Most of what the academy produces is boring. I will go further and say that most of it is simply a waste of resources. It was a waste of educational resources training some for 30 years to write the boring paper, it was a waste of their time to research its topic, and it was a waste of trees to print the thing. There are many reasons why the academy produces so much boring trash, notably publish or perish and difficulties associated with quantifying academic quality into a KPI (also replication and related issues, but that's beyond what I'm talking about here). One that I want to discuss here is the misuse of the philosophical armchair, including its main tool, intuition pumps.
Here's how I think the paper writing process should go, crudely speaking. You should start in the philosophical armchair, which doesn't have to be an armchair, it's just wherever you do your best thinking i.e. 'theorising'. Ask yourself an interesting and preferably significant question. Something like, "why are good people divided by politics and religion?" Or "why are rates of antidepressant use increasing even as people have better than ever?" Or again, "what's the optimal way to design a Carbon tax for Australia?" These are big, interesting, important questions. Next step: stay in your armchair and think through as much of the answer as you can. You'll quickly have to make some assumptions, but your initial assumptions will be pretty uncontroversial, things like "people prefer to buy cheaper things ceteris paribus". I suspect you'll get very far in the armchair before you come to an assumption that you feel really uncomfortable with, like "based on my back of the envelop calculations, a $10/tonne price on Carbon would result in declines in carbon usage of 10% per annum for the first decade". At this point, you've got to get out of the armchair and go do some empirics. You might already be able to write several papers though, interesting ones. Once your empirics have turned up some more or less solid facts to replace your assumptions, you can publish them, then sit back down and work through some more theory until you once again come to some dubious assumptions that you need to test, at which point you go back to empirics and so on. This is basic scientific method: theory > test > theory > test etc. etc.
What goes wrong in the academy is that empiricists have an incredibly low bar when it comes to what constitutes a 'dubious' assumptions and thus expend immense resources asking questions we basically already know the answer to, while philosophers can't be bothered doing empirics (all that grunt work is unbecoming I guess) and so at times venture off into a la la land of conjectures stated as fact rather than hypothesis (if that).
Let me give you some examples. Years ago I was working for a professor of public policy doing work on leadership ethics. He tasked me with reviewing the literature on this topic coming out of business schools. I read maybe 300 papers. I would say 3 of them were good. Some of the papers I read where immense empirical studies with samples of 3000 executives and the like concluding staggeringly boring things like "leaders who behave with integrity engender greater trust in their subordinates". No shit.
On the flip side, we have a study of Hello Kitty as a form of 'Kawaii' ('cute') diplomacy and soft power on the part of Japan, with this statement: "Kawaii diplomacy ultimately teases us with the idea of Japan as victim, rather than as perpetrator". You can only make this shit up. It sounds like an empirical statement, but it's not a testable hypothesis, and its basically just pure conjecture. If it's possible to respond to a philosophical statement with "does it?" or some such, then it's time to stop philosophising and do some empirics. In this case, the author left that point behind hundreds of miles ago. I can't imagine that most people working on Japanese strategy even know what Hello Kitty is.
There is a prominent trend in the humanities of saying things in a literary way to give them an air of significance when they are just thought bubbles. No wonder their relevance and credibility is on the decline. I recently came across a doozy of a title: "This contentious storm: an ecocritical and performance history of King Lear". I'll just leave that turd there to steam.
This issue is particularly raw for me because wellbeing research - my area - is chock full of it. Empiricists have been working for nearly 40 years on the topic of happiness and still can't quite decide whether spinal cord injury makes you depressed. Part of the reason why is that they don't have enough theoretical depth to realise that their measurement instrument is broken. Meanwhile, my philosophy colleagues spend most of the their time arguing over the definition of wellbeing rather than the much more interesting question of how to get it. If they asked the latter, they might actually solve the definitional debate. I suspect the reason why they don't is in part that philosophers have ever found it more fun to dance around a totem poll than simply knock it over and move on.
The disillusion is strong in this post.
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