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pragmatist comments on A reply to Mark Linsenmayer about philosophy - Less Wrong
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Philosophy is a pretty varied discipline. It's worth distinguishing philosophy of religion and ethical theory (which, if I'm not mistaken, are the main fields you have researched) from, say, philosophy of science, to which your criticisms don't really apply, and which, I would argue, has been responsible for a number of genuinely valuable advances in recent years.
Look, for instance, at the abstracts from a random issue of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (the premier journal in the field), and tell me if the majority seem to be of the kind that are susceptible to your worries. As a suggestive illustration, here are the titles of all the articles in the latest issue:
Incidentally, the BJPS has an Editor's Choice section, where certain articles are made freely available, and which I highly recommend.
Yup. The most frequently useful parts of philosophy of science are sometimes called "formal epistemology," which I picked out as a particularly useful corner of philosophy in my very first post on Less Wrong.
Another example of useful philosophy is a tiny corner of ethics which works on the problem of "moral uncertainty." Proposed solutions in that domain generally aren't developed with AI in mind, but we (at the Singularity Institute) are going to steal them anyway to see whether they help with Friendly AI theory.