It’s interesting you say this because many cultures through history have considered that writing things down, especially laws would lead to confusion, misunderstands and social dysfunction.
I’m not trying to argue they are / were right, but it’s starting to make me wonder.
Written communication is lossy compared to direct, ongoing, personal social interaction. But it's also what allows communities to scale beyond couple dozen people. A blessing and a curse.
It seems that there is a threshold for this, given that there is a boundary where physical interaction no longer contributes to the information needed for efficient communication. Written communicatoin in these forms are more of a philosophical nature with abstract objects or abstract processes, which may or may not mimic reality. The part of mimicing reality is an interesting contrast to lossy. For example modern physics is largely mathematical, and arguably more lossy in person vs in solitude and imagining the symbols within the language of mathematics paints _potentially_ an accurate mimic of reality or at least a predictable aspect of it.
Right. I agree. I meant writing is lossy for social interaction-related things. Dealing with other humans directly, trading resources, coexisting. We needed writing to scale communities up, but we also needed to make imperfect, explicit, formalized replicas of the interpersonal and social bits that were lost in this process.
As you note, writing also enabled us to deal with things like mathematics and physics - things that our natural language and modes of thinking are entirely ill-suited for. Here, writing isn't approximating some lost skill, but rather compensating for our default inability to think straight :). Which makes the trade-off even harder to evaluate - by scaling communities up, we've gained a lot more than just efficiency in food production and security. All our technology stems from it.
