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 6 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 [-]

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▲ 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 [-]
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