Other: I often find these sorts of questions useful as a way of clarifying my own understanding of related subjects, and I think clarifying understanding can lead to pragmatic value even in the absence of an agreed-upon answer.

That is, sometimes it is useful to go from "I am confused about X" to "there are three possibilities (X1, X2, X3) and I know what each one entails but I don't know how to choose among them", even though the question remains equally unanswered.

This is similar to your "interesting debate" option, I suppose, but different enough that I felt uncomfortable picking it.

"Uninteresting", but perhaps only due to Sturgeon's law.

Philosophical problems as a whole are a mix of all 3, and I don't know enough about modern philosophy to empirically determine which answer reigns in the "most." Voted "Other."

I voted for "Interesting questions", because a slight majority of the polled questions fall in that category to me, and that matches the literal meaning of "most". But when 30-40% of the key questions of a discipline look "Uninteristing", it is not a great endorsement for it.

There probably is a gigantic bias to the "Uninteresting" amount of responders. If you find those uninteresting, you wouldn't get here in the first place. So, given now it is about 25% "Uninteresting" I'd guess more than 50% LWers are of that opinion.

Other: unanswered philosophical questions are about evenly distributed between interesting questions that will soon be matters of engineering, confused and revealing questions, and historical nonsense. I produced easy examples of all three categories without trying.

Uninteresting artifacts of history. But some (moral realism or not) are vitally important to figuring out effective social engineering.

But I'm in a minority in this community in thinking that social engineering is desirable (other than as an inevitable effect of physical engineering/ technological progress).

ADBOC with talking about "most," so I voted other. But maybe I should have voted "Uninteresting."

Other: Philosophical problems primarily serve to encourage creative thinking and asking more abstract questions about the world. Philosophical debates primarily serve to remind us that intelligent, well-meaning people can disagree about pretty fundamental things, so we should tread carefully when assuming our "opponents" are idiots or monsters.

This depends a great deal on both which branch of philosophy we're talking about & who is evaluating that particular branch's usefulness.

For example, I find developments in logics, philosophy of science, & general epistemology to be of great interest, and I perceive all three topics to be advancing (listed in order of priority as that goes) as the years go by. I'm sure others feel differently.

It would be hard to get past the fact that, especially between the different branches of philosophy, there is a great deal of "philosophy of language" that is or must be done just to get at what anyone's talking about. But that is, to some extent, true of any field with a technical language.

So I guess all four answers make sense in some sense.

This book makes the argument that (paraphrased, and put into LW terms) most philosophy is uninteresting because their curiosity doesn't seek to annihilate itself. Instead of asking "how can we actually improve our knowledge?" they bicker over the definition of JTB.

The tools and insights of philosophy can be useful when you try to answer the practical questions, but most controversial topics are controversial because there are a lot of wrong ideas there, not because it's a hot new empirical question (Higgs: does it exist? If so, how big is it?).