During that time period, the logical positivism movement dominated in philosophy. Logical positivists thought only logic and science were useful, and prior philosophy was subjective bullshit that nobody could prove. Logical positivism is now considered debunked and dead in analytic philosophy.

Logical positivists were extremists and really into abstract math(s). It's not surprising that Russell enjoyed it but the four biologists from 1949 would find it useless. That says very little about whether philosophy of science, which found problems in logical positivism, would help science today.

In many ways, STEM bros who think only science and mathematics are useful—and philosophy is subjective bullshit—are logical positivists. And that's why some humanities education would help, especially philosophy of science.

This is laughable. Tech bros are nothing like logical positivists.Please read autobiographies by A. J. Ayer and others to see what they really thought about the world. The Vienna Circle members were leftists who actively opposed nationalism, fascism, and clerical conservatism.

Tech bros are a mixture of wannabe John Galts, longtermists (a “philosophy” with deep pseudoscientific roots), and more-or-less open authoritarians or worse. All scientists I know thoroughly despise their “philosophies”.

Also, the claim that logical positivists thoughts only science and mathematics were useful and philosophy a subjective BS is as wrong as it gets. They were philosophers doing philosophy, who had strong opinions how philosophy itself should be done. They only thought of metaphysics as meaningless.

Logical positivists were philosophers who birthed analytic philosophy, which didn't previously exist. "Prior philosophy" is an oversimplification, but topics outside its scope include metaphysics, theology, ethics, aesthetics, and the whole category of continental philosophy.

Analytic philosophy predates logical positivism - it started with Frege, Russell and Moore, none of whome were logical positivists. Logical positivists didn't think aesthetics or ethics were outside the scope of philosophy (they did work on both) but outside the domain of knowledge. Big difference.

Here Russell appears to be defending logical positivism. (I did not claim that they thought aesthetics and ethics were outside of philosophy. These were well established within philosophy.)

Where do you see that in the article? I see the article questioning both the idea of verificationism and the wholesale rejection of metaphysics.

What I meant is that they thought aesthetics and ethics were outside of the meaningful, not outside of philosophy. They thought philosophy outside of narrow topics were meaningless.

I said "STEM bro", not tech bro, and I'm referring to the characteristic of most STEM people thinking that their topic of interest can be widely applied and solve problems in other fields, not their politics. I'm in tech, and even liberals are AI boosters who think generative AI can everyone's job.

I am a STEM person in STEM and I know of no other STEM people around me who think any of that, and I doubt that you do, either. It is only some (albeit too many) students who think AI can help them avoid learning without consequences.

You'd be surprised. I know an experienced ex-FAANG software engineer who thinks LLMs can be used to generate legal arguments for a lawyer but it just needs to be reviewed. It works really well for full stack web development coding, what they do, but not for software eng outside of that, what I do.

I was refering to your claim that "most STEM people thinking that their topic of interest can be widely applied and solve problems in other fields". I don't know any of my colleagues who thinks THAT. As for LLMs, they are a tool. People are still learning its limitations, sometimes the hard way.

When I was a student, a chemistry student complained to me that their philosophy prof failed them on their essay, because they used chemistry to argue philosophy. They said chemistry > philosophy, so their prof was an idiot. They were just a student, so maybe it's just the physics/maths/CS adults.