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lukeprog comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
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I think that most people just don't believe that philosophy has any value. I used to believe that it didn't, gradually concluded that it did, but then gradually concluded that yes, 99.9% of it really is worthless such that even reading contemporary famous people or summaries of their arguments (though not discussing such arguments with your epistemic peers who are familiar with them, and not reading pre-WWII philosophers) really is a waste of time.
I agree that 99.9% of philosophy is very close to worthless. Its signal-to-noise ratio is much lower than in the sciences or in mathematics.
This brings to mind Eliezer's comment that "...if there’s any centralized repository of reductionist-grade naturalistic cognitive philosophy, I’ve never heard mention of it."
But reductionist-grade naturalistic cognitive philosophy is probably an even larger sub-field of philosophy than the formal epistemology I mentioned above. Names that come immediately to mind are: John Bickle, Pat & Paul Churchland, Paul Thagard, Tim Schroeder, William Calvin, Georg Northoff, Thomas Metzinger.
There's some good philosophy out there. Unfortunately, you normally only encounter it after you've spent quite a while studying bad philosophy. Most people are introduced to philosophy through Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel, and might never suspect a neurophilosopher like John Bickle exists.
Which reminds me of the old Bertrand Russell line:
Having been one of the exceptions, I wonder if there are enough exceptions to create critical mass for philosophy to take off, or if we will always be condemned (in a good sense) to merge with fields that enjoy precision, such as cog psy, chemestry, physics, maths, neuroscience, etology, evo psy and so on.........
Not that I mind being partly neuro/psycho/evo........ it's just that there are, summing all these fields, too many papers to read in a lifetime.........
I think that the state of the field is still something of a barrier to the sort of people who would be of most benefit to it. I personally dropped my double major in philosophy after becoming fed up with how much useless and vacuous material I was being required to cover.