Even corporations realized that the word "done" has many definitions.

You had me with that one. (I don't mean had...you know what I mean.)

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?

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.

Perhaps if your imagination included a game of telephone which includes multiple error correcting codes/mechanisms, when instruction in those mechanisms is part of the teaching, and when preserving the wording is valued by most/all participants in the game/culture/conversation?

Here is one example where knowledge was well maintained over 12000 years.

https://indigenous.sl.nsw.gov.au/recent-updates/ancient-abor...

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.

True, but I don't think leaving it unwritten makes it better.

Even in the quote given in this article, most instances of the word "word" are "logos" in Greek, which means something closer to speech, argument, reasoning, logic, etc. This doesn't really change the meaning of the quote dramatically, but some slight nuance is lost.

I share your sentiment. What you're describing here was also very eye-opening to me when I first realized it.

I'll restate these ideas in a more explicit claim. All symbols are defined via one's own subjective experience.

One's own understanding/definition of every word can be traced back to personal experience. Imagine your life as a timeline, like a video, from birth up until now. You can seek that timeline to find the moments/clips that contributed to your definition of any given word or even mathematical symbol. To give an example, when I say "apple", the corresponding idea in my head is based on every apple I've seen and every instance of the word "apple" I've seen being used or being taught to me in the past. Even when we try to define the phrase "this specific apple" while looking at the same apple on the same table in the same room, the light bounces off of it slightly differently from my angle of view vs yours, and we did not see the same sequence of "video frames" about the apple, and so our mental models of that apple would necessarily be slightly different.

This is probably why the hard problem of consciousness / unified theory of physics appear forever out of reach. If no two observers/observations are fully identical, then you cannot even define what an ideal observer is. But we tend to assume such an ideal definition exists.

This seems almost trivial in hindsight because "identical" can be defined as 1) "one and the same", based on one thing OR 2) "mostly similar", based on pairs of adjacent things one has seen in the past.

And to sort of echo the original post, it seems to me that a lot value comes from the interactive nature of argumentation. But I think the specific medium/modality of those interactions don't matter for most things, and even when it does, like in this case, valuable insights can still fall out of a discussion in text. I derived the precursor ideas which led to this conclusion of definitional non-equivalence in past offline arguments as well as simulated discussions in my head. And I derived the actual conclusion by arguing with people here on HN, which helped me truly internalize the idea that even the definition of consciousness/observation differs from one person to another. That comment thread can be seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338029

It's worth mentioning that I am not too proud of that specific interaction because I got needlessly defensive and adversarial, and lied about my subjective experience of having undergone general anesthesia even though I haven't really, and it was especially egregious in a discussion about consciousness. My original reflex/motivation was I felt that many other people would likely prematurely dismiss some of those ideas if I admitted that one of the tangential premises were wrong. And regretfully, by lying that time, I've introduced a cancer in my mental pathways when considering the problem of consciousness and adjacent philosophical problems because I'd always have this nagging feeling to try to justify that past mistake, even now. But in truth, I was just being an intellectually dishonest little shit trying to win an argument. And yet, something valuable came out of that interaction.

He's verbally questioning their intelligence, because he's actually opposed to doing anything literally literally.

Well, we don't literally know that — we only know that Plato wrote that he said so, and as other have suggested, maybe Plato verballed him.

Duke Huan was in his hall reading a book. The wheelwright P'ien, who was in the yard below chiseling a wheel, laid down his mallet and chisel, stepped up into the hall, and said to Duke Huan, "This book Your Grace is reading - may I venture to ask whose words are in it?"

"The words of the sages," said the duke.

"Are the sages still alive?"

"Dead long ago," said the duke.

"In that case, what you are reading there is nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old!"

"Since when does a wheelwright have permission to comment on the books I read?" said Duke Huan. "If you have some explanation, well and good. If not, it's your life!"

Wheelwright P'ien said, "I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I chisel a wheel, if the blows of the mallet are too gentle, the chisel slides and won't take hold. But if they're too hard, it bites in and won't budge. Not too gentle, not too hard - you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind. You can't put it into words, and yet there's a knack to it somehow. I can't teach it to my son, and he can't learn it from me. So I've gone along for seventy years and at my age I'm still chiseling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn't be handed down. So what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old."

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.

This is absolutely, objectively false.

Spoken Q&A sessions are not neutral.

The origin of rhetoric is oral persuasion, not the transfer of objective information. Oral conversations are noisy AF, easy to dominate, allow speakers to lie with "I didn't say that", and to use persuasive rhetorical tricks to confuse and persuade instead of enlightening.

We've all been in meetings where people talk at each other, or everyone says their part with no connection to the rest, and previous points are forgotten almost immediately even if they're valid, true, relevant, and important.

Likewise lectures - good luck teaching anything scientific without allowing notes.

Writing gives the recipient time to stop, ponder, understand, and - on a good day - disagree and criticise.

It doesn't prevent questions at all. It encourages them, and gives them time to mature and deepen. You may not be able to ask the original writer - especially if they're dead - but you will always be able to find comments and opinions from others.

If you put all of these together you get an argument from status, not from effectiveness.

Being a teacher/philosopher was a career, and writing endangered that.

Superficial in-the-moment wit and memory were always better for entertainment than expanding human knowledge.

“Why would he argue against what he was literally doing at that moment?”

Plato’s writing style used historical and invented characters who argued in a dialogue.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/#WhyDia

“In some of his works, it is evident one of Plato’s goals is to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and the dialogue form is being used for this purpose.”

What more puzzlement than to follow the hero into confusion and doubt, only to be lead out by the brilliance of his later unfucked arguments?

I just a guess…

Socrates is a historical person and the mentor to Plato, but Plato uses him in his works to develop and deliver his arguments. Since we don't have much about Socrates outside of Plato its unclear how true Plato's rendition is true to what Socrates would've argued.

Also it should be noted that ancient writings did not include punctuation or whitespace, and presumably they were meant to be read aloud and listened to. Augustine (354 - 430 AD) mentions someone reading in his head as odd.

You should generally but not always read any statement by Socrates in a Plato dialogue as a statement that Plato is putting into the mouth of Socrates, not something Socrates himself said. There is a gradation, though. The Apology was probably very close to what socrates actually said, and some of the later dialogues (The Republic, for example) probably bear little relationship to anything Socrates said.

But, and this is important, Plato almost certainly did not agree with everything he had Socrates say in every dialogue. Sometimes he is just playing with ideas. Personally, I think Plato is just being provocative about books in this dialogue to push an idea as far as he can.

not true all precde egyptians

the _enormous_ social differences between them. i.e not just rejecting new technology because it's new

Isn't it always like that, every time?

From the linked article :

    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.

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.

Socrates was not “in business” as a teacher and did not charge fees for his conversations. Τhe Sophists typically taught rhetoric and other subjects for payment, whereas Socrates explicitly distanced himself from this. “Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting … if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence.”

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.

Socrates deemed writing a 'pharmakon,' a word that can simultaneously mean both a remedy and a poison.

Even if Socrates didn't have any real arguments

He had arguments though. And they were correct and irrelevant. Just like the arguments against calculators, computers, wikipedia, AI. Or against farmers diet (as opposed to hunters/gatherers diet).

Do technology makes as dumber? Always, at least in few ways. Does it matter? It hasn't mattered for last 10000 years, no reason to think this time it's different.

The written word is nothing like paying a rent to an oligarch across the ocean in order to get access to information that was stolen in the first place.

So please come up with another talking point. Not every historical anecdote where someone opposed some kind of progress can be applied to centralized data centers that contain stolen material.

Socrates had a point.