Philosopher who acts

I personally prefer being called a 'philosopher' rather than an 'engineer'. While the role of a philosopher may vary depending on the definition of philosophy, under my definition, philosophy is not any specific content but the 'activity of thinking' itself.

I believe there are two ways philosophy manifests itself: constructing ideal theories and applying them to the world, or solving existing problems in the world at a philosophical level.

As someone heavily influenced by the Tao Te Ching, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game, I naturally prefer the latter approach. I believe it's important to blend the world of thought and the real world, preventing them from becoming too distant in the process of philosophy.

Previously, I thought philosophy meant studying the philosophical ideas and history of renowned philosophers like Nietzsche, Marx, and Confucius. However, lately, I've come to think that we shouldn't define philosophy as any specific content or ideology beyond the 'activity of thinking'. The moment we define our philosophy as a set of ideologies, we start viewing the world through that frame, building Platonic models based on a poor understanding of the world. I think such models are vulnerable to other real-world facts not considered when building them, making them difficult to sustain long-term.

To address this, I'm constantly striving to understand the framework through which I perceive the world - while writing books, investing, doing business, and taking classes. After all, we need to understand the boundaries of our perspective to move beyond it. In this process, Elon Musk's first principles thinking is very helpful. The realization that many things we take for granted didn't originally exist but emerged over the past few centuries, and that I too can create such things, provides great motivation.