Your first two intro paragraphs are most often applied to parents, and are nearly universal experiences. It’s called “growing up” to realize that your idols and teachers are multidimensional and fallible, and to then have to wonder if ANYTHING you know is actually true.
Unfortunately, there IS no perfect teacher or thinker. You can’t reach a useful model / attain enlightenment by picking the right people to believe. You must look for cross-correlations in experience and evidence, and develop your own hybrid model of things, and update it as you gather new evidence. You ALSO should maintain some humility and understanding that your understanding is imperfect as well, and find a way to live with uncertainty.
As to your direct point, which seems to be another take on your lizardman theory, the difficulty is that it’s impossible to separate the two horses of Socrates’s soul-chariot. Every socrates has good and bad ideas, and good and bad discussion norms, and while it MAY be that there is an ideal ratio of socrateses to athenians, there’s no way to identify WHICH would-be socrateses to support or dissuade (or execute, given sufficient hemlock).
Your first two intro paragraphs are most often applied to parents, and are nearly universal experiences. It’s called “growing up” to realize that your idols and teachers are multidimensional and fallible, and to then have to wonder if ANYTHING you know is actually true.
Having this experience repeatedly is a form of “Gell-Mann Amnesia”, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you.
Unfortunately, there IS no perfect teacher or thinker. You can’t reach a useful model / attain enlightenment by picking the right people to believe. You must look for cross-correlations in experience and evidence, and develop your own hybrid model of things, and update it as you gather new evidence. You ALSO should maintain some humility and understanding that your understanding is imperfect as well, and find a way to live with uncertainty.
As to your direct point, which seems to be another take on your lizardman theory, the difficulty is that it’s impossible to separate the two horses of Socrates’s soul-chariot. Every socrates has good and bad ideas, and good and bad discussion norms, and while it MAY be that there is an ideal ratio of socrateses to athenians, there’s no way to identify WHICH would-be socrateses to support or dissuade (or execute, given sufficient hemlock).