It doesn't work great with texts. Any communication is done with background idea of a receiver. If you try to prove math theorem to someone, you need to start with some assumptions about level of math literacy of those who will read/listen your proof. If your assumptions are wrong, you either will tire your readers with trivialities, or will prove them nothing, because they cannot comprehend your argument.

Authors of texts make assumptions like this. If you do not assume that their assumptions about your preparedness for topic are too high, then you have a little chance to figure it out while reading text. Reading a math text you probably will figure out that text is too high level for you. But if you read philosophy it is more probably that you find author to be a stupid one with stupid ideas.

> The important is to respect what you read and give it a chance to convince you.

It works great with interactive dialogue, but with texts you need not just give a chance, but make all the efforts the need to make to convince you, because book cannot make any efforts. The more efforts to do to prove the author to be right, the more you would get from the book. In dialogue you can expect your opponent to make all the hard work to prove his point. If your opponent is smarter than you are. If he is not, than to get maximum from dialogue you'd better help your opponent sometimes. A book is a stupid opponent, a book have ideas but lacks intelligence to defend them.

> We are conditioned to think that books and their writers and their roles and society standing are an implicit guarantee of quality or validity of their arguments.

The goal is not to prove the author right or wrong. The goal is to get maximum from reading. If you read book, assuming that the author is smarter than he really was, and you spent a long hours to prove him wrong, arguing with more intelligent ideas than stupid author really had, it means that you have invented some clever looking ideas, and then prove them wrong. That was not obviously wrong ideas: if they were you wouldn't spent hours to refute them. So you have got more wisdom from book, than the author had in his mind. It is a great outcome, isn't it?

Alternatively, if you found interpretation of text, that cleverer than author meant, and you prove this interpretation to be true, than it is even more great outcome. Does it really matters now what the author really meant by his text?