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.
> 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
In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.
But the point about culture of questioning is an interesting one I hadn't heard before.
> In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.
Yeah, good point. At a cultural level, this was a change from an Oral world where _knowing_ what to recall, being able to, and being 'witty' about it mattered a great deal; to a Literate world where things could be cited, 'looked up', and compared.
The quoted Seventh Letter limits the argument to writing about philosophy, not writing about other things: "There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another ..."
There's also the objection to "putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness". If I was being uncharitable I could say that he fears criticism, like he's saying the ideas will be ruined if taken outside of his Svengali-like reality distortion field. (Or more charitably, he wants a good faith environment to discuss them in, instead of exposing them to hostile trolls who just won't get it.)
(This is supposedly a letter written by Plato, but probably is more like fan fiction written by his contemporaries.)
This is more like a dancer or a martial artist refusing to write a book about his craft on the ground that the required understanding cannot be passed this way. With dancing this is more obvious than with philosophy, so writing on philosophy is more dangerous, as the reader may mistake the false knowledge for the truth.
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.
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.
Socrates was right in a sense, if you consider how for 2000 years Plato and Aristotle were seen as authorities on all matters, especially by the Church.
They are still considered by many people as the greatest philosophers of all time, especially by those who have never read them.
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.
It makes you wonder about not just writing but language as a whole. In transcription we clearly lose important dimensionality such as tone, intent, or body language. Socrates seems to have been alluding to accessing information beyond what was merely initially offered as well, e.g. follow up questions.
What sort of dimensionality do we lose when thoughts go from ephemeral forms transcribed into concrete english language structures? Is this lingua franca holding us back in some ways from different thought patterns that might be better in some ways?
Dream states or psychedelics probably get you closest to this sort of "knowing without having the knowing put into discrete words" state of low level cognition. I wonder what might be there in our minds if we managed to strip our thinking of being bound by the limited framing offered through our languages?
> 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.
On the one hand, yes, I agree with you.
On the other hand, I’ve played the game of telephone. I can’t imagine a game of telephone played over multiple generations has any sort of fidelity.
Also, and I found this idea in that newest translation of Homer, remembering is a kind of technology. We do not write books, poems, songs or tv shows to be remembered. But, when people relied on memory, they did structured knowledge so that it is easier to remember.
That is where rhyme and repetition comes from. We kind of lost how to do that.
But then again, when you talk to people who don't learn because "you can find it on the internet anyway", they come across as dumb. When you encounter people who can do basic arithmetic because calculator, there are situation where they are ... dumb and not useful. When you encounter people who use car to get everywhere, they cant really walk - they think 1km is a long hike. It is going to be the same with ai.
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.
It took writers 2400+ years to solve Socrates' UX complaint, we can now talk to previously written text and it's pretty close to the original context. lets hope AI is a bit quicker in solving their own UX complaints.
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.
And now imagine that the only one and same thing the LLMs say is not only fixed, but intentionally steered as the biggest and most inflexible propaganda mechanism we have ever seen.
Especially given the lack of competition in the space, and people mostly using models from 2 or 3 providers.
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...
> 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
In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.
But the point about culture of questioning is an interesting one I hadn't heard before.
> In fairness, that is a rejection of the actual technology, not the surrounding culture.
Yeah, good point. At a cultural level, this was a change from an Oral world where _knowing_ what to recall, being able to, and being 'witty' about it mattered a great deal; to a Literate world where things could be cited, 'looked up', and compared.
The quoted Seventh Letter limits the argument to writing about philosophy, not writing about other things: "There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another ..."
There's also the objection to "putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness". If I was being uncharitable I could say that he fears criticism, like he's saying the ideas will be ruined if taken outside of his Svengali-like reality distortion field. (Or more charitably, he wants a good faith environment to discuss them in, instead of exposing them to hostile trolls who just won't get it.)
(This is supposedly a letter written by Plato, but probably is more like fan fiction written by his contemporaries.)
This is more like a dancer or a martial artist refusing to write a book about his craft on the ground that the required understanding cannot be passed this way. With dancing this is more obvious than with philosophy, so writing on philosophy is more dangerous, as the reader may mistake the false knowledge for the truth.
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.
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.
Socrates was right in a sense, if you consider how for 2000 years Plato and Aristotle were seen as authorities on all matters, especially by the Church.
They are still considered by many people as the greatest philosophers of all time, especially by those who have never read them.
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.
It makes you wonder about not just writing but language as a whole. In transcription we clearly lose important dimensionality such as tone, intent, or body language. Socrates seems to have been alluding to accessing information beyond what was merely initially offered as well, e.g. follow up questions.
What sort of dimensionality do we lose when thoughts go from ephemeral forms transcribed into concrete english language structures? Is this lingua franca holding us back in some ways from different thought patterns that might be better in some ways?
Dream states or psychedelics probably get you closest to this sort of "knowing without having the knowing put into discrete words" state of low level cognition. I wonder what might be there in our minds if we managed to strip our thinking of being bound by the limited framing offered through our languages?
> 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.
On the one hand, yes, I agree with you.
On the other hand, I’ve played the game of telephone. I can’t imagine a game of telephone played over multiple generations has any sort of fidelity.
Early on my corporate career, I quickly realized “have” had 5 distinct definitions.
Do you have those definitions?
He must have had them at one point.
Yeah, he would have had to have had them, hadn't he?
Even corporations realized that the word "done" has many definitions.
Also, and I found this idea in that newest translation of Homer, remembering is a kind of technology. We do not write books, poems, songs or tv shows to be remembered. But, when people relied on memory, they did structured knowledge so that it is easier to remember.
That is where rhyme and repetition comes from. We kind of lost how to do that.
But then again, when you talk to people who don't learn because "you can find it on the internet anyway", they come across as dumb. When you encounter people who can do basic arithmetic because calculator, there are situation where they are ... dumb and not useful. When you encounter people who use car to get everywhere, they cant really walk - they think 1km is a long hike. It is going to be the same with ai.
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.
It took writers 2400+ years to solve Socrates' UX complaint, we can now talk to previously written text and it's pretty close to the original context. lets hope AI is a bit quicker in solving their own UX complaints.
From the linked article :
And now imagine that the only one and same thing the LLMs say is not only fixed, but intentionally steered as the biggest and most inflexible propaganda mechanism we have ever seen.Especially given the lack of competition in the space, and people mostly using models from 2 or 3 providers.