[Diogenesian]

My intention is less "talk down" and more "Socrates was right." Too much of note-taking is a ritualistic behavior that actually hinders understanding and retention. I think highlighting / circling / crossing out / etc is by far the worst, but margin notes are also bad.

It is very frustrating the number of people who say "it's their property, they can do whatever they want" and similar comments, all of which are missing the point. Yes. It is legal to write on your own property. I know thay. It's my opinion that they're doing something that is guaranteed to harm overall human knowledge: whoever purchases/inherits/digitzes the book has to deal with it. And it almost certainly harms their own understanding of the book.

[chimpanzee]

I printed this out just so I could cross out every line except for one. And now, with renewed mental confusion, I wrestle with my sins against humanity.

[jvergeldedios]

We don't even know if Socrates not writing his teachings was a principled stance to begin with, so "Socrates was right" is a shaky place to start your argument. Also "Socrates said writing is bad, so don't write in this piece of writing that you didn't force me to buy" is one of the weirdest pieces of circular logic I've ever come across.

Even if we take for granted that it was principled, it almost certainly wasn't pointed at marginalia. The argument (that Plato put in his mouth, through written text, no less) is that writing that substitutes for internal recollection can't answer back. It's an argument against outsourcing a thought to fixed text. A margin note is the opposite: it's the reader talking back to the text.

You have a personal preference about buying unmarked books, and you retreat to a Grand Unifying Socratic Theory whenever someone challenges it.

> it almost certainly harms their own understanding of the book

What? For all people who ever mark up a book in the margins or highlight passages? How could you possibly know that?

> they're doing something that is guaranteed to harm overall human knowledge

Also what? Human knowledge is necessarily a collaborative effort. Reading a text with another person's notes alongside it is just another way to engage with it. I'll maybe grant you highlighting since it's been shown to not help with retention all that much.

We have a deeper understanding of some of the most famous thinkers in history because we have books that they marked up to help us understand how they engaged with specific texts. This is invaluable for "overall human knowledge."

Herman Melville marked up his copies of Shakespeare's works and that shaped how scholars read Moby-Dick. Did he "harm overall human knowledge" by doing that?

[calf]

Ok then please explain why Socrates is better than margin notes for an assumed purpose, because that is not reasonable common knowledge.

If by that you meant to suggest that for formal study, some kind of self-review process combined with cold written practice/rehearsal sustained under interleaved spacing, then that is likely the gold standard for comprehension and memorization. But most people don't even know that, either.

But the main premise is we should not assume all book reading is for rigorous self study. Margin notes can be useful for other purposes than direct understanding/retention (I admittedly don't know the psychology evidence for it but many academics routinely write margin notes here and there on (poorly written/edited) papers for purposes of idea generation, scientific criticism, etc. Presumably the Edison example mentioned above would have been more like that.).

[crdrost]

You are correct that the reference is a little obscure -- if my memory serves it's Plato's Phaedrus.

Plato argues, in a book, in the voice of his mentor Socrates, that books will destroy knowledge. And the reason is precisely to do with the thing that Socrates is famous for, his Socratic Method of asking his students (or rival politicians or anyone) questions about what they claimed to know, engaging them in a real discussion where we come to things that we agree about and then build that agreed knowledge-base incrementally. For Socrates, a book could never provide that experience; you cannot ask the book a question.

[podocarp]

That's actually kind of very similar to a passage in Zhuang Zi (ancient Chinese philosopher). He recounts this tale about a king and a wheel maker. The wheel maker asks what the king is doing, and the king proclaims he is reading. The wheel maker then goes on to inform the king how those books are just the trash of the ancients, and how he could not teach his son how to make a proper wheel, and the art "comes from the hand and is met by the heart". So anything that can be put down in books is certainly not true wisdom.

It also coincides with the Taoist philosophy (and actually somewhat Buddhist) of learning through actions and not speech. The most famous (if I recall the story correctly) of the Buddha teaching his disciples by smiling and twirling around a flower.

Kind of fascinating that these faraway places kind of arrived at the same ideas. Independently or not I think nobody would know but it does not matter.

[calf]

They weren't though. Socratic method was a singular argument and should not be confused with the argument in Chinese culture. As a Chinese American I literally hear the Zhuang Zi type argument in lay discourse and I would argue its legacy has been a strain of antiintellectualism in secular Chinese culture, e.g. whenever people say books are not necessary or book knowledge is not "real life" knowledge is a sentiment you hear from older Chinese, Hong Kong or Taiwan parents. It is very damaging and anti-intellectual. The Socratic idea is a very different argument because in Phaedrus the argument (as I recall from my undergrad critical theory class reading this text) is that through dialectic comes truth which is a discursive argument, not an argument that truth is learned from hands-on or religious experience.

[calf]

Yeah but Phaedrus was an implicit critique of Socrates so I don't buy the idea of taking Socratic approach at face value (and then in the 20th century many critical interpetations of Phaedrus in turn). A lot has happened since that time that has complexified notions of learning, and it strikes me as idiosyncratic to of the OP to cite Socrates as the solution instead. It is like ignoring the rest of the extant literature, including scientific literature on pedagogy and cognition, why do that? It is not justifiable from a STEM pov.

[marjipan200]

thanks to LLMs we can now ask books questions :)

[rc5150]

How dare you gatekeep how people interact with literary material? Who(M)ever purchases/inherits/ditigizes/burns a book has to deal with it, and that dealing with could include ignoring it like a grown up, using some whiteout, or if digitizing, using any of the myriad photo editing software available. Sure, maybe don't put your grocery list on a first edition of some rare Chaucer book, but Chicken Soup for the Teenager's Soul? Study guides? Infinte Jest?

A book with notes is a guarantee that the book didn't spend its life sitting on a bookshelf not being read. If people are reading it is a net positive for overall human knowledge.

Lastly, your usage of Socratic teachings is a hollow appeal to authority. Socrates is dead and a modest library in an elementary school would surely have brought him to tears had he known how far we've come as a species, much less the remainder of books currently available.