For the same reason we make kids write out math problems rather than just reciting them. It engages different parts of the brain for one, you gain an expanded amount of context by doing so.
The next thing has to do with human memory, when you remember something it is never read only. Recalling memory can adjust your neurons and change the memory, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Hence why eyewitness testimony is mostly trash.
Writing it down also provides a larger workspace for making changes that you can loop over. Quite often things sound fine in our mind, then we write it, and reread it and we realize its wrong. These days people commonly use this in agentic workflows. One agent will conceptualize an idea, and then it's passed off to another agent with a clean context to review for logical flaws. Reading ones own text does the same things for humans, we don't load the full memory context of what we wrote and it seemingly allows us to iterate over the problem differently.
And I guess lastly, human voice is very low bandwidth. A wagon full of well written books is far easier to manage than the humans that contain that knowledge. The reader is at their leisure to learn and the speaker isn't inconvenienced by being at someones beck and call.
I agree with your premise, but writing things down is not "better" but "different". Oral histories have a strange rapid way of evolving by only preserving structure that matters to many and contributes to fitness of many. Cultures that didnt know how to transmit the "right" parts of oral history, they ceased to be that same failed culture, and became another culture made of those new stories.
Writing locks in and requires the evolution of other forms of evolution, as the Word can no longer evolve during transmission.
I say that while being firmly on your side in the larger back-and-forth exchange here :)
I was thinking about this when I almost had to walk under a ladder the other day (and get bad luck). That one seems like an oral story that arose from people being hurt, whereas crossing the path of a black cat, while also supposedly bestowing bad luck, seems to have no plausible rationale.
I like this thought. Maybe some things are just like astrology, just Schelling points that everyone decided meant something, and simple "heightened awareness" gets scaffolded into it. That heightened awareness is the selective pressure for a set of observations to persist, even if arbitrary :) but sometimes there's a rhyme to the reason, and something that cant be clocked to one thing is somehow at the center of an idea
what happens in the end was my entire point, and the refutation of your point. wtf? writing things down is a superior form of information retention and accuracy than verbal recitation and memory, obviously.
>why is writing things down better?
For the same reason we make kids write out math problems rather than just reciting them. It engages different parts of the brain for one, you gain an expanded amount of context by doing so.
The next thing has to do with human memory, when you remember something it is never read only. Recalling memory can adjust your neurons and change the memory, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Hence why eyewitness testimony is mostly trash.
Writing it down also provides a larger workspace for making changes that you can loop over. Quite often things sound fine in our mind, then we write it, and reread it and we realize its wrong. These days people commonly use this in agentic workflows. One agent will conceptualize an idea, and then it's passed off to another agent with a clean context to review for logical flaws. Reading ones own text does the same things for humans, we don't load the full memory context of what we wrote and it seemingly allows us to iterate over the problem differently.
And I guess lastly, human voice is very low bandwidth. A wagon full of well written books is far easier to manage than the humans that contain that knowledge. The reader is at their leisure to learn and the speaker isn't inconvenienced by being at someones beck and call.
I agree with your premise, but writing things down is not "better" but "different". Oral histories have a strange rapid way of evolving by only preserving structure that matters to many and contributes to fitness of many. Cultures that didnt know how to transmit the "right" parts of oral history, they ceased to be that same failed culture, and became another culture made of those new stories.
Writing locks in and requires the evolution of other forms of evolution, as the Word can no longer evolve during transmission.
I say that while being firmly on your side in the larger back-and-forth exchange here :)
I was thinking about this when I almost had to walk under a ladder the other day (and get bad luck). That one seems like an oral story that arose from people being hurt, whereas crossing the path of a black cat, while also supposedly bestowing bad luck, seems to have no plausible rationale.
I like this thought. Maybe some things are just like astrology, just Schelling points that everyone decided meant something, and simple "heightened awareness" gets scaffolded into it. That heightened awareness is the selective pressure for a set of observations to persist, even if arbitrary :) but sometimes there's a rhyme to the reason, and something that cant be clocked to one thing is somehow at the center of an idea
what happens in the end was my entire point, and the refutation of your point. wtf? writing things down is a superior form of information retention and accuracy than verbal recitation and memory, obviously.