When I was first getting into philosophy for the first year or so I was convinced I was brilliant because I was coming up with all these great ideas that people loved to talk about but then I realized that it was all addressed (largely by the existentialists and postmodernists, but also the German idealists and Plato) decades, centuries or millennia ago. Now when I have what seems to be a unique idea I spend a while googling different formulations of it to make sure it's truly original.

This isn't to say that philosophy has already asked and answered every possible question, just that the most obvious versions of these (obvious for the kinds of people who would bother doing this in the first place, i.e. relatively intelligent people) probably have good discussions going on and that the philosophy of those questions is more about joining that discussion and adding your perspective (if it's new) than about formulating original paradigms and meta-narratives for solving them, because that's been done already for a lot of questions.

> Now when I have what seems to be a unique idea I spend a while googling different formulations of it to make sure it's truly original.

The problem is that you often can't really find this through Google, unless you know the name we've given it (or happen to phrase your question in almost the same way someone else did on StackExchange). That's why it is so valuable to have a good human search engine to talke to (say, a professor who knows their field really well).

For me I know the fundamentals well enough that I can kind of winnow it down to a couple movements that would be good to start looking around in, but I'm not sure if it's a strategy you can use when you're just breaking in. You first have to know the history, then you can determine how original your ideas are.

I've read/skimmed a ways in. I'd say your judgement of it was sound. There's been a lot of, "wait, you know this is a whole thing, right? [reads a little farther] Huh, guess not." More than you might expect from the introduction, in fact—it keeps stumbling against the edges of those sorts of well-explored topics across a surprisingly broad range.

I'm pretty sure the author is in fact well versed in various philosophical traditions, but intentionally chooses not to directly engage them (in the course of the main text) because the project is not intended to be a discursive philosophical text but rather a sort of self-help book, for lack of a better term.

He's not trying to talk to the philosophers. He's trying to talk to STEM people. So he chooses his writing style and terminology to that end.