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DaFranker comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - LessWrong
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I think the criticism is indeed pointed towards the scientific "field" of Philosophy, AKA people working in Philosophy Departments or similar.
I doubt many here are targeting the activity of philosophy, nor the people who would identify as "philosophers", but rather specifically towards Philosophy academics with a specialization in Philosophy, who work in a Philosophy Department and produce Philosophy papers to be published in a Journal of Philosophical Writings (and possibly give the occasional Philosophy class or seminar, depending on the local supply of TAs).
IME, a large fraction of real, practicing philosophers are actively publishing papers on arXiv or equivalent.
Did you mean academic field?
You mean professional phi. bad, amateur phil good. Or not so much amaterur phil as the sort of sciencey-philly cross-disciplinary stuff done by EY and Robin and Botrom and Tegmark do. Maybe. But actually some of it is quite bad for reasons which are evident if you know phil.
Yes, my bad.
A good professional study of philosophy itself is to me indistinguishable from someone doing metaresearch, i.e. figuring out how to make the standards of the scientific method even better and the techniques of all scientists more efficient. IME, this is not what the majority of academics working in Philosophy Departments are doing.
OTOH, good applied philosophy, i.e. the sort of stuff you do once you've studied the result of the above metaresearch, is basically just doing science. In other words, doing research in any field that is not about how to do research.
So yes, in a sense, most academics categorized as "professional phil" are less good than most academics categorized as "amateur phil" who mainly work in other disciplines. The latter are also almost exclusively "sciencey-philly cross-disciplinary".
I'm guessing we both agree that non-academic-nor-scientist amateur philosophers are less likely to produce meaningful research than any of the above, and yet is pretty much the stereotype that most people (in the general north-american population) assign to "philosophers". Then again, the exclusion of "scientists" from that category feels like begging the question.
Is the "so" meant to imply that that follows from the forefgoing? I don't see how it does.