Many of those problems are of the "seriously, who cares?" sort! For example: "How many straws can you remove from a bale before it's not longer a bale?", which has the answer "Words are not meant to be numerically precise so stop inventing problems"
This is the new anti-intellectualism. Highly technical people displaying complete unwillingness to engage with philosophical problems, understand why they are problems, why they are difficult, and how their first-pass solution is massively flawed.
I don't disagree with this in general principle, but "how many straws can you remove from a bale" points pretty transparently to the failed mapping between our black-and-white language and the shades-of-grey world. It's a shallow insight and to refer to it as an "unsolved problem" feels very strange to me. What depth am I missing?
Not anti-intellectualism at all, and not even anti-philosophy.
If I'm anti- anything, I am against those philosophers who refuse to make disprovable assertions and instead use rhetoric and non-formal logic to make their points.
The reason is simple, their stuff comes and goes. They contradict each other -- and often do not accept scientific fact simply because they do not understand it.
Philosophy was once the only way to investigate some particularly hard problems, such as "where do we come from?" or "what is the mind?". With recent scientific and technological advances, we actually got some fact-based answers there. Cosmology, standard model, evolutionary biology, neuroscience are evidence-based sciences that override, and often contradict, most philosophical speculations of the past. A lot of philosophers simply do not have the domain knowledge anymore.
I know that some argue that those sciences are philosophy, but, frankly, that's stretching reality.
No, that's just the very bad problem. Normaly we'd use several different words to describe various amount of hay.
This is problem is on par with "have you already stopped to beat your wife?"
Pseudo-intelectualism is just another form of anti-intelectualism.
Exactly. I forgot which exact essay but Paul Graham has a great point about most controversies in philosophy being an argument over imprecise definitions. Exceptionally intelligent, young would-be philosophers see this and thus choose not to study philosophy, leading to the current situation where we have few incisive professional academic philosophers. If it's worth anything, I feel I learned more about how to live a good life from reading Graham's essays than in three semesters of studying academic philosophy in college.
Aside: paraphrasing another answer, you can remove all of the straws from a bale, and you're left with a bale of zero straws.
I guess 'all the straws' is as many as you can remove. If you removed any more than that, you would have to put some back to return to bale of zero straws.
