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Jack comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
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Reading the masters (the little I've done of it) has taught me the following things:
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.
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.
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.