I'm not sure if it takes professional philosophers though. It perhaps needs visionary, deeply reflective domain experts. You might call that philosophy and therefore the person, in part, a philosopher, but it's not in the original spirit.
But I agree we can benefit from some "philosophical products" to enhance our thinking. The common sense framework sometimes sends us into a corner and dead end from which we can only come out via philosophy.
I think it's entirely in the original spirit. Read the conclusion of the post:
> The lesson is that they are you. Whenever you hear someone ranting about something you take for granted as wonderful and praiseworthy, and you're wondering why they don't leave well enough alone so we can all get back to our incestuous cheerleading, just remember: we went from the Dark Ages to our reeeeasonably enlightened society today by questioning our most cherished beliefs.
> So keep questioning them.
The entire point is that there's nothing specially reserved to them, and that instead of dismissing philosophy, you and I and the rest of us need to engage in it, by questioning things, and looking for the second-order, and the non-obvious, and the non-practical.
This is a bit of a bait and switch or motte and bailey.
Now you're arguing that people should do philosophy.
The original argument was that we need philosophers, as in we need to take professionally trained philosophy graduates more seriously and bring them into the software industry so they can help us make better software.
The first is probably useful, everyone benefits from a broad range of knowledge and activity. Including sport, novels, humanities, philosophy, natural sciences, computer science, people management and psychology, etc. It doesn't necessarily mean we need graduates of all these fields in the software shop.
I suspect part of this push comes from a certain resentment from philosophy majors that their expertise is not valued much and they can't find jobs.
But for all but the richest places like Google, it is totally ridiculous that a software company could employ philosophers and pay their salaries for coming up with publishable articles according to the academic standards they learned at university.
Most software places are already annoyed how unpractical and far removed from the ground the CS graduates are compared to day to day practice. Them hiring philosophers is completely out of the question.
When I read philosophers takes on AI for example (eg Precht's new book), it's painful. It's as if their philosophy is still stuck at decades ago. They are asking the wrong questions, answer them clumsily, not using mathematical tools right or misunderstanding them, taking simple and well-understood things to be profound new insights and thinking that something is simple when it's actually really hard.
Philosophers (as in these actual real-life current humans) tend to invent problems for themselves completely orthogonal to what would actually be interesting and complex to investigate, probably out of fear that they are not technically adept/trained enough to engage with the details.
There's a component of tech-envy here that makes this type of discussion quite heated and tribal.
You misread Steve Yegge's post and you're accusing me of a bait and switch. Just read the post.
> as in we need to take professionally trained philosophy graduates more seriously and bring them into the software industry so they can help us make better software.
Really? Where does it say that, or anything like it? You're reacting to something you made up - not something that the post actually said.
It doesn't demand professional philosophers anywhere. It demands "great thinkers" and five of the eight people listed as examples aren't professional philosophers.
It is directed at telling the audience "you might be" a great thinker, so go to it.
This whole thread you're reacting to your imagined resentful philosophy major instead of taking the time to comprehend the post on its own terms.
But I agree we can benefit from some "philosophical products" to enhance our thinking. The common sense framework sometimes sends us into a corner and dead end from which we can only come out via philosophy.