Socrates thought that writing contributed to brain rot.
If I AI rots my brain than so did Google before it, and printed encyclopedias before that. In reality, the fact I can get my questions answered quickly only makes me think of more and more questions to ask, more things to wonder about, more problems to ponder.
That still seems to be a problem.
It was not what "Socrates thought", but what Plato put into Socrates' mouth in Phaedrus, and even this imaginary Socrates is not saying anything like that, just referencing an even earlier Egyptian tale: "There is an old Egyptian tale of Theuth, the inventor of writing, showing his invention to the god Thamus, who told him that he would only spoil men’s memories and take away their understandings..." https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j...
But that's just pedantery. The real painpoint is that just because there are lots of useful AI tools, it doesn't mean it's not dangerous at the same time for a surprising number of 8B people currently alive (children, elderly, mentally lazy or just fatigued).
At the very least, they will end up being exploited by bandits. And if you let the bandits continue to exploit those who lack certain mental resistance, the bandits will become stronger etc.
It was used in exactly the same way. You think the world you live in is based on the honest truth of how things went? Entire families and peoples have been written out of history, for convenience. They are kept out of history for "stability".
Reading should help one think, but it is not to replace thinking...
I mean to some degree it is true in that you have the luxury of forgetting stuff if you know where you can get that information in future. I think many can agree that having access to written and printed word even has been a big positive.
"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Socrates is probably right. There are probably entirely different connections being made in ones brain in an oral culture vs written culture. Socrates was alive to see the transition where these differences in manners of brain activity were readily apparent, unlike today where all educated people are already “ruined” by writing and there is no control possible.
I have seen something similar. Engineers from the analog era able to solve complicated calculations in their head like you and I might perform simple arithmetic. It is like entire functional capabilities have been lost thanks to being able to punt these tasks to a calculator in modern times. Akin to an animal no longer competent to make the amino acids it needs to survive because some other species in the environment makes them and can be eaten.
I agree that those are impressive skills that are becoming rare and make us compare unfavorably to old schoolers. But I am also impressed by trackers who can follow a trail in the bush by observing clues invisible to ordinary people. All kinds of skills fell into disuse when the problems they solved lost importance.
But we will never run out of problems to solve and new problems will call for new competencies.
I wonder what are some of these new competencies. I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Can you?
I would say learning to be successful in modern society would probably count as a new competency. Rather than know to hunt and forage like our ancestors have for what millions of years, within three generations that has been replaced with having a sense for grocery shopping. How to hold a job. How to manage modern social constructs.
However, three generations or so is not enough time to see the effects of this form of selection on our species. All the great things we see in life that we’ve built rest on the laurels of behavioral patterns and neuron networks established by millions of years of this hunter-gatherer paradigm. Now that is over for most of the breeding population. What is next for us is the interesting question. What are we selecting for today? What sort of person tends to be the most fecund? Where are our alleles heading? I mean, we aren’t even selecting for reproductive success anymore. For example, the people who need to rely on ivf to reproduce today perhaps would not have reproduced in the past, and whatever alleles that conferred that infertility might have been regularly lost in the population shortly after they emerged through mutation. Now, that ivf offspring survives, and might harbor these alleles instead to the next generation where they will also depend on ivf to reproduce.
Intelligence is also not being selected for. Intelligent people tend to have kids late in life when sperm and egg quality are already in decline harboring more mutations than gametes from younger humans. They tend to also have fewer kids. Lack of education on the other hand is correlated with having more kids younger in life. The poor and uneducated therefore have a higher fitness.
It does not seem to bode well that our present level of intelligence will even be around in 10,000 generations time given that the selective pressures that generated it in the first place are now lost.
Maybe that is the great filter: intelligent life is short lived as the changes to behavior that emerge from it being widespread and technologically capable lead to that very intelligence no longer being selected for.
Socrates was really ahead of the curve on this I guess…
I found out about this book from the recommended reading section at the end of one of Ogilvy’s books (Ogilvy is a famous advertising man from the Mad Man era).
The most seamless capture-from-anywhere workflow I struck upon is to have a shortcut on my phone's home screen. When tapped, it takes my dictation, transcribes it, and saves it to an inbox.org file with an org-syntax timestamp, synced to my main computer.
Basically the notes have the same format that org-mode uses to save notes placed in the logbook. But you can also make them as individual TODO headings or whatever. It's all plain text anyway.
I try to empty the inbox.org every morning, I typically have 20-30 entries to go through. Some things matter and are revised and refiled appropriately. The rest gets dumped into a chronological log file for just in case.
edit: btw, it would be cool if I also made a version that would append the content of the phone's clipboard to the transcription, so that I can also catch links and/or bits of text. Or maybe even multimedia, thought I am not sure how I would accomplish that.
I’ve relied heavily on seamless capture for a couple of decades, ala Getting Things Done.
My solution is a twilio text number that automatically inserts any texts it receives into the top of my todo.md file. Previously todo.org, until about a year ago.
iOS has ubiquitous support to quickly share to SMS from any/everywhere. It’s easy to send a text to this contact from a Home Screen shortcut, but also also from the share sheet in most every app.
I'd be very curious to know more about the shortcut you describe. This workflow would work incredibly well for me. I already have my notes synced via syncthing, and capture with Orgzly Revived, but auto-transcribed captures would be a gamechanger.
I keep the inbox.org on dropbox, that keeps it synced.
The shortcut is called “longdictate” because previously I had a version that didnt require me to press stop after finishing my thought. Instead it was set to stop recording when I stopped talking. But it misfired too frequently, cutting me off, so I added the button.
I imagine there must be something similar to iphone shortcuts on Android?
This isn't rsync, but you can integrate a-Shell[0] with iOS Shortcuts. You would need to make the syncing happen in the script instead of in the background though. I use a Python script to create aliases for my email this way, so I don't have to turn on wildcard addressing to my inbox.
My stack is org mode plus the Denote package which has a nifty journaling feature. Each day has its own file. The date is in the file name, but more useful to me, the file name also includes a signature that looks like this today:
2025q4w40thu
I find that the week number and day of the week is a more meaningful coordinate than the date itself to orient myself when browsing through the files.
The issue I'm having is that the daily file is sometimes a running log of notes I jotted down, other times a structured journal entry written the next morning. I wish I could separate the two so that I could export all my proper journal entry into a pdf.
One option would be org-mode's capture templates. If you had a capture template for structured journal entries, you could keep your daily file open for notes, and then pop open a capture window when you want to start a journal entry.
Or, if you're not sure which a piece of writing is going to be when you start, you could tag the ones you want to save in your "proper journal" with a :JOURNAL: tag, and then refile those once in a while to a separate file.
I do a lot of captures which all go to refile.org, and then I go through that weekly or more often and refile items to other files where they belong. That makes it easy to jot down a thought down quickly, since I don't have to decide where it goes first.
I often use timers and alarms either on my casio or on my laptop as reminders for this or that. I routinely get so carried away by whatever I'm doing that I don't notice when the sound alert plays. Sometimes, when I realize later on that the bell already went off, I can recall hearing it earlier, as if it were a faint memory from a half-forgotten dream.
I also switch between my macbook keyboard and my external ortholinear keyboard. In my case, getting used to the ortholinear actually improved my typing on the macbook keyboard, as it taught me to use my pinky finger more, and also fixed some other bad habits of reaching across with the wrong finger to type certain keys. But I have an ordinary rectangular ortholinear, not a moonlander-type layout.
Living in the northern hemisphere, it bugs me that standard north-up, west-left maps don't match up with the sun and with our clocks. It's neat that both clock hands and the sun are "up" at noon. It would be even neater if that upward direction corresponded to south, since that's where the sun actually is at midday. With south-at-top, east-to-the-left, maps would sync with both our clocks and the sun's daily arc. But then we would lose the west-left rhyme.
I spent my 20s searching for the perfect todo solution but my search ended when I discovered org-mode. It's not that I'm the most productive person you'll meet, it's just that there's nothing further to look for. Should I decide to be my productive self for a while, I know org-mode will support me and not stand in my way :)
