"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
offloading thinking is a little/lottle bit different than writing to preserve your thoughts versus memorization. it's more analogous to skipping the writing, plugging your ears, and closing your eyes, while you wait for the answer to be presented before you.
This offloading was present even with pre-LLM googling. Sufficiently powerful search allows you to forget enough of the story to rely on imprecise recall. This is a form of thought atrophy.
I think this is probably what Socrates meant. He wasn't wrong, it's just that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
Even the "calculators make you forget how to do math" people seem antiquarian to me. But I totally get it when people talk about googling, and AI is another step change in the wrong direction.
To follow that arc backwards in time, maybe Socrates was right after all.
yeah, the centralization and concentration of knowledge and ability through reliance in this manner enables the teacher to escrow all your states pencils at any given moment for whatever reason.
once embedded i can see whole classes of industry dos'd.
logistics, dos'd.
it, dos'd.
military planning, dos'd.
medical, dos'd.
pay us this fee so you can update your nvidia drivers.
it's the unholy marriage of the surveillance and petrol states pushing this.
I don’t suppose he was entirely wrong. I would probably be able to recall a lot more (verbatim) if it all had to be stored in me noggin. I think the trade off worthwhile, however.
Im 45, and i can tell you getting a cell phone absolutely destroyed my ability to memorize phone numbers. During the 90s when i was in highschool i has all my friends numbers, parents work numbers, etc... memorized, i only know my parents and wife now.
I don't think the _ability_ to memorize phone numbers is what atrophied here by getting a cell phone. The _need_ did. It's harder to memorize phone numbers today because we lack the practical application of the memory (e.g. only when something fails do we actually try to put that memory to practice). I bet anyone would quickly pick up on memorizing phone numbers if they had to both remember and type in the phone numbers every time they wanted to make a call or text.
It's not like we are born with a "phone number library" skill. It's a specific skill that's developed to meet a need. It's carved out of the grey matter, a little table for storing 7- or 9-digit numbers. But the grey matter is still available for other uses.
Maybe as per usual, I think we all mostly remembered so many numbers thanks to pattern recognition. I'm old enough to have had a rotary phone in the basement growing that I used less than the various other keypad phones in the house. Whenever I was dialing (literally) a newly learned number on the rotary phone, I to think of what it looked like on touchpad first. Although very quickly I'd get to know the rotary pattern as well.
Of course, this is likely totally a regular memory device people would use. I've done no reading on this so, so if Socrates was wary of writing, was he also wary of pattern recognition or drawing as memory aids?
Back in Socrates time, masters of rhetoric used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci to memorize long texts without reading or writing. Something was definitely lost as something was gained.
...which can come in handy. Sometimes your cellphone battery dies. I still know my parents' numbers from memory (as well as some of my friends' parents' numbers, though that isn't super useful) but I am concerned about it sometimes.
But what if it isn't? Like, if you didn't have the written word to rely on as a crutch, what more could you have accomplished if you didn't have that? Maybe nothing, but maybe much, much more! Who can say in retrospect?
I've always wondered how we'd fare in battle against an extrasolar civilization which achieved technology without writing. They'd be a hell of a lot scarier than we are, in my view.
Being able to pass on precise information without writing them down would be hella impressive in of itself. Currently we fail with simplest ones after a few hops.
There's this fallacy where one defends a modern idea by citing criticism to an old idea, thus positioning their modern idea as revolutionary as the classical one that survived the filter of time.
Ha, indeed! I misguidedly turned to Reddit somewhat recently when the activity on the programming forum I spent most of my time on died down thanks to LLMs. As I got sucked into reading various shit posting on AI, there are multiple quotes daily along these lines. Many are written in a way as if it's the first time anyone has said it (probably most of them are bots). I finally deleted my Reddit account.
Anyway, a particularly funny one I read recently was "Ya, it's just like how musicians who didn't accept synthesizers got left behind." This person apparently believes there have been successful musicals acts based purely around traditional instrumentation since the ~80s.
The thought of reading someone’s writing without having to meet with them and discuss interactively probably evoked the same fears as using AI instead of working with another person interactively.
Then taking writing as the source of truth… who even knows if the author is the original sayer. They could just write things down they heard other people say - the birth of IP theft! And yet, journalism
very interesting perspective, i remember reading thyucledies and he complains about how historians before him would report the first tale they heard, by comparison he worked dilligently to confirm his history (though since he was inventing this process his standards were not quite modern, meaning he didn't rely as much on documentary evidence, and he had a penchant for writing speeches down when it is impossible they are word for word what someone said).
The modern world has way too much content to commit to memory. Our brains would explode. Maybe 2500 years ago it was still possible to functioned as an adult without writing things down.
If we didn't have writing we wouldn't have to memorize that much stuff. The world would probably be worse for it. But that wouldn't have been obvious in Socrates' time.
I think it was only after I had familiarised myself with hermeneutics that I really understood why the written word is problematic and what Socrates took issue with in writing.
This is the key danger of worshipping LLMs as false gods or oracles. They do not have superior answers, only random noise generated to appeal to simplistic, expedient deference of lazy people. All answers thus generated fall victim to an implicit appeal to authority fallacy.
> All the emphasis these companies place on technological progress is a distraction from dealing with the climate crisis, said Gregers Andersen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark who has written a forthcoming book about Silicon Valley overpromising tech solutions to climate change. “The problem is, of course, that it takes attention away from actually solving the problems that are here on Earth,” he said. “And I think that’s also what’s meant by the term of ‘starwashing.’”
This is an example of the fallacy of relative privation[0]. Private space ventures have essentially zero impact on climate change. They do not utilize the same resources that combatting climate change involves. Changing anything about space ventures will have no impact on the effectiveness or timing of climate change solutions. The global space industry is roughly the same size as the global cosmetics industry - it is exactly as ridiculous to say space is distracting us from the climate crisis as it is to say we should stop producing cosmetics until the climate crisis is solved. Environmental protection is important, but so are other things, and we neither will nor should stop everything to focus on one problem at a time.
1. Current space exploration work is supported at least in part by the bizarre fiction that humanity can escape global warming by putting infrastructure in space or by traveling to Mars. This pipe dream competes with more realistic proposals. People concerned about global warming might be misled and support allocating capital to space exploration rather than to overhauling transportation and power grids here on Earth.
2. Fabricating and launching rockets is environmentally destructive. This is not causing global warming so much, but launch facilities cause a great deal of local pollution to air and water. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/12/spacex-repeatedly-polluted-w...
I suppose that what I am really saying here is "SpaceX sucks" in two different ways. Their competitors don't have either of these problems to the same degree.
> People concerned about global warming might be misled and support allocating capital to space exploration rather than to overhauling transportation and power grids here on Earth.
Assuming jjk166's position that space industry's environmental impact is akin to a rounding error overall: it's hardly competing with "overhauling transportation and power grids here on Earth" because these 2 activities are limited by different bottlenecks.
For both, government funding is an important factor. But the space industry is limited by long development/testing cycles (spacecraft & their engines, designing & building satellites, etc). Or simply commercial demand for satellite-related services.
Whereas the energy transition is largely depending on permitting issues (for new power cables, land for solar or wind parks), production capacity of specialized companies, shortage of qualified workers, price vs. market tipping points, geopolitics & more.
Apart from governments' limited role here, cutting back one doesn't speed up the other.
The bigger issue is presenting [moving to space] as a fix for problems back on Earth. That's just ridiculous. Building & putting anything in space is waaayy more difficult & expensive (read: more resource-consuming) than doing the same on Earth. Not even a tiny fraction of Earth's population can be moved to space in the forseeable future. Surviving in space (long-term) is harder still than surviving on the open ocean, in a desert, or on Antarctica.
So humankind is stuck on Earth for the time being. To survive as a species we MUST make things work on this planet.
Space industry should focus on complementing that: science / exploration, telecom, Earth observation, maybe some niche manufacturing that's small-mass but enabled by 0-G, etc. Building datacenters in space? Send up mirrors to aid the energy crisis? Anyone saying such things with a straight face has lost their marbles and/or is BSing you.
But for believers: okay! Research what's needed, do the math & see how that works out. Maybe surprise us all.
>but launch facilities cause a great deal of local pollution to air and water. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/...
Importantly this was a paperwork issue, not actual pollution. SpaceX reading of the rules was that only Texas regulated this category of discharge not EPA, but this was quickly resolved. The same unmodified water deluge system was later operated with the blessings of the EPA (guess it wasn't that bad!), so I wouldn't lose sleep over this one. YMMV
A user's hardware represents the worst case scenario they want to be able to handle, not their preferred nominal settings. Most people aren't changing their screen refresh rate when they switch between playing a game and reading wikipedia.
After all, people painted the walls and enhanced their gas with cyanide in large quantities for years before even realizing it had to be carefully handled so they are basically the same risk in the typical mind.
The problem is free cyanide is extraordinarily dangerous in the air and you'd likely kill a lot of people before someone realized what was going on with the battery, not just that people eat batteries. Even lithium batteries honestly get pretty close to not being worth the risk for consumers, cyanide is still a bit of a step after that yet.
> No manager/CEO would say “hey, due to AI my workers get the same work done in 30h for which they needed 40h before - let’s cut their working hours down to 30h with same salary”.
Why not? The moment anyone offers this option, they get their pick of employees who will both churn less and be better rested for their work time, increasing productivity, whereas their greedy competitors get the people with no better options and burn them out. Despite people's despair, the current situation is extremely unstable.
Productivity per capita has already 5Xed since the 40 hour workweek was implemented. The resources required to comfortably raise a family in a suburban home can be generated with only a few hundred hours of labor per year. Everything they had then is easier to produce now, and the things we've gained since like consumer electronics require barely any human labor at all to produce.
> There's an assumption buried in Chesterton's Fence: somebody built the fence. It didn't grow there by itself, so whoever put it there presumably had a reason. Code has traditionally worked much the same way. Even if the reasoning was bad, there was at least some reasoning to uncover.
That assumption is not in Chesterton's Fence. Plenty of things happen by accident, even without invoking AI. The point of Chesterton's Fence is simply that you should not assume by default that there's no good reason for something to exist. If you live in an area where a tornado might deposit a fence in a random location, it still behooves you to investigate any fence you come across before removing it.
Note that even if something was done without purpose, it can still potentially be providing some benefit that you'd rather not give up, or someone else may have since taken advantage of it existing and built upon it. If you don't understand the system, then you can't predict the consequences of changing it. There is no escaping the need to develop understanding.
Your arguments might align with his fence but they are not his fence which is about determining an intentional earlier action.
The random placement has no explanation for why it will outperform any other truly random placement in a future storm. Path dependent behavior of agents after placement is a better argument but that assumes you don't want to upset other agents. Disruption is taking benefit in removing things that are a higher positive to the whole than to yourself.
You are wrong, as I didn't limit the analogy specifically to desktop computers only, try reading the rest of what I wrote. The original analogy was obviously hedging against simplistic brain-computer analogies (GP could be read as: "the brain is not a simplistic computer"), so the response demanding to "live with that" citing computational aspects of the brain was misguided and arrogantly wrong.
Multiple other responses also point out the definition given leads to absurdities / triviality (the liver is a computer in this context), so the "correction" with citations is both inept and inapt.
-Socrates
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