The importance of epistemic reliability of oneself in order to do philosophy is almost completely ignored. Yet, it seems much of confusion in philosophy is ultimately rooted in one’s undisciplined and confused disposition rather than one’s intellectual ability. You are the instrument by which you craft intellectual thoughts. This means you as a whole person affect whether the thoughts you produce are more likely true. If we use a distorted camera lens, we take a distorted picture irrespective of our skill in photography. Philosophy should be connected to development of the whole person and not merely the intellect, like it used to be for many ancient philosophers. Instead, we find so many insanely brilliant geniuses who attempt to describe the ground of reality (or else to dismiss it), but because of their conceit or other distortions within themselves may as well be rabid foxes. Yet, I see people take them seriously because they are, like the geniuses themselves, dazzled by their intellects to the point of ignoring the unreliability of their whole person. It’s a myth to think ideas can be separated from the process of view formation, and some views can be rhetorically powerful in a way that makes combatting them intellectually almost impossible for most despite being entirely false. Thus, the only way to evaluate certain views is to understand the process of view formation and what the criteria are for epistemic reliability, avoiding the need to match genius with [an attempt at] genius. I have often found that I could have short circuited many hours of study of a person’s work if I had simply noticed their overall presence earlier on and realized “there is no way this person will come ultimately to the truth with this attitude”.