the chicken man?
chicken man! chicken man! chicken man!
too few twinks fallacy
There isn’t one. It’s not a fallacy. It’s simply that it’s stupid and wrong.
Non sequitur. There’s no logical connection between the two statements
Not exactly. Plato was against books because they made it too easy to remember information - people no longer had to memorize facts, because now they could be written down, forgotten, and read later to be relearned. So it was very much someone arguing against new technology making things too easy, and whittling away at humanity’s ability to process and remember information, just like people arguing against AI today.
Ultimately, Plato was right that books made it harder for us to remember information, but the benefit of being able to share information so much more effectively outweighed that drawback, leading to books making people smarter overall even if they aren’t as good at retaining that information. The same can’t be said for AI, which further whittles away at our ability to retain information on top of limiting our ease of access to verifiably correct information, instead leading us toward assumptions and opinions, which is the real reason why this argument falls apart.
The firehose of false information from AI slop is kind of the opposite problem…
Ironically it was Socrates his opinion and Plato was the one to write it down. Not the opinion of Plato (who wrote a lot).
Socrates would have loved AI because contrary to the static written word you can have a Socratic method style discussion with AI that has follow up questions and rebuttals.
AI isn’t “silent written word” that Socrates disliked.
Plus if we didn’t have books we wouldn’t have dungeon crawler Carl
Plato might’ve been onto something then
j/k but I do get tired of people bringing it up during D&D
If you run under the presimise that anything Plato ever thought was strictly the opposite of true, then it follows.
It’s a relatively common and flawed structure. People just usually say Hitler or Stalin or Obama or whatever.
The fallacy fallacy: assuming that every falsehood matches one formal fallacy and only one.
OH… you meant the Plato thing. Never mind.
Faulty generalization, since what’s happening is that you’re essentially saying “conservatives were wrong about technology being bad once, therefore they’re always wrong about technology being bad.” There’s usually a hint of non sequitur, but that’s the gist of it.
Chewbacca fallacy. It makes no sense!
Plato?! That drunk bastard?
I’d call it a non sequitur or maybe false cause.
An inverted appeal to authority? Because a famous philosopher hated a new thing that ended up being good, you want to assume all new things will be good.
It would also be an over-generalization because it isn’t considering the reasons Plato was against books and if all new technologies and changes would have any relation to those reasons.
Never been a fan.
I think his argument against books is better explained as that he was against the mindless consumption of media? Absorbing information without discussing it through spoken word. He must have been all for using art and literature as a means to express ideas, that’s what he did.
Then putting this up against new technologies becomes more interesting.
In Plato’s time, people learned information primarily through verbal discussion, then shared it with their friends, family, and community to pass it on through the generations. Oral tradition was extremely important to their culture at the time because it was accessible to everyone, and required practice and recitation to ensure no details were left out. Not many people could read back then, and those who could might not be able to read at the level to understand more complex topics.
It was also thought that writing down information would give people an excuse to never properly learn or discuss it in the first place, therefore depriving society from the uninterrupted chain of gaining and passing on knowledge. Anyone who could read could find the information, but would they actually understand it? This is why public forums were so important back then; you needed a community to share and discuss knowledge so everyone could understand and learn from it.
Also, it was Socrates who hated writing and refused to document any of his philosophy teachings. The only reason we know he exists today is because Plato took extensive notes on the teachings of Socrates. If anyone was pro-book, it would’ve been Plato.
exactly right! Plato loved writing and it was Socrates who disliked the static written word.
I think Socrates would have loved AI though because it’s so good at the Socratic method of discussion (if you use it that way, by default it’s sycophant and gives answers in stead of questions so if you don’t set it up it will be anti-socratic)
