Oh I doubt I'd be surprised, but that's more a problem of the people coming out of Philosophy 101 than the discipline itself.
No, seriously: the assumption that others will share one's philosophical intuitions is rampant in contemporary philosophy. Go read all the angry papers written in response to the work of experimental philosophers, or the works of the staunch intuitionists like George Bealer and Ernest Sosa.
The field as a whole (or rather, some within it, to be more accurate) takes these issues seriously as a matter of debate, yes, but arguing over controversial claims is the entire point of philosophy so that's no mark against it. It's also a radically different position from the strong claim you've advanced here that the field itself is broken, which is nonsense to anyone familiar with modern moral philosophy and ethics/meta-ethics and is dangerously close to a strawman argument.
To say the problem is "rampant" is to admit to a limited knowledge of the field and the debates within it.
You would be surprised to learn how often I talk to Less Wrongers who have been corrupted by a few philosophy classes and therefore engage in the kind of philosophical analysis which assumes that their intuitions are generally shared.
Despite being downvoted in this comment, I think Eliezer is generally right that reading too much mainstream philosophy — even "naturalistic" analytic philosophy — is somewhat likely to "teach very bad habits of thought that will lead people to be unable to do real work."
Oh I doubt I'd be surprised, but that's more a problem of the people coming out of Philosophy 101 than the discipline itself. Frege and Bertrand Russell put most of the metaphysical extravagances to bed (in the Anglo-American tradition at least) with the turn towards formal logic and language, and the modern-day analytic tradition hasn't ever looked back.
As it stands the field has about as much to do with mind-body dualism or idealism (or their respective toolkits) as theoretical physics. This goes for ethics and meta-ethics, and no serious writer in that topic would entertain Cartesian dualism or Kantian deontology or any other such in a trivial form. The idea of contingent, historical, contextually-sensitive ethics is widely recognized and is indeed a topic of lively discussion.
For one thing, we would never assume that people of all kinds would share our intuitions.
You write this like it's an original insight and not a problem that has been taken seriously by every philosopher who ever wrote seriously about ethics or meta-ethics.
I'm interested to know how this methodology is supposed to diverge from existing methods of science in any useful way. We've had a hypothesis-driven science since (at least) Popper and this particular approach seems to offer no practical alternative; at best we're substituting one preferred type of non-empirical criteria for selection (in this case, a presumed ability to calculate he metaprobabilities that we'd have to assume for establishing likelihoods of given hypotheses, a matter which is itself controversial) for the currently-existing criteria, along the lines of elegance, simplicity, and related aesthetic criteria which currently encompass inference to the best explanation.
With regards to the above metaprobabilities, how are we to justify these assumptions with regards to epistemic uncertainty? Popper and Hume have already shown us that, for all intents and purposes, we can't justify induction and Solomonoff is no realizable way around that. I don't see how substituting one mode of inference, based on a set of assumptions that are given no justification whatsoever, provides a superior or even a reasonably-supportable alternative to current methods of science.
This is undoubtedly a useful heuristic for establishing confirmation of what has been observed, but then again so is the research structure we already possess; to claim that such an unsupported and unjustified methodology as outlined in this article is in any way establishing "truth" above and beyond current methods of confirming hypotheses is to overstate the case to such a degree that it cannot be taken seriously.
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You would be surprised to learn how often I talk to Less Wrongers who have been corrupted by a few philosophy classes and therefore engage in the kind of philosophical analysis which assumes that their intuitions are generally shared.
Despite being downvoted in this comment, I think Eliezer is generally right that reading too much mainstream philosophy — even "naturalistic" analytic philosophy — is somewhat likely to "teach very bad habits of thought that will lead people to be unable to do real work."
Also could you expand on this as I didn't catch it before the edit?
It's not obvious what the "bad habits" might be, and what they are bad relative to. This reads as a claim that would be very hard to defend at face value, and without clarification it reads like a throwaway attack not to be taken seriously.