Plato was not against writing. In fact, he wrote prolifically. Plato's writings form the basis of Western Philosophy.
Plato's teacher Socrates was against writing, and Plato agreed that writing is inferior to dialog in some ways; memory, inquiry, deeper understanding, etc.
We know this because Plato wrote it all down.
I think it would be more accurate to say that Plato appreciated the advantages of both writing and the Socratic method.
I don't think it's too tangential. If you haven't already seen it, I suspect you'd enjoy this; it really made an impact on me when I first read it, especially the ending.
I imagine his memory and those of people who memorized instead of wrote were better. So by that metric, writing is making people dumber. It's just not all that relevant today, and we don't prioritize memorization to the extent Plate and the ancient Greeks probably did.
Civilization is the process of externalizing our individual needs to others.
We externalize our information to books. We externalize our jobs to specialists. We externalize our shelter to home builders. We externalize our food to farmers. We externalize our water to manucipalities.
Individually we may be weaker because of it. Yet in the end we are all stronger, and now billions of us can live at levels unimaginable in the past.
We're not concerned with the community aloofness
Duke, we're animals, we just go where the most food is
Lower the toast, most formal etiquette is useless
Truth is you're equally expendable as spoon-fed
> It's just not all that relevant today, and we don't prioritize memorization to the extent Plate and the ancient Greeks probably did.
Funny enough, that's kinda what we're seeing with LLMs. We're past the "regurgitate the training set" now, and we're more interested in mixing and matching stuff in the context window so we get to a desired goal (i.e. tool use, search, "thinking" and so on). How about that...
This is a great illustration of the dangers of lost context.
This excerpt is a bit of the dialogue where Socrates is quoting some legend that takes place in Egypt.
On other parts of the dialogue, when speaking directly, Plato says that anyone can plainly see that writing in itself is not negative.
There is also a great bit where he warns that relying on texts solely to learn without guidance of other learned people opens oneself to misinterpreting the text and learning all the wrong things from it.
Not really sure why the geometry and color gradient of the world needs to be captured in a skeletonized syntax and semantics when our body is evolved to experience them directly.
https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/