[cognaitiv]

SOCRATES: Do you know how you can speak or act about rhetoric in a manner which will be acceptable to God? PHAEDRUS: No, indeed. Do you? SOCRATES: I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know; although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much about the opinions of men? PHAEDRUS: Your question needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell me what you say that you have heard. SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

[cognaitiv]

“The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.” Alberto Moravia, London Observer, 14 Oct. 1979

[MichaelZuo]

It’s a pretty interesting point.

If a large fraction of the population can’t even hold five complex ideas in their head simultaneously, without confusing them after a few seconds, are they literate in the sense of e.g. reading Plato?

[TheOtherHobbes]

I hope they're literate to understand we're only reading about that alleged exchange because Plato wrote it down.

Median literacy in the US is famously somewhere around the 6th grade level, so it's unlikely most of the population is much troubled by the thoughts of Plato.

[theoreticalmal]

I’d be really curious to see metrics on literacy broken down by other criteria. What’s the median literacy of people who are “like me”?

[Eisenstein]

I looked up those stats. First of all, it is literacy in 'English'. A good portion of the country does not speak English at home. Second, it was assessed in 2003, and a disproportionate amount of those with 'below basic' prose literacy were over age 65 at the time. The assessment before was done in 1992 and there was an a marked increase in quantitative literacy between the two.

* https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp

[fn-mote]

> can’t even hold five complex ideas in their head

As an aside, my observation of beginning programmers is that even two (independent) things happening at the same time is a serious cognitive load.

Amusingly enough, I remember having the same trouble on the data structures final in college, so “people in glass houses”.

[wolfram74]

What makes an "idea" atomic/discrete/cardinal? What makes an idea "complex" vs simple or merely true? Over what finite duration of time does it count as "simultaneously" being held?

[MichaelZuo]

Whatever you want them to be?

I don’t care about enforcing any specific interpretation on passing readers…

[empath75]

Just keep in mind that Plato and (especially) Socrates made a living by going against commonly held wisdom at the time, so this probably wasn't an especially widely held belief in ancient greece.

[clpm4j]

they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing

Sounds like a rather accurate description of a LLM.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

That's perfectly true and the internet has made it even worse.