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Roman's Attic's avatar

Bro you just used AI to trick me into learning about Greek philosophy smh

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Rob Nelson's avatar

To make the most of the summer, I have been rebalancing the ratio of reading and writing toward the latter, so I missed this piece. My thanks to Mike Kentz for telling me about it.

I gave a talk earlier this year about the uninvited arrival of ChatGPT into our lives as a Phaedrus moment, when a new cultural technology appears and threatens established educational norms and values.

It pleases me no end to know that you and Audrey Watters were talking about it around the same time I was working through the text, even though my reading is taking me in a different direction.

Thanks for the pointer to the Lane Wilkinson essay. Danielle Allen offers a similar take in "Why Plato Writes," but Wilkinson directly takes on the problem with those who ignore the context of the often quoted passages and, those like Walter Ong, who miss the fact that Socrates is a character in a written text whose author is communicating much more than straight forward skepticism about writing as a technology.

We agree on this: like books, chatbots do not offer wisdom. You can call it the dialectic or "a continuous process of reconstruction of experience," but wisdom is found through a human social process.

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