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- Hacker News
- > hands are wrung that communication will become rife with error and misunderstanding because unlike the telegraph, the newfangled telephone leaves no written record!
Well let's not forget that early phone communication quality was ahem not-very-good, so of course errors were an issue.
by renox - Socrates deemed writing a 'pharmakon,' a word that can simultaneously mean both a remedy and a poison.
- Well, for someone whose business was giving lectures it's natural to see the written word as a threat and to point out its only flaw (there's nothing more than what's written) instead of its virtues. Business wouldn't be booming as much if everyone could access knowledge at any time, anywhere.
- Tech today: after over a decade of hypes that either led nowhere or were mainly successful at facilitating frauds or damaging society, we take it personally when people hate our new hyped product.
So, we go to Socrates (without really knowing much about the guy other then 1-2 anecdotes) as he is our new hype salvation. Cause it is impossible for this our new hyped tech to cause harm, because writing and Socrates something something 2000 years ago. Also, it will destroy the world and replace people which means you have to give us more money now and celebrate us.
by watwut - Besides, any argument regarding new technologies that starts with "well Socrates was against writing..." is bad because the new technology is not writing. Even if Socrates didn't have any real arguments and was simply hating "because it's new", that would have no connection to whatever technology you're making now. People have hated both good and bad developments. People have hyped both good and bad developments. Pointing at Socrates and saying "see, he was against writing" doesn't work because someone else can simply point at the steam-powered car or zeppelin or one of the countless other technologies that did end up going nowhere.
On a similar note, any argument along the lines of "well, the elderly have always thought the new generation was getting worse, just look at Socrates saying the youths have no manners" or something. Besides the fact that Athens did fall and lose its entire overseas empire right around when Socrates was old, and he thus may have had a point, it's also just... possible for things to get better or worse? New generations are growing up under completely different circumstances with different technologies, of course Gen Z and Gen Alpha will be doing better in some areas and worse in others than Gen X or Millenials.
Both arguments fall into the fallacy of "you are criticizing A. But 100 years ago, someone criticized B, and they were wrong" which is just like... yeah A and B are not the same thing. Young people 2000 years ago are not young people now, even if Socrates 2000 years ago was wrong in criticizing the youth of Ancient Athens, that has no bearing on modern arguments. Even if Socrates was wrong in criticizing reading, that has nothing to do with modern criticisms of social media, crypto, AI, video games, etc.
by djaro - It feels historically vertiginous to see Socrates weigh in on <artificial> <intelligence> , 2000 years ago. [1]
"And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing"
--
[1] Because words are literally artificial marks on paper, and he's literally [2] questioning their intelligence here.
[2] Except he's not, is he? He's verbally questioning their intelligence, because he's actually opposed to doing anything literally literally. [3]
[3] This is getting me twisted in philosophical knots.
by Kim_Bruning - Initially, I thought Socrates' stance on writing was some kind of eccentricity but now that I have seen first hand how the meaning of words can change over time and differ between people and places, I now have a better understanding of how much context is lost in writing.
When you said something, back then, the people around you in close proximity to you would have a very similar understanding of the words you use, especially in terms of magnitude, cultural context and nuances.
When you write something down and it is read thousands of years later, interpreters are doing a lot of work to try to figure out what was meant and the thought the author was trying to get across. I fully believe that there are entire, complex thought processes and ideas which were lost in translation due to contextual differences.
Also, subjective experience-based words like 'difficult', 'easy', 'entertaining', 'funny' or even 'good' and 'evil' can vary widely between individuals. I didn't realize this until I met certain people who had very different values to mine. They had completely different definition of 'good' and 'evil' or 'right' and 'wrong'.
Talking to these people is strange and sometimes uncomfortable because you're using the same language and can 'understand' each other superficially, but you know you're not actually speaking the same language. You know they interpret what you're saying differently; they have fundamentally different goals and beliefs about the world and about you.
For example, some action or belief which might be second-nature to you, might actually be seen as strange and a weakness from the other person's perspective. But there are many, many distortions like this.
In fact, no two humans understand the same language in the same way. Often, what people believe, is shockingly different; you just never realized because you never discussed in depth and never defined your words and broke them down into their atomic parts... And in elite social circles, many taboos exist precisely to prevent any such exploration from occurring as such explorations might jeopardize relationships. Many relationships serve a strategic purpose and aren't about truth discovery.
by jongjong - 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...
by ppsreejith