I'm not sure why you think "philosophy" and "practically irrelevant jibberjabber" are synonymous. Or maybe you just think that's what commenters are implying? T

I'm not sure why you think "philosophy" and "practically irrelevant jibberjabber" are synonymous. Or maybe you just think that's what commenters are implying? That's certainly not what I was trying to imply. Scientific thinking can be super practical, and it need not involve meta thinking for everyone that uses it. But there absolutely are philosophical discussions that remain of relevance today, discussions that some part of the scientific community ought to be having. Besides, academic science has become more formalized than it used to be, not less. People are running the algorithm badly IMO not because they are trying to be philosophical or eschew the previous fundamentals of science, but because they lack a deep understanding of what they are attempting to implement. The guardrails that were put up to try and force things to be more formalized have backfired into becoming a bad crutch for shitty science. It's also not surprising that certain metrics and incentive structures would break in a career environment where resources have become scarce. Things implemented in good faith 25 years ago may not have even been a bad idea at the time, but they definitely were reacting to a different era with different job expectations and different open questions. Anyway, I definitely agree with most of your broader concerns but I'm not sure if I'm misinterpreting your statement about philosophy. In my experience present grad students are hyperfixated on highly unimportant (from a training perspective) technical details. When I've been around PhD students chatting about science at lunch or house parties or whatever I more often hear discussions at the level of abstraction of mouse perfusion techniques than philosophy of science. It is certainly theoretically possible to have too many eggheads, but that's been the opposite of my experience.