The Tyrrany of Literacy. on Oral Tradition and What Is Lost

Superstitions should never be considered "knowledge", the same way that stupidity is not intelligence and noise is not information.

There’s a way of knowing something that can be recalled orally from memory that is different and valuable. But we even measure it using a yardstick for written knowledge (accuracy, breadth, etc).

I believe this overemphasis on written knowledge (really, it’s implicitly a denial that any other type exists) is part of what drives the hysteria about LLMs ending the world. LLM doomerism has to believe that written knowledge is at least the most important if not the only necessary form of knowledge.

Let's take a modern example. There is a place where the road to it's entrance has changed recently. It's been six months and Google Maps has still not updated the "written record" (Incidenetally this a real situation I'm talking about, not a hypothetical fhough it shouldn't matter.) The only reason people in the vicinity know the correct way is through word of mouth. It's a simple case where the oral record is correct and the written record is false. The truth has propagated orally from the people witnessing the change to the surrounding region.

Another example. The educated member of family of farmers always teases their mother about how she always tells them to use oils extracted from various plants whenever they have different ailments, recommending a specific plant depending on what the ailment is. Since the educated child can't find scientific literature supporting the claim, they often ignore the advice. Big pharma is not incentivised to fund clinical studies on these type of plants since they'd rather create a synthetic form of whatever property of the plant is aiding the healing and patent that synthetic formula instead, so studies like these are not prioritized. Years later, when someone finally gets around to conducting clinical studies on some of the regional plants, they end up supporting their mother's claims.

It should be even more apparent if we use the legal system as an analogy, since everyone now understands that if you are not literate in legal matters or don't have a top notch lawyer you can lose even if you're in the right. People are abused because they are legally illiterate, and it is in fact a type of tyranny. Oral records vs written records have the same problem. It's a very hard problem to solve but it is a problem.

Written accounts are still vastly superior to oral tradition of course, their accuracy is on another level. But that doesn't mean there is absolutely nothing to glimpse from old myths.

I don't know, I'm pretty sure this is in the Historia Augusta.

No talking about Homer or territorial expansion of 1880 for them anymore.

Make it make sense.

Not as relevant today, you say? OK, name someone who has memorized a work of similar length.

So, I agree with you. That kind of "long-read" memorization is no longer appreciated and cultivated, and I have no doubt it impacts our brains differently than watching a YT video.