alt Hacker NewsWhile I agree with your rebuke of the GP, Socrates was materially wrong about writing (or at least, about the ability to persist information beyond any single human lifetime).
Cumulatively, knowledge work (including, in particular, curating knowledge) is exceptionally energy intensive from an evolutionary standpoint. It does pay dividends, clearly, but to get compounding effects from it, being able to efficiently pass down big corpora of facts, ideas, processes, etc., is an absolute necessity.
Writing systems are the fundamental way through which we can do this. They worked for us for millennia, and we eventually built upon them to develop encodings used today to store information remarkably densely.
The larger win from writing is passing down things that are not commonly needed. If you hunt antelope every year I can teach my kids. If we know there are antelope "over there", but they are easy to over hunt to so we only hunt in 100 year droughts - nobody in the village will know how to hunt them when we need to and so we need writing. (never mind how we figure out that they are easy to over hunt)