I was in high school when I first read this opinion (I did not remember it was Socrates though). Also, I learned that Gaul, pre-roman France (where I lived), had a society where the priests/judges, the druids, were forbidden to write down their knowledge.

It fascinated me. The idea that books, that were more or less revered depositories of knowledge, could have been seen as anti-intellectual at one time. It pushed me into memorizing stuff. I think it had an unanticipated effect. I thought it would help my overall cognitive capabilities and make me maybe better at science and maths but instead, it gave me a taste for poetry.

If you learn poetry for the sake of it, not because you have a recitation exercise, after a while, it become easy. It is not like memorizing the digits of pi: good poetry has a flow. A flow of sounds, a flow of words, a flow of meanings and a flow of emotions. It is easy to dismiss them when you simply read it, but having to learn it makes you connect deeply to the meaning. Hearing it also has a different effect. I now understand why poems, that I used to find uninteresting when skimming over them in books were actually so highly regarded back in the time.

That was an interesting experience, but Socrates missed a trend that continues nowadays: the volume of accessible information grows. We need faster processing modes. We need written text so we can skim through a page and dismiss it in a few minutes. We can't do that with oral transmission.

That must not make us forget that deeper modes of thought exist. Once we have googled the words we did not know, wikipediaed the summary of the knowledge we lacked, we must fight the urge to keep the flow of information going, reach out to the off button, and dare to stay an hour or two with our mind. Thinking.

We memorize things by exerting recalls. We understand things by banging our heads over what we don't understand about them. Acquiring the knowledge is just the first step of acquiring understanding.

In this day and age meditation becomes popular amongst intellectuals for a reason, but even if you are not into meditation, do yourself a favor when you learn new things: think about them with only your brain for an hour or two. Thinking does take time but without it information gathering is useless.

This really speaks to me. I have trouble remembering things, even important things that I know I will want to remember in the future. I forget or it gets fuzzy. Sometimes I can remember better once my memory is jogged, but I can't recall it on demand. That means that things that I should be able to associate pretty easily are never put together unless it's made painfully obvious and explicit.

It's a been a point of frustration for me and the people I'm closest with for several years now. It doesn't seem to affect work nearly as much.

I've had a feeling that it's because I don't let myself just think. Your comment makes me even more sure of this. I've developed habits since I was a teenager to keep my brain constantly busy, always either consuming or producing something. But never integrating or just thinking. It seems I need to replace some habits.

Or ADHD. What you describe is one of the symptoms in the cluster of ADHD. Attention deficit is real. A part of your brain may not be developed quite fully.

> I've had a feeling that it's because I don't let myself just think.

I feel your frustration here. The best way I can describe what prescription stimulants do for me is give me just enough space and perception of time that I can pause and think. Otherwise my mind just keeps going on cruise control with shallow cognitive load chores.

Deep in a programming bug or reversing project my mind is stimulated and dopamine is being released. In the zone my brain feels fully alive and attentive (without meds). Outside of things that deeply stimulate me it is always a challenge.

Meditation, exercise, nutrtion, and CBT all help. They chip away at the undesirable behavior. For many it is enough.

You could try meditation/CBT etc.

But at the same time, basics like exercise, good sleep(+), low stress, healthy eating (fewer stimulants) etc can all affect memory - It's hard to diagnose any particular cause of poor memory with all these variables.

(+) As an aside, I've sometimes found too much sleep can cause me to be less alert!? Maybe it's related to "mind-busyness"? Like how the "Balmer-peak" seems to operate on reducing overthinking via the confidence/fuzz-increasing effect of alcohol.

Yes, give your brain some rest. You can try meditation. It really costs nothing save a bit of time. Put a timer on 15 minutes, sit straight (in a position that requires a little bit of effort so you don't fall asleep) and do nothing. No mails, no internet, phone out of reach, concentrate on yourself, your body, your breath. Forbid yourself to do anything else before the 15 minutes are over. That really helped me.

Memorizing happens when you try to recall. If you want to learn a list of things, spend half of your time trying to remember them. Let your brain push as much as it can to reach the memory before giving it the answer. This helps memorization a lot.

You are right. Consolidating and ruminating are essential. Feeling bored is important. Having the patience to tolerate it is a very important skill.

Thank you for one of the more beautiful comments I've read here on HN recently (or quite frankly for a long time).

Thanks, I am really surprised by the score it reached!

I feel that you would adore Dan Simmons first two "Hyperion" books. They're predominantly about poetry and how it's affected the human race, far into the future.

I second the opinion, although I loved the second two, the Endymion books best.

Interesting! I was told to avoid them when I was introduced to Hyperion. I'll check those two out...

Avoid the sequels, for sure. The original diptych is wonderful.

The Hyperion books also have some interesting (and prescient) things to say about humans relying on a vast network of information instead of their own memories. They are some of my favorites.

I think your balance (incorporating a deeper mode of thought and appreciation of memorization without abandoning modern information processing) is unusual and extremely admirable. Thanks for sharing your experience.

Recommendations on intro texts for poetry?

I'd love to weigh in here.

When I was young I took part in a lot of weekday groups in a Christian church (rural Ontario, pretty much the mode out there at that time). One of our regular practices was being rewarded for perfectly memorizing passages. I recall being able to recite entire chapters, and soon entire books after practice. I ended up doing some acting as a kid and had no difficult time memorizing scripts after all of that.

But later in my high school years and into university I loved poetry, and tried to keep a few favourites in memory (and still do) because they inevitably become relevant at some point, and I find it a comfort.

Just find something you enjoy reading first off. The technicals of craft are arbitrary if you enjoy it. If you don't read much poetry and ever want suggestions, I'd love to contribute!

edit: fixed a typo

Do like most people these days: learn song lyrics! Songs are really poetry. Some have very deep meaning and good flow. Some will probably resonate with your own feelings.

Otherwise I have only bad recommendations in French, but I learned almost all of Cyrano de Bergerac's play and still remember maybe a third of it. In it, "La ballade du duel" flows very well and "la tirade des nez" is a classic that is a very good exercise.

I have no clue about English poetry. Despite having a decent written English level, I could never get into poetry in English. I think my pronunciation is not good enough and I have a hard time knowing how some more rare words, common in poetry, are actually pronounced. I would love to have the courage to get into Paradise Lost at one point.

walt whitman

    I celebrate myself,
    And what I assume you shall assume,
    For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

whitman essentially only wrote one book: leaves of grass; with one poem: song of myself; but revised, reordered, and rewrote the book multiple times from 1855 to 1892

http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/index.html

    EXCELSIOR.
    
    WHO has gone farthest? for I would go farther,
    And who has been just? for I would be the most just person of
    the earth,
    And who most cautious? for I would be more cautious,
    And who has been happiest? O I think it is I—I think no one
    was ever happier than I,
    And who has lavish'd all? for I lavish constantly the best I have,
    And who proudest? for I think I have reason to be the proudest
    son alive—for I am the son of the brawny and tall-topt
    city,
    And who has been bold and true? for I would be the boldest and
    truest being of the universe,
    And who benevolent? for I would show more benevolence than    
    all the rest,
    And who has receiv'd the love of the most friends? for I know
    what it is to receive the passionate love of many friends,
    And who possesses a perfect and enamour'd body? for I do not
    believe any one possesses a more perfect or enamour'd
    body than mine,
    And who thinks the amplest thoughts? for I would surround those
    thoughts,
    And who has made hymns fit for the earth? for I am mad with de-
    vouring ecstasy to make joyous hymns for the whole earth.

The Gruffalo.

http://frombooksofpoems.blogspot.nl/2007/03/gruffalo-by-juli...

Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry

You can also try starting with an author whose themes or circumstances evoke a strong emotional response in your mind. This is likely to be more effective at getting you hooked in comparison to a text that provides a general introduction. In my case, it was Wilfred Owen who provided the initial spark.

By Heart, Ted Hughes

Yes, this is a good book.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Heart-101-Poems-Remember/dp/0571278...

https://www.amazon.com/Heart-101-Poems-Remember/dp/057127874...

> What has happened to the lost art of memorising poems? Why do we no longer feel that it is necessary to know the most enduring, beautiful poems in the English language 'by heart'? In his introduction Ted Hughes explains how we can overcome the problem by using a memory system that becomes easier the more frequently it is practised. The collected 101 poems are both personal favourites and particularly well-suited to the method Hughes demonstrates. Spanning four centuries, ranging from Shakespeare and Keats through to Thomas Hardy and Seamus Heaney, By Heart offers the reader a 'mental gymnasium' in which the memory can be exercised and trained in the most pleasurable way. Some poems will be more of a challenge than others, but all will be treasured once they have become part of the memory bank.

I'd add that if you want to understand what's going on within a poem you might find The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry useful.

https://www.amazon.com/Ode-Less-Travelled-Unlocking-Within/d...

Writing is the spatialization of time. Speaking is the temporalization of space.

The insights and characterisations of human behaviour found in ancient records sometime shock me with their accuracy and depth. Human nature has not changed and it was well, if not better understood, Millenia ago.

Wouldn't that mean, then, that most all "doom and gloom" we get today is as irrelevant as those of old?

They didn't have nukes or climate change back then.

Human nature + escalating technology is the scary formula we are exploring today.

The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did, and there was no way to stop it until people understood what spread it. Of course technology has bright sides as well. Without medicine and many other discoveries we would not be where we are today.

> The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did

No one is worried about the number of people who have ALREADY been killed by nukes, they are worried about the number of people who might be in the future. But I suppose I fundamentally agree with you. I think we may have more to fear from scientifically engineered diseases than we do from nuclear weapons.

Exactly. Every people in their own time considers their time as the most important, crucial and urgent. they consider past times as less important.

If you observe this then you can see that in the future people will look back at now and think the same. history tells us the same thing. it's human nature to think that doom and gloom now is much worse than before, simply because we are in this moment and without perspective.

But that's not what GP was saying.

We, today, have the ability to dictate what others tomorrow over- or under-appreciate as doom and gloom. Whether there is a cognitive dissonance is irrelevant, but what actually happens is very much only avoidable going forward, not looking back.

In the same context, The debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Matt Riddley is an interesting one http://www.munkdebates.com/debates/progress

The problem would be even higher by a seemingly dormant disease agent, which first infects nearly all of humanity and then wents time delayed into action.

Nobody suspects the flue.

The variance of the fat-tailed distribution of casualties of nuclear warfare post-M.A.D. is much higher than during WW2, and is may be more prone to inadvertent unintended catastrophe than an epidemic now that we can research them, but that's also unforeseeably variable.

> The plague killed way more people than nukes ever did

Yeah, but without bacteria we wouldn't be where we are today. Whatever that means.

I would not identify rather specific technologies accelerating the reach of the dysfunctional into "technology in general", just like I wouldn't lump together the bacteria that caused the plague and those that live in my stomach.

Yesterday's risks were exogenous. Few were existential.

Today's are engogenous. Several are existential.

Erm, endogenous.

Edit window expired.

They had climate change, and it was one of the main reasons "barbarians" migrated, and Rome had fallen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Ancient_Rome#Enviro...

I think if anything, the talk about moral decline can be ignored completely. It seems people have been complaining about moral decline since earliest written records.

Alternatively, it does decline and raise, in cycles, and the complaining may be what helps it raise.

I don't think so, but a regular decline isn't impossible.

Didn't consider that, thanks. Yeah, it works as a possible explanation, though I don't buy into it either.

Even the talk on moral decline has declined. I remember in my youth we where mor meta..

Were they irrelevant? -- I see plenty doom and gloom in my history books and, hell, twitter feed.

It was just a few decades ago that 80 million people died in a single war.

yet the world did not end. Countless prophecies aboutvthe absolute apocalypse have gone and passed. So yeah it is by large irrelevant.

Their world did end for those 80 million people.

If most of society dies in pain and hunger to climate change, would the survivors say "bah, just more fear mongering"?

For me, humanity is the sum of human experiences, not the mere presence of the species. The end of the world being relative and analog.

> Their world did end for those 80 million people.

The world did not end for the other billion on Earth living at the same time. You can't just throw figures like that without putting them in perspective.

This sum is already negative, btw. And it is hard to tell whether it is still negative or just negative. Few happy areas may put you into "it's everywhere like that" dream. But it's not, most species are simply present to supply to someone.

9 million already due of hunger every year, what is the world doing about that presently?

A lot. Billions of dollars are spent to combat it and research on food and agriculture to solve hunger has been going for years.

>The vast majority of hungry people live in developing regions, which saw a 42 percent reduction in the prevalence of undernourished people between 1990–92 and 2012–14.

http://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-fac...

> 9 million already due of hunger every year, what is the world doing about that presently?

Most of it is because of conflicts. Poverty is decreasing fast across the globe and there were relatively a lot more people dying from hunger in the 80s.

It's not a given that it did not end... think to yourself what would happen if Nazi Germany had developed a nuclear bomb ahead of the Americans?

If even the US government couldn't resist obliterating 2 cities in Japan with Nukes can you imagine what the Nazis would have done? There would have been zero consideration for the loss of human life, possibly large areas of continental Europe and the US would have been bombed.

I think "the world did not end" meaning "it never will despite what's been said and done in the past" is a really dangerous miopic notion

I don't think there was economic in massive nuclear bombing, NWs were and are mostly psychological. E.g. the absense of nuclear bombs didn't stop "even" US from grilling Tokyo urban areas with incendiaries with total death toll equal to those in Hiroshima + Nagasaki. Yeah, it could be done much faster with modern delivery systems, but we also have lots of effective non-nuclear mass- and precise-destruction weapons today.

In the end, though nazis didn't value non-arial lives, they were no idiots. Why would they destroy cities and pollute areas supposed to be the part of Reich? The end of the world is both hard and unprofitable. "Nazis would" is a scary tale nicely covering the actual face of war that always remained the same.

What is really scary today is that some countries develop supreme air/space control systems, so those in the club become immune to any sort of dialog.

> I don't think there was economic in massive nuclear bombing

There was no economic in V1 and V2, yet they did it, harming themselves economicaly more than they harmed the targets.

Additionally they knew losing WW2 is existential threat for most of them. If they could destroy London with one push of a button - they would.

> It's not a given that it did not end... think to yourself what would happen if Nazi Germany had developed a nuclear bomb ahead of the Americans?

Nukes at the time were still weak weapons. You could inflict a lot more damage (and a lot more damage happened on Tokyo and many other Japanese cities) by regular firebombing. You did not need nuclear bombs to inflict catastrophic loss of life.

Now when it came to thermonuclear weapons, the magnitude is entirely different, but that only occurred many years later. It would never have occurred at the time of WW2.

You just made me realized that this sentiment of pending apocalypse is maybe exactly what drove humankind forward along the past.

It just look like the notion is always morphing from generations to generations : the flood, the plague, the apocalypse, the nuclear winter and now climat change.

From biblical hazards to scientific hazards, maybe humankind is finally like the high school student who only work great when under heavy pressure for it's exams.

And maybe just maybe this is how you can best reconcile science with religion because no matter your beliefs, this is a test for all of us... Are we making enough "good" around to deserve joy for us, our children and all they children after them?

of course the world ended at the time. but the end of something is the beginning of another.

For anyone who wishes to delve deeper into Socrates' arguments and the effects technologies have on our attention spans/memories, I recommend "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains" by Nicholas Carr. I read it for a book report in a computer ethics course, and it does a great job at laying out the pros and cons of our constantly connected society.

It was written 7 years ago, but it's still relevant as Android and 4G were rapidly rising in usage around then.

Right but there is so much more information of every kind today than what used to exist at the time of Socrates. Attempting to remember all that information would probably be infeasible.

"More and more information, less and less meaning." - Jean Baudrillard

"The more words, the less the meaning, and how does that profit anyone?" - Ecclesiastes 6:11

"Let's start from the premise that more information, more empowerment, is fundamentally the correct answer" - Eric Schmidt

One of these two quotes is not like the others...

“I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book.”

-Albert Einstein

Which is clearly false: the meaning of words being readily looked up, for example, or common multiplications.

Probably he meant "I never make effort to ...".

Which IMO is foolish - for most people - but probably reflects more that he easily memorised facts without effort (something I was fortunate to experience in my youth and which is now sorely missed).

He made that comment in reference to not knowing the speed of sound off hand, and it is not remotely foolish. It is a very bad student that wastes his time memorizing endless reams of facts, rather than trying to understand the deeper meaning of what they are reading.

>Education Is Not the Learning of Facts, But the Training of the Mind To Think

-Also Einstein

Information is only useful insofar as it furthers understanding. It has no value outside that beyond parlor tricks or game shows, especially in the modern internet age.

If you work on subject matter you commit it to memory simply through familiarity, this is a great boon as it simplifies many analyses to recall facts.

What good knowing how to think without having the standard inputs; this enables focus on the wider problem rather than interrupting to feed in necessary facts.

E=hf ... but hang on, does that make sense, the trained mind can analyse it. Sure you can look up energies, and Planck and frequencies but having any of those to hand makes your work more efficient. It doesn't just have to make theoretical sense except for v. v. few ... and I say that as an erstwhile theoretician.

Don't get me wrong. Learning facts as a goal is inherently misdirected. But facts are the atoms on which the trained mind works.

Moreover axioms are facts that can't be intuited or derived, they must be learnt of existing systems or defined of new ones.

I think the position espoused in those quotes is hyperbolic.

Case in point: Tycho Brahe's exceptionally detailed and accurate astronomical observations. His recorded work on the position of Mars allowed Kepler to establish the laws of planetary motion using elliptical orbits around the sun. Without that data (and logarithm tables and trigonometry), it may have been impossible to test theories of celestial mechanics and physics that kick-started the scientific revolution.

In the same way that reciting Homer's Odyssey themselves after one hearing is infeasible, right?

(poking fun, but only a bit)

That's feasible. Barely, but feasible.

Now try reciting the Library of Congress after one hearing. Or Wikipedia. That's a whole nother level of problem.

I really doubt it's feasible to memorize it in a single hearing without paraphrasing. The human brain couldn't have been different a few millennia ago, and we know that the greeks used the same memorization techniques we use today (e.g., the memory palace, chunking, ...).

We also see in history specific people tasked with recitation, and high status coming through that ability. Suggesting it's a rare and learned characteristic.

Nitpick: That only suggests that this ability is rare, not that it is learned. (Not saying it is purely talent; everything I know about the brain suggests otherwise. But not just the historical evidence.)

Only a small fraction of that information is actually useful in improving our lives or giving meaning to them.

I think you'd be surprised. It's kind of like your house. The only necessary things there are the bed and the ceiling. And yet life would be much more miserable without all the random stuff you probably store in various cupboards.

These days I think of it in terms of cost to benefit ratios. I've for instance spent countless hours on Reddit, and while I got some benefit from it it is clear that the overall cost was negative even if it is impossible to know the exact figures.

It's still unclear to me which parts of the Internet provide a good ratio.

I guess for most sites, the cost-benefit ratio is a function of the time spent, following a steep downward slope. When I spend 15 minutes on HN every workday, it provides me with interesting stories and insights. When I spend two hours, it ends up draining more energy than it replenishes.

Sure, but to get that tiny, useful portion you have to dig through mountains of information.

The amount of information in existence today is so absolutely mindblowing it's not even funny. No meaningful comparison can be made with Socrates.

I have a terrible memory for arbitrary detail, so studying it is a waste of time for me. Instead I try to learn principles. Hopefully, Socrates would approve of this as learning "truth".

Socrates would not have approved, but I do not see why we should care. He was a very important philosopher, but he wasn't flawless. His refusal to see the value in a permanent written record was a mistake, as was his over-valuing of memory.

Heck, Socrates' own students ignored his teachings on this subject and wrote extensively. That they are what we know him from, and not some oral or memorized tradition, is pretty damning for his opinions on the subject IMO.