is a thin 2D slice of that knowledge. I can think of practically no ways that written expertise is not better.
	▲	layer8 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		On the other hand, books allow us to access a much broader selection of ideas than would otherwise be feasible. I’m not sure where LLMs lie on that spectrum. They allow faster access, but it also feels more limited.

▲ CamperBob2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

▲ moralestapia 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is why I come to HN, knowledgeable people enrich the discussion so much with their unique points of view.

Also thanks to Mia (she/her), this was a very interesting read.

▲ reg_dunlop 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Impressive. Thanks for the share.

I was thinking about this recently: The difference between systemic (systematic) learning and opportunistic learning.

AI enables opportunistic learning, or Just-in-time (JIT) learning. It give the impression of infinite knowledge.

Most general concepts are well within the grasp of human understanding.

My curiosity RE the difference between systemic v opportunistic learning was the effect of longer-termed exposure/use to a tool that enables opportunistic learning.