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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