I can't believe how difficult it is to convince some people that some useful things come out of mainstream philosophy. To me, it's a trivial point.

If it's not immediately obvious how an argument connects to a specific implementable policy or empirical fact, default is to covertly interpret it as being about status.

Since there are both good and bad things about philosophy, we can choose to emphasize the good (which accords philosophers and those who read them higher status) or emphasize the bad (which accords people who do their own work and ignore mainstream philosophy higher status).

If there are no consequences to this choice, it's more pleasant to dwell upon the bad: after all, the worse mainstream philosophy does, the more useful and original this makes our community; the better mainstream philosophy does, the more it suggests our community is a relatively minor phenomenon within a broader movement of other people with more resources and prestige than ourselves (and the more those of us whose time is worth less than Eliezer's should be reading philosophy journals instead of doing something less mind-numbing).

I think this community is smart enough to avoid many such biases if given a real question with a truth-value, but given a vague open question like "Yay philosophy - yes or no?" of course we're going to take the side that makes us feel better.

I think the solution is to present specific insights of Quinean philosophy in more depth, which you already seem like you're planning to do.