Agree with everything. I’m part of those people who can’t just directly do philosophy study.
I’m having this big confusion, if you clear out the confusion for me it would be really helpful. I don’t think you’ve ever said this but I drew the implication from your essay Dialog: Non-Consumption of Philosophy and from the short viewpoint for discussion of it that you posted here that philosophy comes first. Getting better at philosophy is important because any other project that you work on use philosophy in some important way or has some philosophical assumptions underlying it. When you start failing at your chosen project it could be because of errors due to bad philosophy. As your project becomes more and more sophisticated it is gonna become mostly about knowledge. And then good philosophy of knowledge is required otherwise good environment for knowledge creation won’t be present.
If this implication I’m guessing from the article is correct then won’t this problem occur when applying self help ideas to improve life? Or is it the case that self help ideas can be implemented in life without great philosophy as well because of some reason? Or maybe self help ideas can be applied to improve life and not being great at philosophy is not gonna be catastrophic to the project of applying self help to improve life?
If that is the case are there other stuff as well that one should also get good at in life where being bad at philosophy is not gonna be catastrophic? I know you mentioned learning to read and write and understand better as one of those things. It make sense to me that one can get decently good at these skills and after learning philosophy they’ll be able to catch even more systematic errors and thus become even better at these skills. But I’m wondering what should one do in the following example (this is personal to me) - going through college and getting a decent paying job (120K+ USD)? I could characterize this as a prerequisite for philosophy as well in the following way - you need a decent paying job so that you’re able to live comfortably and be able to take out time so that you have the time to learn philosophy. Does it make sense to clean up the mess in their life by getting a job first before getting better at philosophy?