In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates recounts on old story of how the legendary King Thamus of Egypt had declined the god Theuth’s offer to teach his subjects how to write. “What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory but for reminder,” says King Thamus. “And it is no true wisdom you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom. They will be a burden to their fellows.”