Hacker News Reader

Comment by rflrob | Hacker News Reader

I'm always a little skeptical of arguments that new technologies are actually damaging. I'm willing to accept that people are sometimes unhappy adjusting to new things (and that people are unhappy with how other people use their new technology), but people have been saying that [new technology here] is bad for thousands of years—Plato even complained about writing because it's "bad for memory"[1]. If you frame the questions such that the metrics you choose to measure it are going to come up poorly, then yes, new technology looks bad.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/259062-if-men-learn-this-it...

View on HN

The Atlantic did an article a couple months ago on the harm that smartphones are doing to today's teenagers, and they provide plenty of graphs and studies to back it up.

I totally get your reticence to believe the FUD, but the Golden Age of Greece didn't have the scientific method and the means to conduct study after study demonstrating the negative effects of writing. We do for smartphones, and the evidence is overwhelming.

> The Atlantic did an article a couple months ago on the harm that smartphones are doing to today's teenagers, and they provide plenty of graphs and studies to back it up.

The Atlantic piece is not without significant criticism for abusing the available data to draw unwarranted conclusions. See, e.g., https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/once-more-feeling/20170...

Thanks for this

If you read the article, it did mention Socrates warned about writing. Maybe Plato did say it as well.

Anyways, your point was brought up in the article.

Did you read the article?

> If you read the article, it did mention Socrates warned about writing. Maybe Plato did say it as well.

All the saying attributed to Socrates are by way of Plato's writing in which Socrates is used as a mouthpiece, and are more properly attributed to Plato. So, the references are probably to the same thing.

This is absolutely strictly correct but I think (in the Phaedrus) it's accepted that the injunction against writing thing is Socrates' idea (because Plato's work survives to this day in written form – Plato wrote stuff down) but that the injunction against art/theatre/drama (is it?) is all Plato's and is to be found in the Republic, the reason being that that which is representational is twice removed from the truth or something like that.

But you probably already know all this. So for the benefit of others.

Well, yeah, it's pretty hard to take seriously the idea that Plato adhered to an injunction against writing (given how we have access to his written works), but quite plausible that Socrates did (since we have access to him only through Plato's written works.)

This claim is, at best, highly contested: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/#HisSocEarMidLatDia.

Nope, I've got too much scrolling to do. These headlines aren't going to read themselves.

I read that part and saw how they stated it and then totally dismissed it. "This time is different" and lets keep going on with our talking points with studies that we spin/abuse and other things which aren't backed up at all.

> Did you read the article?

I did not. :( Turns out that not only Plato is too curmudgeonly to read things. Perhaps if I had a longer attention span from not using my cell phone too much, I could have read it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com