Or the "original communicators." When you start to read the masters of every field, you realize they are in some sort of a conversation that spans centuries and you get to participate. One problem with this approach is these are dead teachers so no question & answer session for you, and usually the material is hard to comprehend at first. That is exactly what you need it, a material that elevates you, something that pushes you from understanding less to understanding more. Lastly, during this exercise you will find amazingly that there are really only a few original teachers and that most of what we read today are simply digest of what was originally written and discovered by a handful of experts. So it is probably in your best interest to take it straight from the horse's mouth.
You may know that we often read Plato but never read Socrates, and you might have wondered why the hell we don't go back to the 'originals'. Reading Plato's dialogue "Phaedrus" gives an answer near the end: Socrates apparently believed "that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence." Socrates of course was famous for using questions to try and ferret out truth; the idea that you couldn't have a conversation with a book seemed to make Socrates very cautious. He expresses other concerns as well: that memory must be exercised to be strong, and that writing would thus lead to a weakening of memory; also that writing makes it easier to pretend to know something which you don't really understand; and that people will write texts which cannot be used to learn the subject but only can be used as an aid to remember it.
Thus ironically, Socrates seemed to believe that books would end the existence of knowledge. This presumably was the reason that he never wrote down his own philosophy, and his students had to do it for him.
Feynman had some similar advice to not read too much. He'd get just the basic idea, stop reading, and try to solve the problem himself. There's a similar anecdote about Turing. You don't have to be a genius to profit from this approach, though of course it affects how far you can take it.
I am currently reading Plato's works (chronologically). As you mention I keep asking myself "why did he not write anything? he knew he was a teacher of virtues." Now I am looking forward to the answer in Phaedrus.
Socrates, by means of Plato, Plato, by means of Aristotle, and Aristotle himself are all examples of masters, original communicators. Much of the way we think today, not just the philosophy, but even the mechanism, has to do with their writings. For example it appears the concept that something is either right or wrong comes from Aristotle, and that affects even our laws and sciences where as other cultures may have 4 possibilites: right, wrong, both right and wrong, and neither one nor the other. (I have not verified this, I just heard it last week)
One additional point: the masters almost always had great ideas they took too far.
The "conversation" that spans centuries consists of brilliant minds each getting a little glimpse into something sublime, then spending most of their lives taking these concepts to the extreme -- past where they are useful.
This means that the pattern that many young learners have, where they latch on to a person and then hero-worship, (this is the guy who figured it all out!) makes for a really bad way to follow the conversation. You're always trying to find the best person, and you're always trying to make his/her ideas fit into all of the material. Much better to passively and fluidly accept new information. Think of it more like meeting a bunch of really smart people in a bar, listening to their philosophy of life, then meeting the next bunch. The question becomes absorbing and understanding and being able to apply the way they think, not the ultimate truth. Most things you consume are not physics. Hell, at some level physics isn't even physics. Humans are model-builders, and the models are always incomplete. The kind of certainty we yearn for just doesn't exist in the real world.
Perhaps another way of putting this would be "Deep learning lightly held"
The "conversation" that spans centuries consists of brilliant minds each getting a little glimpse into something sublime, then spending most of their lives taking these concepts to the extreme -- past where they are useful.
I agree. Theory vs. Practicality, Pure Science vs. Engineering.
Seems like in the article and the comments there are three categories of "master" here: Theoreticians, Mechanics, and Explainers. People who destroy and replace models, people who take models into places we never envisioned, and people who can explain models to others. (These categories work across both fiction, non-fiction, and science)
I wonder as we learn if we don't naturally move from one of these categories to another. I'd wager it's from explainer to theoretician to mechanic. It'd be interesting to see some research in this area.
Yes, I am repeating Adler's How To Read.