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Alicorn comments on Causation as Bias (sort of) - Less Wrong
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I don't think so. If I had so poor an opinion of philosophy, I wouldn't be trying to get my PhD in the subject.
A PhD-level philosopher knows where to look, and so expected value of the answer they can find is high enough, as opposed to the situation for a random educated person. This is very unlike the situation in other sciences, where even few weeks' study can give you a lot of genuine insight in how things work, likely answering your questions if the answers are known and not awfully deep. With philosophy, you are going to be led in circles for years, emerging more confused than at the start, with a few simple answers and likely a serious memetic illness.
The good answers in philosophy are easy enough to find. We just offload them onto other disciplines for easy reference. For instance, once we'd gotten a good handle on natural philosophy, we started putting bits of it into new disciplines like 'physics'.
Complaining about not finding easy answers in academic philosophy is like complaining that your R&D department hasn't manufactured anything this week.
You suggested that 'studying philosophy' was not a "good use of one's time". Given how much we've already gone around the whole 'philosophy is useless' meme, I'd expect such a comment to just get downvotes from the at least a dozen or so philosophers kicking around these parts.
When was the last time another discipline was spun out of philosophy?
psychology, a century ago?
I can't make heads or tails of your first couple sentences. As for the last, what's your evidence for that claim and what is a "memetic illness"?
"What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?" describes the problem with memetic illness: you start believing some of the nonsense invented by philosophers. This is not to say that all philosophers invent nonsense, but some excel at it.
Expected value of seeking an answer in a given pool of info is the estimation of how good the answer you're going to get, given what you know before actually looking. If you are asking a person on the street a question about quantum mechanics, you don't expect a good answer, even though there is still a chance that the person will turn out to be a physicist. The answer to the same question asked at a physics conference will have higher expected value, even though you are not guaranteed to chance upon a knowledgeable person. Likewise when the person you are asking a question is yourself, with a library to study.