[zzyzxd]

They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?

But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to learn that even writing, as a skill considered universally good these days, was once subjected to scrutiny[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines#...

[nbardy]

The first bit was interesting and then you flipped right to generic cynicism.

They would be impressed with our technology even if it has downsides. Wisdom is knowing humans and technology and imperfect tools.

[ricardobayes]

What good is something that only looks good from afar? Most new tech is exactly that, for posturing to gain shareholder value - very few innovation in actually useful things that make peoples lives better. It's all self-serving, to consume more and get people hooked on digital experiences.

[solumunus]

I’m not arguing that social media is a net benefit to society, but you’re acting like it’s all downsides. It’s been an extreme economic enabler for a lot of people. There are many people earning money independently who would have really struggled to put themselves in a position to do that 20 years ago. For independent businesses or artists it’s an invaluable promotional platform.

[ricardobayes]

You know I really don't know about that. Generally speaking people had more dispensable income after WW2 in the west than right now. People had a job lined up if they wanted to work, work was abundant. Back then any kind of job would pay well and most households had one earner. Being able to earn money through the internet today doesn't really replicate what these people had back then.

If you wanted to start a band you had multiple ways to promote them: I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc). In fact social media made it so you need a prohibitively high marketing budget to cut through the noise.

[solumunus]

But that economic situation is not contingent on the Internet, it’s unrelated.

> I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc).

Of course, that’s what you would expect. Pre Internet music was more curated, there were less bands finding ears but the bands that were popular were therefore much more popular. The internet gives the music consumer WAY more options. The biggest bands are less big and less successful, but on the other end of that is it’s WAY more possible to have a music career as a niche artist today. A huge percentage of the music I listen to is music that would have been completely inaccessible to me pre-internet.

[benj111]

Define "good from afar". We romanticise the notion of the wild west, while ignoring the poverty death and disease. Would you rather live in the wild west or today, where the issue is AI which at this point is more a #SVproblem than even a #firstworldproblem.

[ricardobayes]

That's a very interesting point. I'd think the "happyness/contentness" levels are not necessarily tied to life expectancy or poverty.

I would argue despite some global tendencies being way up (like people out of poverty) we are at a local minima right now for happiness for the middle class. It is entirely possible middle-class people had it better in the late 50s/60s despite multiple statistics being much better today (e.g. crime).

In a way it is also entirely possible, that a medieval peasant was happier than an overstimulated, modern human being, despite having a "worse" life.

[benj111]

Tbf I think my view is it's about improvement over your own life. We expect our children will do better than us and that our lot will improve etc.

That sets expectations. We are at a high base, but things aren't getting better thus we can't look back at our own life and see that we have been successful.

I suppose the question is, where are we in the life cycle? In the industrial revolution life was pretty crumby for a lot of the working class. Do we have to wait for society and laws to catch up so we get to that 1950s/60s heyday of life for the working class. Or is this a plateau and the disruption will makes things worse before they get better? Or is the west going to stagnate while china or whoever takes over?

[ricardobayes]

Yes, very true, and I can already thank you for the thought-provoking discussion. I think we are the first generation who don't necessarily expect that children will do better than us, in fact, in many ways we know that they won't: climate change etc.

The current gen alpha is also the first generation since measurements began, who are doing worse at school, measurably, than the previous generation. All research points to the inclusion of digital learning devices in school as the cause of that.

[zzyzxd]

That's my point. It's not about the technology itself, because that's never cut and dry. It's about having a process to evaluate and criticize a technology before fully embracing it. Socrates was in a position with loud voice. Critics of technology exist today too, but they aren't loud enough. Instead, there's a far stronger force coming from private companies and their investors to push whatever they want onto us.

But I want to admit that I was indeed shoehorning my rants about AI (not the technology itself, but how it is being adopted) into this topic. Let me stop steering the discussion further. I do think the fact that we could recover Herculaneum papyrus like this is amazing!

[robertclaus]

I suspect most of the critique even back then was around teaching from static written text, not the writing itself. In my experience that aligns well with modern education theory.

[kombookcha]

It was in part this, and that when contrasting with the more common tradition of oral transmission and memorization, ancient teachers lamented that their students were not only failing to learn things by heart because they knew they could look them up in the book or notes later, but also as a consequence failing to learn the important life skill of really good memorization and contextual recall. I think this too aligns with modern education theory in that it's not just about students learning the material, but also the meta-skills they are acquiring while doing so.

It's not that they didn't see the usefulness of books, it was more so about the overreliance on them and the effect it had on the education students would come away with, just as you say. A pretty reasonable concern, I think!

As an aside: One of the techniques students would be exposed to was the use of memory palaces, which remains helpful to this day where everyone has a computer in their pocket. Pretty cool stuff - technology of the mind!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

[cannonpr]

Considering the very traditional issues they had with the demagogues… I don’t think they would find anything about our social media surprising at all.

[bambax]

Socrates' objections to writing wasn't that it was inherently bad, but that it introduced limitations; namely, that you couldn't have a discussion with the author of a text while reading it, and therefore, reading was inferior to talking.

It could be argued that AI is the first step in 2000+ years towards addressing this specific problem.

[troyvit]

> How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?

Like ... a lot? Now if RFC 2549 had been around back then you could get the same point across without trying to describe how information, rather than nectar, might flow through the equivalent of a butterfly's proboscis that happens to stretch around the world.

[serf]

> Ancient societies ... were much more careful when introducing new technologies

I do not believe this for a minute.

> But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things ... which destroy our brain.

what kind of destroy are you talking about?

modern living changes brain development, it doesn't destroy things -- the brain is an ever-molding plastic object for that very reason, situations change and require different access to different things; unless by destroy you want to talk only of neuron number ; jury's out on that.

'Ancient societies' , let's talk Greek since you brought up Plato, ate and drank lead -- both accidentally and on purpose. destroyed their teeth on rock grit from stone mills and had zero ability to deal with the resulting abscesses aside from brutal surgeries without anesthetic, sterilization or antibiotics , inhaled burning wood smoke indoors just about everywhere, believed that the majority of natural happenings were omens , believed the womb caused women to 'wander', requiring infantilization and control of anyone with one, trained their militarizes through starvation and beating and rape/pederasty relationships were common place and even legally bound.

so, actually I think that ancient societies would be more surprised by the fact that nearly every one of their ritualistic ways of dealing with the problems that arose in their life was either 1) ineffective, 2) harmful, 3) deadly.

but first you'll have to convince them of what their brain even does ..

[egeozcan]

> How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?

I mean, sure, the beacon fire transmits at the blistering rate of roughly one bit per several minutes, assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you. Fiber optic, by contrast, limps along at a measly several terabits per second. Not to mention the flexibility to increase the range by just starting a bigger fire.

[zzyzxd]

Well I didn't say it was achievable at the time. But is it really that unimaginable?

> assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you.

So you are talking about dealing with "packet" loss and data encryption, right? Those concepts were not new to them.

[Brian_K_White]

The rate is infinit bits, times infinite copies on infinite cables in infinite directions, per several minutes.

[Tangurena2]

Plato was being a crotchety old fart, complaining about "kids these days". As every generation has done since Plato has complained about how "kids these days don't do X like our generation did". He was complaining that "kids these days don't memorize poetry (like my generation did), instead, they're using this new-fangled technology called 'writing'". This is exactly how older generations complain about new technology like cellphones/pagers/television/radio/telephones/horseless carriages/telegraphy/steam engines/etc.