PS: As to the few big questions like life after death there is nothing in philosophy that let's you tackle such questions.
For an example nearer to a hacker's heart, take the "brain-in-a-vat" concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
While science can't simulate this (well) for someone we can ask quite yet, I believe there's value in thinking about the implications of a fully simulated reality. This discussion was more or less started in the 1600's before we had any sort of technology that could remotely get us near to this. We still can't explore it yet, but it's a valid question and it's an important discussion on subjective reality.
I think it's very healthy and productive for people to ask and explore deeper questions about reality. To pretend that you can't study things without experiments is taking the scientific method. True, experimental evidence is required (in my mind and for most educated folks in our era) to confirm or disprove even the most well-founded theories. Still, there is a very abundant space of theories that are nearly impossible to prove. I feel there's value in discussing them, building conceptual models, and reasoning about them before science is ready.
PS: Think about how people talk about the landscape in a video game.
I think "brain in a vat" only makes a stronger case for mathematics. After all, in the end what else but information and it's transformation matters? Everything else can be stripped away. And stuck with pure information, I think we are talking maths.
Philosophy is bunk/useless/mumbojumbo because its obvious that <insert some random philosophical position>.
Take chapter 23 from the lecture. It is about "how to live life in the face of death" and possible ways to maximize "value". But it seems to dodge the question what is value in the face of death, which would be the only worthwhile question. Instead it dwells on ways to optimize value, which could be better done with solid economic theory (it is "how to invest actions and time to maximize results").
Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer. Will there be a judgment in afterlife, depending on our lives value? I don't think so. I think the "value" is strictly a subjective, individual thing, and therefore Philosophy can't help much with it. Perhaps what is useful is to get a better idea of the effects of our decisions (will people be harmed by my life style, that kind of stuff). But then again it seems "hard sciences" would be much better suited to answering that question than ancient poems and philosophy.
Even if you believe in a judgment after life, I guess then you should assign a probability to the kind of god you will encounter and align your actions accordingly. I just don't see how philosophy could help.
Except if you say mathematics is a special kind of philosophy - I could accept that. So in theory there could be useful philosophy, but I have never seen it (except for maths).
Take that lecture: I actually new I could safely skip most of the chapters because they are obviously irrelevant (like the one's about "is there a soul or not"). They are just WAY too shortsighted. I bet they don't have a proper definition of what a soul would be, to begin with.
Yeah, I agree with most of your points. I feel this is a little more true of modern philosophers I read-- there is less rigor than is warranted. I don't feel it invalidates the important parts (to me), which are the questions raised by their arguments/discussion.
Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer.
This lecture aside, (as I mentioned), I personally feel the value in philosophy is in the questions it raises and areas it explores, not specifically in any answers it provides. I also want those answers, but I don't look to philosophers to provide them. Sometimes they offer conceptual models that do help in scenarios where science isn't giving me a better one, but their "answers" are more like "suggestions" that may later give way to formal theories and empirical experiments once science catches up.
They are just WAY too shortsighted.
I think philosophers, as a whole, aren't short-sighted. I've always believed that the best philosophers explore different "assumption trees" in their quest for earnest questions. Certain assumptions have to be made in order to discuss much of anything at all in philosophy (e.g. we exist, etc) so some of the short-sightedness symptoms you sense might just be hidden in the assumptions of that particular discussion.
Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer. Will there be a judgment in afterlife, depending on our lives value? I don't think so. I think the "value" is strictly a subjective, individual thing, and therefore Philosophy can't help much with it.
you're already committing yourself to a philosophical position, that "value is strictly a subjective, individual thing." But that's precisely one of the philosophical issues that's under debate! After all, how could you decide whether value is subjective or not via the scientific method? You can't. There's no value finding experiment. The only way to proceed is philosophically.
If debate is useless, why are you debating me? ;) In any event, my proposition is that the question here -- the question of values and their subjectivity -- cannot be resolved scientifically. That doesn't imply that it's pointless to discuss. Your point about god is a good one, but it's also a philosophical one.
Note: I have studied maths myself. I am no Gauss or Erdös, but I guess I have my standards for the application of logic, and most of the time, philosophers don't meet them.
I was a very interested in philosophy in college, and if I had chosen anything other than CompSci, that probably would have become my major. I have a lot of respect for people exploring metaphysical questions. While it's easy to dismiss them as "non-practical", I can't think ill of people who try to seek underlying meaning behind the day-to-day sciences/morality/etc. and improve our understanding of truth and logic.
Those questions are really far harder than the ones I tackle day-to-day or even in my highest math/CS studies. I still feel like a wimp sometimes for not trying to attack "deeper" questions and paradoxes.
In a sense, philosophy asks questions that all the sciences, ultimately, try to get us closer to answering. I don't think there's as much glory in asking the questions, but there's still a whole lot of them to ask.
That being said, I understand your position entirely. Had I become an engineer without being introduced to philosophy first, everything there (sans the logic/fallacy discussions) would seem impractical. Now I see it as a fundamental that helped to start most of the major branches of science, and keeps growing discussion around some of the tougher problems we've yet to solve.