Sewing-Machine comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong

177 Post author: lukeprog 05 January 2011 07:22AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 05 January 2011 09:11:53PM 11 points [-]

Reading the masters (the little I've done of it) has taught me the following things:

  1. Almost no ideas are good
  2. Almost no ideas are new

Plato's ideas were, at least, new. And (per 2) they're the most influential ideas ever to be put on paper. There's value in seeing that for yourself.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 06 January 2011 12:30:11AM *  3 points [-]

Plato's ideas were, at least, new.

Much of Plato's thought comes from Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Socrates. If I were to pick an ancient philosopher that didn't have obvious intellectual antecedents, I would choose Thales.

Comment author: David_Gerard 05 January 2011 11:31:51PM *  6 points [-]
  1. Almost no ideas are good
  2. Almost no ideas are new

This counts as vast insight. When looking at the output of lots of ridiculously smart people, you discover that most intelligence is used to justify stupidity, and the most important thing about most new ideas is that they are wrong.