It’s the difference between being able to score above the 90th% on the GRE biology and having read a bunch of classicbooks like “The Origin of Species”.

I’m as credentialist-prone as you, but reading many old, classic, texts in a field strikes me as one of the weaker credential signals for an active, evolving field of science.

Who cares if you end up thinking Smith had a different view than he did. He won’t mind but the world will if that interferes with you learning more actual economics.

Then we could treat it just like going on a walk in nature and those of us who don’t feel the appeal wouldn’t be sneered at or pushed into it on the grounds of it beeing a good way to learn.

I mean evidently you can recognize that Plato has these vital philosophical insights so what could possibly stop you from passing them on? Did he just stumble upon the best possible exposition and unlike any other originator of an idea never got confused….or did he just get lucky and get confused in exactly the right places to help later people understand more?

On what theory could Plato have had this amazing power that all his predecessors lacked? Do you really think he was that much smarter than everyone who has come since?

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It’s amazing how many people who don’t believe in god will swear up and down the bible is a great work of literature and morality just because they’ve been told that’s what to expect inside. Any writing that admits a minimal level of confusion and imperfect clarity will induce the same effect if that’s what the reader expects. You merely read your own insights into Plato because you are told to ponder it until you have an insight and it’s a poorly written confusing work.

Obviously if your goal is to understand one particular ancient greek who died 2000 years ago rather than to progress in philosophy I take this all back but why the heck would you do that? Why not go dumpster diving for the guy who lives next door’s journals and mail and memorize trivia about his life instead?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1d1/the_value_of_nature_and_old_books/

Also, a lot of the gains from reading the originals comes more from how they thought or wrote than their discrete ideas. Plato is the best example of this — you should expect to get no more out of a distillation of Theaetetus than you would get from a synopsis or summary of Shakespeare.

I agree with Prof. Hanson that it is discouraging to discover how much can be learned by reading the old masters, as it reflects on how little progress we’ve made. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile!

Famous thinkers from the not-to-distant past have *salience*; a reference to one of them allows one to point to a complex of ideas that is familiar to one’s audience, without having actually to articulate it. Admittedly, the Classic Comic Books’ version of the famous thinker’s ideas–Kling’s “distillation”–normally suffices for this purpose.

In my experience, the main reason for reading an old-time thinker’s work is that one is a student, the teacher has assigned the work, and reading it will contribute to one’s getting a good grade in the course. Perhaps ultimate the goal is signaling, but there is a much more specific proximate goal.