Is there a reason I should want to? I mean that sincerely. Is there a reason I should want to memorize a specific handful of books’ worth of information? Because rather than memorize a few thousand pages designed to be memorizable, what I’ve actually done is read/hear hundreds of thousands, mostly likely millions, of pages or their equivalent, with hundreds of new pages per day added, and extracted the key insights as best I can while keeping track as best I can of where I got them and how they all fit together.
I’ve read or heard or watched the Iliad and Odyssey, Plato, Aristotle, the Oresteia, the Bacchae, and thousands of other books, plays, songs, movies, shows, lectures, podcasts, etc. Would anything about me be better if I’d instead memorized the Catalogue of Ships or the exact text of Plato’s Crito and Apology?
I think the skill expressed by the bards isn’t memorization, rather its on the fly composition based on those key insights they’ve remembered. How else could Međedović hear a 2,300 line song and repeat the same story over 6,300 lines?
So if you gained the skill of the great bards you would be able to read the Odyssey and then retell the story in your own engaging way to another group of people while keeping them enraptured.
I’m not sure it only applies to memory. I imagine that ancient philosophers had to do most of their thinking in their heads, without being able to clean it up by writing it out and rethinking it. They might be better able to edit their thoughts in real time, and might have a stronger control over letting unreasonable or not-logical thoughts and thought processes take over. In that sense, being illiterate might lend a mental stability and strength that people who rely on writing things out may lack.
Still, I think that the benefits of writing are too enormous to ignore, and it’s already entrenched into our systems. Reversing the change won’t give a competitive edge.
Is there a reason I should want to? I mean that sincerely. Is there a reason I should want to memorize a specific handful of books’ worth of information? Because rather than memorize a few thousand pages designed to be memorizable, what I’ve actually done is read/hear hundreds of thousands, mostly likely millions, of pages or their equivalent, with hundreds of new pages per day added, and extracted the key insights as best I can while keeping track as best I can of where I got them and how they all fit together.
I’ve read or heard or watched the Iliad and Odyssey, Plato, Aristotle, the Oresteia, the Bacchae, and thousands of other books, plays, songs, movies, shows, lectures, podcasts, etc. Would anything about me be better if I’d instead memorized the Catalogue of Ships or the exact text of Plato’s Crito and Apology?
I think the skill expressed by the bards isn’t memorization, rather its on the fly composition based on those key insights they’ve remembered. How else could Međedović hear a 2,300 line song and repeat the same story over 6,300 lines?
So if you gained the skill of the great bards you would be able to read the Odyssey and then retell the story in your own engaging way to another group of people while keeping them enraptured.
I don’t know, I can’t tell you that. If I had to choose I also strongly prefer literacy.
But I didn’t know there was a tradeoff there! I thought literacy was basically unambiguously positive—whereas now I think it is net highly positive.
Also I strongly agree with frontier64 that the skill that is lost is rough memorization + live composition, which is a little different.
I’m not sure it only applies to memory. I imagine that ancient philosophers had to do most of their thinking in their heads, without being able to clean it up by writing it out and rethinking it. They might be better able to edit their thoughts in real time, and might have a stronger control over letting unreasonable or not-logical thoughts and thought processes take over. In that sense, being illiterate might lend a mental stability and strength that people who rely on writing things out may lack.
Still, I think that the benefits of writing are too enormous to ignore, and it’s already entrenched into our systems. Reversing the change won’t give a competitive edge.