However, writing for thinking and writing for storage is two different things, and it activates different parts of the brain.
I'm an avid pen and paper user, and using a real pen on a paper allows me to think much more deeply. It regulates thinking speed, so things doesn't escape or my focus doesn't get derailed. Also it changes how brain works so it can think better.
Also, blogging and writing documentation at work made me a much better thinker, because converting these abstract concepts to meaningful sentences with a context and easy to understand structure affects also how clearly you communicate in other parts of your life.
Offloading this really robs you of the joys and power of meaningful communication on many mediums.
As a result, it can't replace a real human being backed by real experience and thoughts, hence it can't be as useful. I converse with myself, too, but it's not the same either with a different human being or an artificial construct which can babble meaningful sentences.
Currently, we simply ignore or don't understand the fact that the meaning of a sentence is not solely built with word order. There are higher orders of information carried implicitly, and they are not articulated in words. Hence an LLM can not replace, even mimic a real human being in a conversation.
Humans for sure do not guarantee this either.
I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. It's heard of everything, and it always responds with something that sounds like it came from the same sphere. You have to use your own mind to figure out if it's meaningful, but this is not so different from conversing with a person. People can babble too.
> There are higher orders of information carried implicitly
You're not always looking for those in a conversation. Sometimes you really are just checking that you've thought things through. Like if someone asks you what the arguments in favor of democracy are, you want a list of points so you can check you haven't forgotten something.
That was my first thought too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
But it's a pretty amazing rubber duck that has read the entire internet and thus can correlate your ideas with the ideas of all of humanity in a split second on the spot.
However, humans are more nuanced than that. One might remember wrongly, or act in bad-faith. This is why I said "baseline honesty". One people's traits definitely affects how their words are perceived, and this is not carried in the sentence itself.
> I think of LLMs as an amazing rubber duck. ... People can babble too. (Snipped for brevity)
Humans are not as random as an LLM.
> You're not always looking for those in a conversation. Sometimes you really are just checking that you've thought things through.
Again the person you're asking or answering has their own character and their or your words are affected by that implicit knowledge. This is a background process we're not aware of unless you dig into yourself and look for it.
Humans you know and trust, sure. Humans you think you're conversing with online, not so much.
Two decades of experience shows me otherwise. Even your two comments shows a consistent tone. We're just started to discuss, yet I have started to build an image of you thanks to your comments.
This is one of the mechanisms we don't fully understand and don't dare to dig much, because tinkering with people's minds are dangerous.
Many people argue convincingly that it's exactly how the meaning is built, though.
Or, if word order built the meaning and it's devoid of the character itself, we wouldn't be praising authors for their character building skills and embedding things not written or spoken into their stories, regardless of the medium it's presented.
"Honesty" and other forms of self-introspection is just a high level construct which current models aren't trained for, and likely not a fundamental issue with being a stochastic parrot.
However, I'm still on industry forums and communities like HN to hopefully have new and conflicting thoughts thrown my way by peers. That's my primary concern with LLMs, a lack of fresh perspective that has all the nuance of experience and understanding behind its output.
It made a few errors in at least presenting my ideas, but these errors were a consequence of my misunderstanding and lack of clarity.
The errors themselves, in my opinion, are invaluable because they force you to think, to be clear, and to guide the model into giving me useful ideas to look into.
For all intents and purposes, it was an example of the Socratic method, albeit inverted, where the student is asking questions to an all knowing teacher, and the teacher / LLM responds with ideas and hints. Ultimately, it's up to the student to synthesize the solution, be critical of the data, and tie everything together.
No, the brain does not "replace written information with a pointer". I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it, but I can tell you that you can construct computer analogies in support of either case.
I could posit that writing actually improves your memory, because the minute movements of your arm require more of your brain to compute, therefore creating more neural connections and possibilities of recall.
This is likely just as wrong, but demonstrates that thinking up some vague explanation is insufficient to make a point about a system as complex as the human brain.
In all cases I think parent post is trying to communicate that they are putting the large mass of information elsewhere, and only retain a reference locally. (implementation details notwithstanding)
No, because I literally don't remember my to do list after writing to my EDC notebook. The only thing I know is, it's in the notebook. So I only know the address of my to do list. I'm a literal sitting duck if I leave my notebook at home.
> I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it ...
I can tell you because I observe myself over 5+ years since I started to write my daily plans consistently to my notebook.
> I could posit that writing actually improves your memory, because the minute movements of your arm require more of your brain to compute, therefore creating more neural connections and possibilities of recall.
What it improves is not the "verbatim memory", but the concepts you work on. Working on something slowly, and with a reflection medium (i.e. pen & paper) allows your brain to refine the thing you're working on better and store it as a concept, rather than memorized string.
> This is likely just as wrong, but demonstrates that thinking up some vague explanation is insufficient to make a point about a system as complex as the human brain.
I have read a paper about supporting the claims I did in this comment, but I failed to find it in a whim. Will update/reply this comment if I find it. I use these analogies because of that paper.
[1] "Michael Levin - Plasticity without genetic change: bioelectric embryos & synthetic proto-organisms", https://youtu.be/5ChRM4CEWyg?t=1169
Why? Those are perfectly good parallels, and quite specific at that. Forgetting the thing, and replacing that memory with the memory of the location of that thing - that's an "indirect reference", i.e. a pointer in programming terms.
> I cannot tell you with complete confidence whether writing stuff down improves recall or diminishes it, but I can tell you that you can construct computer analogies in support of either case.
You can construct analogies to anything in support of anything, what matters is whether the analogy is bringing the reader towards or away from the truth.
Also, even when you have two similar analogies pointing in opposite direction, that doesn't mean either is wrong - they may be talking about two different things. For instance:
> I could posit that writing actually improves your memory, because the minute movements of your arm require more of your brain to compute, therefore creating more neural connections and possibilities of recall.
I believe that to be true just as much as GP's pointer analogy. In fact, I attribute my learning of irregular verbs in English directly to my grandfather insisting I copy the verb table by hand several times. Doing it, I went from near-zero recall to near-perfect recall in two sessions (with each having me copy the table once or twice).
Now the difference here is, in case of irregular verbs, I wanted to memorize them. The act of writing the information down myself somehow helped commit it to memory, perhaps because the brain was more focused, or because I was more invested, or a bit of both.
In case of GP's (and mine too!) experience with TODO list, the act of writing serves the explicit purpose of getting the thing out of your head. This is the opposite of memorization - you literally want to forget about tasks you write down, so they stop circling around in your head, distracting and stressing you.
Incidentally, when I write some TODOs by hand, I actually improve my immediate recall of them - should I try and check. But I don't, because I don't want to reinforce those thoughts. My brain understands, and before I know it, I no longer remember most of them in detail.
And, unfortunately, as you get older and memory starts to fill up, the pointers get overwritten.
Challenging yourself is conscious decision. Make choices to challenge yourself, and don't build an echo chamber.
They even did pretty well with computing with the Antikythera mechanism and its predecessors; though, like Babbage, they were limited by the manufacturing technology of the day.
[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1165/ancient-greek-inve...
Classic oral literary traditions are based on rhyme, meter, repetition, simile, metaphor, and references to cultural touchstones and themes, for the most part, all of which strongly assist with memorisation. These are not only necessary for a literature which isn't written down and instead is passed on through generations orally, but also quite likely represents a survivorship bias in that works which didn't exhibit these patterns didn't survive. And of course the versions we know are the end of a long pipeline of transmission (or the world's largest and oldest game of telephone), captured in writing and then passed on to us as (among) the first written traditions.
I've committed a few poems and homilies to memory, one example for nearly thirty years now. I do refresh that recollection from time to time (and realised I was dropping a stanza consistently). It's an interesting counterexample.
Then again, I turned up a piece earlier today I'd written myself about eight years ago and had all but no recollection of.
Of course I have no way to check whether it's done correctly, but from what I hear a lot of people have done this.
Not sure if LLMs will enhance our current "self" by themselves, but once we get a chip or two inside our brains, once we start controlling the cells to regenerate or grow specific limbs [3], we will surely consider our present "selves" as tiny as we consider the "self" of one of our cousins, the chimpanzee, in a zoo today. The journey and expansion of the "self" is merely starting.
[1] "the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same or different agent", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B3%CF%81%CE%AC%CF%86%CF%8...
[2] "HCN2 Rescues brain defects by enforcing endogenous voltage pre-patterns", https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03334-5
That is correct. I mean, some of that is exactly why I write at least 5000 words a day of journal notes while working. Because I want to offload everything from memory to a written form that is indexed.
> and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant...
This part is where we veer into prediction of how it will alter people and it is both right and wrong. I think the education system has shown us it's possible to have a great memory and to remember many facts and still be ignorant. At the same time, there's so much material that can be consumed and people have surface knowledge of many things and once you dig into a conversation with them on it, the ignorance pops up and it turns out that they don't know much about the topic. I know this. This has been me on many occasions and is still me on some occasion.
>... and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
Again, there's some truth to this. I think about the times where I've jumped into a conversation about politics with some half baked knowledge that I read somewhere but failed to understand or recall correctly and I think I must have a looked a fool at those times.
But then again, I've course corrected here and there and I've spent time writing and sharing thoughts with others where I've used previous writings to pull up facts and my own synthesis, and I feel like I've been a better participant at times like that. In that way, writing has helped me steer away from ignorance.
I can't comment further though on the quote because I've never read the rest of the context so I may be missing out on some stuff.
I think Paul is on to something here though. I can't count how many thoughts I've had that I thought were clever but when I started to write the thoughts down and organize it on my own, I discovered for myself that either I didn't have enough evidence to prove myself entirely or that I was just flat out wrong. Writing is a form of thinking in my opinion. And if we don't write, we do lose that side of thinking too. I do appreciate though that Paul doesn't go further into predicting the consequences as Plato's warning does here. But I'll be willing to bet that Paul is right that there will be some negative consequences for sure.
It turns out that was a greater benefit that to some extent makes up for losing the exceptionally well trained memory of scholars from a verbal tradition. Not that that last part isn't a loss though, and his warning against false wisdom is more relevant than ever today when it feels like half the people you talk to online are just googling up wikipedia articles to base their world view upon on the fly.
--edit-- sometimes me not grammar good
Just because you memorized 10000 random articles on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you now have the wisdom to apply that in a particular circumstance.
Very much like early AI models.
It's common and easy to fall into considering the things you could look up as things you already know.
What's the difference, one might ask? What's the problem with offloading some of this knowledge and free up space in your head? Well the thing when you learn something is that it doesn't just permit access to the information, it also permits synthesis of new ideas. The sum of knowledge is greater than its parts.
A very concrete example: As someone who only speaks English one may look up the Latin terms 'manus' (hand) and 'facere' (to act/do/make); but unless you actually do, you'll probably not immediately grok the etymology of the English term 'manufacture'.
There are some computations (synthesis) that require so many (non-front loadable) memory accesses that it's impractical to do them from memory with significant delay (books), because the number_of_accesses * access_time dominates the project time.
Instead, you must have a working set of core information (or at least pointers to information) in low-latency memory (your brain).
Example: How much longer would it take me to do a multi-digit multiplication if I had to look up the process for multiplication in a book for every digit multiplication I did? And what if that multiplication were just one of many in the higher-level math problem I was trying to solve? (Then generalize to any problem that requires a core base of knowledge)
I'm genuinely curious, why do you think this is relevant? How would you differentiate "specific types of memory recall" scientifically?
That's not an accident. Wisdom emerges out of practice and the effortlessness that comes with it. The genius piano player isn't that good because of some pie in the sky wisdom about music, just like the AI they just played tons of scales and training pieces. Literally meaningless stuff. This rejection of rote memorization as some sort of lower skill, that students should be 'smart and lazy' is one of the stupidest modern tendencies.
It's much more likely that you can, that someone who would only look them up "on demand", however, as you at least are aware of the possibilities in those domains.
> He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an utterly simple person, and in truth ignorant of the prophecy of Ammon, if he thinks written words are of any use except to remind him who knows the matter about which they are written.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines
In the Qur'an there is reference to something called Mantiq-at-Tayr and this is usually translated/understood as "Bird Logic". Because the reference is to 'Solomon' and his declaration to people that he and his father David were "taught Mantiq at'Tayr'" by God. And there is a work by a world class "psychonaut" named Attar of Neishapoor who wrote a book called by the same name and translated as "Conference of the Birds". (Note 'Bird' also means 'flier'. Mantiq can also meen logic.)
So I am certain this refers to esoteric speech and the "birds" in question that had conversations with Solomon were "fliers" (as in practicing psychonaut) and the matter is related to -Godel- and limitations of discerning 'truth' via text.
There is a 'communion in conversation' that is never achieved in text.
Tired Alfred North Whitehead quotes aside, he's basically the single most influential author in the western tradition, arguably even eclipsing the bible.
And even better, we would know it by heart.
Assuning we considered it important of course. But that would be another benefit: it would also filter unimportant works over time.
Of course not everybody would know it by heart. That's a third benefit: only people interested and caring enough would know Plato. Not dilletantes.
If we never had writing, would the Huns have carried forth Platonic wisdom? Would it really have survived thousands of years of cultural evolution and the decline of Greek civilization itself? Who even is the "we" who should consider it important?
> that would be another benefit: it would also filter unimportant works over time.
How would it even be possible to know what's been lost in the oral tradition without anyone writing things down? Only takes one autocrat to massacre followers of a specific tradition to effectively erase it. Things get filtered based on their ability to survive, which is partially a function of "importance", whatever that actually means at a given time.
> a third benefit: only people interested and caring enough would know Plato. Not dilletantes.
This just seems like unabashed elitism. A "benefit" of the oral tradition is that knowledge is reserved for the deserving? No thanks.
Is Twitter > books? Is HN > podcasts? Every medium has its tendencies... positive, negative and complicated. We don't actually choose between them. It's useful to keep an eye on losses, not just gains.
Oral traditions, for example, naturally evolve and diversify. A fairy tale can literally spread over the whole world, and develop thousands of versions. Each one adapted and localised. Written stories also spread, but remain identical... even more-so after printing.
This is, largely, the story of monotheist religions. Whether or not they had sacred scrolls in ancient times, the religions were mostly based in folk traditions, temple authority, prophets, judges... people. As the moved from oral tradition to authoritative canon, the religions became extremely stiff an unyielding.
The Catholic Church is interesting counterpoint. Their religious teaching still openly draws upon tradition, institutional church authority and individuals like the Pope.
See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in medieval times (admittedly, the Catholic Church was also much more a political-nation-religious entity then vs now)
Using thousands of monks to copy documents by hand instead of using printers was incredibly resource expensive, but affordable for the Medieval Church.
And I mean fully-loaded, so how much time needed to be spent {farming/military/political administration} to give a monk time to learn to read and write, and then allow them time to copy the book itself.
Price of 7 books = £5 = 100s -> 14s per book / Price of 1 Pig in London = 3s
14 / 5 => roughly 5 pigs per book
Note £1 = 20s
I was observing that the modern Catholic Church (post-printed word) has offified in exactly that way, with the printed word allow direct dissemination of the "agreed" canon (i.e. pope / hierarchy) to the entire church, thereby unifying them into a single practice.
In counterpoint I offered the number of papal crises and schisms that abounded during the medieval and pre-medieval period (i.e. before printed material became cheap and available).
Ergo, the use of the printed word allowed the Catholic Church to unify and standardize in a way it had not before -- GP's point.
It's indicative that the majority of monotheistic religious splits within Catholicism happened before the printing press, when intervening human parties could reinterprete the canon as it flowed through them.
For political-national-religious entity, the Catholic Church / Holy Roman Empire partnership allowed the Church to become a nation in all but land, by the power its blessing conveyed upon a chosen leader.
Would it? The Bible, which is much larger, was practical to standardize and disseminate without the printed word, and its not like there was a proximate relationship between the availability of printing (presumably with movable type, in the 15th century) and the codification of canon law in the 20th. The idea that this was waiting on printing is…hard to defend.
> See: how many schisms and papal crises there were in medieval times
The really durable schisms after the 11th Century emerged after or just before (and became crystallized because of) printing, though.
IIRC this was their main contention against the Protestant reformation. They believed that just pointing at scripture without some practice of custom and tradition to ensure you're properly interpreting it in a sensible way would lead people to folly and extremism/fundamentalism.
Granted it's sort of a pick your poison deal. You either get the fundamentalism of hardline scripturalists or you get the corruption that comes with a hierarchical institution that requires people to offloading some of their critical thinking. Or you can blend them together and get the worst of both worlds by creating something that looks like the more noxious elements of the American Evangelical movement.
I don't think it is fair to say the latter leads to "corruption" or "offloading some of their critical thinking". This phobia is largely a feature of radical individualism and the lack of humility that the notion of radical self-sufficiency (intellectual or otherwise) entails. The paradox of individualism is that it actually weakens the ability to be an individual. Human beings are social animals whose lives are relatively short and therefore whose experiences are limited. And because individualism atomizes the individual, the effect is that this social animal becomes subject to greater levels of fear and stress about his isolation, and when isolated from the social and from tradition, he becomes easy prey for weird ideologies.
In this specific case, scriptural canon was compiled by the Catholic Church. You obviously cannot appeal to the canon to codify the canon, so some extra-biblical body of knowledge and understanding must exist that would allow such a canonical body of scripture to be identified. This body of knowledge and understanding is called Tradition, and it is guarded, refined, and transmitted by an unbroken chain of authority found in the apostolic succession. (Tradition is the basis for the transmission and development of all knowledge in human history; there is likewise a scientific tradition without which there could be no science.) The notion that an individual could do better alone without relying or drawing on tradition is belied by the presence of over 40,000 Protestant sects in the US alone, each claiming to be able to interpret scripture. And how do they interpret scripture? However they want! In most cases, it means interpreting it according to whatever happens to be fashionable at the time. So much for "critical thinking". This is very visible in the mainline Protestant churches that, not so incidentally, are shrinking very rapidly. Where this Protestant mindset has leeched into Catholic circles, it has produced the same deadly effect.
This is largely the story of religions, especially old pagan religions. Myths and folklore came about. The moment when religions went scriptural, the message became firm and technical. And gave rise to law as a study.
The romans were already pretty good at law.
Non scriptural religions had evolving myths and folklore like Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. Those religions did not contribute to law like the prior comment mentions.
India developed complicated law system before Judaism. Seems like it's part of human societies that grow in complexity, not something special to Judaism.
Protestantism definitely had a big impact on the development of western empirism and probably modern law. In general our current Western individualistic skeptic mindset is the heritage of the reformation.
Roman law development is thought to be put together by judaic influence. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1452148
Indian development is beyond my understanding.
Protestantism led to direct literacy and scholarship in Bible studies. Again, this is influenced by religion. The adoption of literacy is what led to Northern Europe's success.
Well you're lucky if they do; often they just make stuff up on the fly depending on what they saw on some dubious media or social network.
What's the difference between having read something last year and believing it, vs having heard someone tell you something last year and believing it? Would people stop in a conversation and go try to find the source of their information if they had to track down a specific person?
> What he didn't consider was the effect the written word had on a social scale in terms of being able to exchange ideas over physical and temporal distances.
Why would his words be less potent when applied to billions of people, as opposed to only a few? Are those billions not just as susceptible to fallacy as the elite few?
> Trust thyself
The whole point of his writing all it down, the very literal foundations of ~2500 years of philosophy and the bedrock of Western (and others) civilization, was so that he could have an effect on social issues over time. That was the whole point! He is super clear about this in his writings and throughout his life and travels.
As mentioned above, I do try to research things to the point of understanding. Which is something human contact definitely helps with. To stay on topic: ChatGPT is obviously less good, but is often good enough, is patient, and guaranteed to answer you in a couple of seconds.
[*] My exact workflow would not quite fit into this footnote, but I seldom cut-and-paste answers, unless it's for something exceptionally non-critical. I try to understand what is written and then type out my own version (which should be very close), or at very least I type it across by hand rather than use ^C-^V. (the latter is an edge case). In general, there's this AI-koan about how some things only work if you also understand them, which has a kernel of truth to it. ( http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html first one about tom knight)
We measured intelligence by the things you knew. We still have shows with questions based on this concept. This concept no longer makes sense in the modern world. But it used to.
Writing is a crutch, Internet even more so, and AI even more so. Eventually you can build the entire thinker out of those crutches and you need no humans anymore.
Especially for this quote, I like attributing it to Socrates as Plato did. We obviously don't know the details and nuances. However, I feel it captures the (perhaps inexact) tension between Socrates' old, mostly oral tradition of philosophy and Plato's newer tradition of written philosophy.
It's ancient Marshall McLuhan. Oral philosophy and written philosophy create different philosophies, not just a different medium for the same philosophy.
It embeds what is remembered in a current context.
Did Plato take this into account?
I'm not going to deny it's a change, but it's too early to decide if it's a bad change. Every generation has its own big shift in the past 100-200 years, and every generation complains about the change.
I'd just like to point out that Plato very rarely wrote in his own voice so it's very hard to say if it's his views or not that are being expressed.
In this case however, this is almost certainly an expression of Socrates' views, not Plato's. Not only because it's in the voice of Socrates but also by what's transparent in their actions: Socrates didn't leave anything in writing and Plato left us arguably the most important written corpus of classic Greek philosophy.
Maybe he felt ambivalent about it, but he certainly thought there was a value in the writing.
I tried asking ChatGTP what it thought and it came back with
>... it's also important to note that technology is a tool, and its impact largely depends on how it's used. For instance, AI writing tools ... can be used to augment human creativity and productivity, rather than replace it. These tools can help writers brainstorm ideas, overcome writer's block, write more quickly, and even learn to write better by providing examples and suggestions.
>Moreover, the use of AI tools might also stimulate new forms of thinking. Just as calculators didn't eliminate the need for mathematical understanding but rather allowed for more complex problems to be tackled, AI writing tools could help individuals refine and expand their thinking, enabling them to tackle more complex writing tasks or express ideas more effectively.
Which is kind of interesting - I didn't think of writers block on my own for example. Also lazy thinks at the moment probably tend to just go along with what they see in the media. AI aided thinking could improve on that.
You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.
Because it is now not the case, and AI trained on a corpus of many books can in fact say something new.
That and Meno's paradox!
* learning to ask good questions
* learning to fact check
* learning to edit the writing of others
Then they have truly learned the Socratic method. Which is a much more valuable tool than writing from scratch solipsistically: being able to actively engage with the writing of others.
"What is the cause of people forgetting texts they had learned before?" I can't remember the precise answer but that was one such line in the texts.
Today if you say that you sound kinda crazy.`
but like socrates there's still a few orders of wandering mendicant homeless-like orders out there (the theravada forest tradition being an example)
The overstimulation could be part of it as well, couldn’t it? There isn’t a lot of other information-rich inputs in a monastery.
Holding a summer school in a forest or on an isolated resort seems like exploiting a similar idea, and it does work quite well (for a month or so, before isolation sets in).
If you replace intense IRL dialogue and discussion, with writing, this might be the case.
On the other hand, if you replace just letting your thoughts fade in the void, with writing them down as coherent though out ideas in writing, I would argue that the writing has actually both triggered retention from memory (thus exercising the memory), and helped you critically assess and make your own thinking clearer.
Thus, I think writing is an extremely helpful tool for processing your thoughts for most knowledge workers who are not already involved in constant dialogue with others (which is most of us I guess).
Consider also Derrida's thoughts on these matters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmakon_(philosophy)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia
"For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise." [1]
[1] Phaedrus 275a-b, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...