Is philosophy dead?

[Alex K]

I'm not saying that there aren't any pompous assholes promotimg bs in theoretical physics, but it is very rare to have actual know-nothings achieve anything that gets attention in the community, because to say anything that is accepted by your peers even as a proposition, you have to do the math, and the math is hard. People could be rightfully accused of propagatinge bullshit positions on speculative topics, but they still have to have a formidable technical foundation to say these things in the first place. Complete charlatans are therefore usually found out or at least marginalized quickly.

That's right to a degree, I'd say.  You can't just grab a Starbucks coffee and put an iPad in your man-satchel and get a physics degree.  However, it seems to me that much of theoretical physics is as wishy-thinking as the worst of philosophy.  Or it's just philosophy with some math to it.

I think there is a grossly distorted picture of what the majority of theoretical physicists actually do, because literally 99% of the media attention goes to people like Michio Kaku rambling about parallel universes. That is a problem because it misrepresents the nature of what is done by most people. Superstring Theory has also gotten a disproportionate amount of attention esp. in the US. I'll give you this, at the quantum gravity end of things, there is a problematic level of speculation going on because of lack of good data, which is kind of unavoidable given the subject. But still the people working in Superstring theory are mostly not of the waving with your arms and blathering about parallel universe types. Many of them try to advance the mathematical structure behind it, hoping to obtain a clearer picture of the possible consequences of the theory framework. One could call that philosophy with some math, but since the "some math" is among most advanced stuff that has ever been devised, I'd say that the intellectual rigour of that work is much above the "bad philosophy" we are talking about here. Where some of the public voices working in this field go off the rails is when they hype the natural-scientific significance of their results.