Some people say you should treat the ideas as having emerged from some platonic space and it doesn't matter who went into that space and plucked them out, you should judge the ideas on their merit alone.

I think the opposite, Timothy C May and Noam Chomsky both sound like total douchebags in real life, I'm happy to ignore anything they've said based solely on the fact that they seem like total douchebags. Other people who don't seem to be total douchebags have put the same general ideas in other words, I'm happy to take their phrasing instead.