What I'd change about different philosophy fields

Discourage talking about 'religions' or 'faiths'; instead, talk about specific claims/hypotheses. Rename the field 'philosophy of religious claims', if that helps.

When we say 'religion', (a) it creates the false impression that claims must be a package deal, so we can't incrementally update toward one specific claim without swallowing the entire package; and (b) it encourages people to think of claims like theism in community-ish or institution-ish terms, rather than in hypothesis-ish terms.

IMO this promotes a particular form of religious belief / way of thinking about religion into "what religion is", in a way that seems wrong-headed to me. Not all religions are about how getting into heaven depends on whether or not you believed the right things, such that we should pay intense scrutiny to propositional claims.

Like, not all religions are about holy texts; a number of them would simply evaporate (or lose critical components) if you deleted all human memories and just left behind what they've written. How can you have Zen lineages or similar things (that rely on the intense transmission from human to human outside of texts) without memories? How can you tell whether or not someone is the rightful caliph without knowing their genealogy, which isn't part of the holy text? 

You and I rarely agree on much, but this looks like a great post! It highlights what an outsider like me would find befuddling about philosophical discourse, and your prescriptions, usually the weakest part of any argument, actually make sense. Huh.

A nit-pick:

Binding exceptionless commitments matter to understanding this complicated thing

I don't think "exceptionless commitments" is a useful category:
Any commitment is exceptionless within some domain.
No commitment is exceptionless over all domains (likely it's not even well-defined).

"exceptionless commitment" just seems like confusion/tautology to me:
So this commitment applies everywhere it applies? Ok.

Saying that it applies "without exception (over some set)" is no simpler than saying it applies "over some set". Either way, the set is almost certainly messy.

In practical terms, claiming a commitment is exceptionless usually means falling victim to an illusion of transparency: thinking that the domain is clear when it isn't (usually even to yourself).

E.g. "I commit never to X". Does this apply:
When I'm sleep deprived? Dreaming? Sleep-walking? Hallucinating? Drunk? How drunk? On drugs? Which drugs? Voluntarily? In pain? How much? Coerced? To what extent? Role-playing? When activity in areas of my brain is suppressed by electric fields? Which areas? To what degree? During/after brain surgery? What kind? After brain injury/disease? What kinds? Under hypnosis? When I've forgotten the commitment, believe I never made it, or honestly don't believe it applies? When my understanding of X changes? When possessed by a demon? When I believe I'm possessed by a demon? When replaced by a clone who didn't make the commitment? When I believe I'm such a clone?... (most of these may impact both whether I X, and whether I believe I am violating my commitment not to X)

For almost all human undertakings X, there are clear violations of "I commit to X", there are clear non-violations, and there's a complex boundary somewhere between the two. Adding "without exception" does not communicate the boundary.

I'm surprised that you discuss philosophy of religion. Why does it matter? Shouldn't the entire field just be trashed? (Aside from studying religion as a historical and social phenomenon, of course.)

Start instead thinking of ethics as a project of trying to piece together psychological models of this insanely complicated and messy thing, 'human morality'... Care less about the distinction between 'moral values' and other human values. There are certainly some distinguishing features, but these mostly aren't incredibly important or deep or joint-carving.

I think we also need sociological models, and, relatedly, the distinction between "morality" and "human values" is joint-carving. IMO "morality" is all about game [LW · GW] theory [LW · GW] masquerading [LW · GW] as values.

(Yes, it's possible that after subjective centuries of research, reflection, and self-improvement, the ideal equilibrium of our values would end up looking a lot simpler than our values do today. Humans aesthetically value simplicity, and we care about things like fairness and symmetry that can cause us to reflectively endorse simpler versions of some other things we care about.

But at the current development stage of the field of ethics, fixating on that possibility is probably mostly bad, because we're so far away from that ideal, and because it's so hard to predict which simpler values we'd end up with, if our values did end up any simpler. And it's entirely possible that our values will end up more complex on the axes we care about. Fixating on this idea could be hazardous for people who are too attached to finding the One True Simple Theory of Value.)

Stop picking a 'side' and then losing all interest in the parts of human morality that aren't associated with your 'side': these are all just parts of the stew, and we need to work hard to understand them and reconcile them just right, not sort ourselves into Team Virtue vs. Team Utility vs. Team Duty.

Is anyone serious actually doing this? My sense is that people on a Team believe that all of human morality can be seen from the perspective they've chosen (and that this is correct). This may result in convoluted transformations to fit particular pieces into a given approach. I haven't seen it involve dismissal of anything substantive. (Or when you say "loss of interest", do you only mean focusing elsewhere? Is this a problem? Not everyone can focus on everything.)

E.g. Utility-functions-over-histories can capture any virtue or duty (UFs might look degenerate in some cases, but do exist). The one duty/virtue of "judging according to consequences over histories" captures utility...

For this reason, I don't think "...parts of the stew..." is a good metaphor, or that the biological analogy fits.

Closer might be "Architects have long-standing controversies, but they don't look like 'Which is the right perspective on objects: things that take up a particular space, things that look a particular way, or things with particular structural properties?'."

I don't see it as a problem to focus on using one specific lens - just so long as you don't delude yourself into thinking that a [good simple approximation through your lens] is necessarily a [good simple approximation].

Once the desire for artificial simplicity/elegance is abandoned, I don't think it much matters which lens you're using (they'll tend to converge in the limit). To me, Team Utility seems the most natural: "You need to consider all consequences, in the broadest sense" straightforwardly acknowledges that things are a mess. However, so too would "You need to consider all duties (/virtues), in the broadest sense".

Omit the "...all... in the broadest sense", and you're in trouble on any Team.

2. Care less about human intuitions and concepts. Care more about the actual subject matter of metaphysics — ultimate, objective reality. E.g., only care about the concept 'truth' insofar as we have strong reason to think an alien would arrive at the exact same concept, because it's carving nature closer to its joints [LW · GW].

I think that metaphysics would progress better when it looks at the practical issues that various scientific fields have with the concepts with which they engage then when it tries to take a detached view from real world concerns.

Accept as a foundational conclusion of the field, ‘human values seem incredibly complicated and messy; they’re a giant evolved stew of competing preferences, attitudes, and feelings, not the kind of thing that can be captured in any short simple ruleset (though different rulesets can certainly perform better or worse as simplified idealizations).

I have not noticed mainstream ethicists assuming values are simple. "Ethics is value" is a rationalist belief , not a mainstream belief.

Binding exceptionless commitments matter to understanding this complicated thing; folk concepts like courage and honesty and generosity matter;

Ditto. Who ignores, or argues against courage and honesty?

Stop thinking of the project of ethics as ‘figure out which simple theory is True’.

I agree with that, it's time to look at hybridised theories.

Start instead thinking of ethics as a project of trying to piece together psychological models of this insanely complicated and messy thing, ‘human morality

I don't agree with that. For one thing, that's already a branch of psychology. For another, it's purely descriptive , and so gives up on improving ethics.

Ethics should be grounded in an understanding of what humans use it for, but should not be limited to it.

Christianity is not a default

Ok. But the idea that a religion is a set of claims is itself a generalisation from Christianity.

the field of epistemology to be much healthier if it spent less time developing theory, and more time applying theories and reporting back about how they perform in practice.

Only certain aspects of a theory can be tested that way.

You can objectively show that a theory succeeds or fails at making observations . It is is less clear whether an explanation succeeds in explaining, and less clear still whether a model succeeds in corresponding to the territory. The lack of a test for correspondence per se, ie. the lack of an independent "standpoint" from which the map and the territory can be compared, is the is the major problem in scientific epistemology. Its the main thing that keeps non-materialst ontology going.

The thing scientific realists care about is having an accurate model of reality, knowing what things are. If you want that, then instrumentalism is giving up something of value to you. So long as it s possible. If realistic reference is impossible , then theres no loss of value, but proving realistic reference is impossible isn't easy either.

we have immediate epistemic access to things we know for certain’ is a contentious, confusing hypothesi

Everyone knows that. Adopting it doesn't give you an easy dissolution of the Hard Problem anything like that. You can have a problem of qualia without the incorrigibility of qualia.

So you would turn metaphysics into physics. It exists already go to that deparment if that is more your forte.

Sure it is important to be strict and obvious about the epistemological special character of the objective of study. But contentious? Are you seriously saying that "You can not be sure how the world seems to you" has significant plausbility? The clues that there exists an outside world is imprinted in such impressions, the existence of a third person viewpoint can't be the foundation for the existence of the first person viewpoint.

Care less about human intuitions and concepts

3. Can you demonstrate a form of epistemology that works with no intuitions (unfounded assumptions) at all?

4. If not, can you show that philosoohy is actually using using more than he unavoidable minimum of intuitiins.?

. Make reductive, ‘third-person’ models of the brain central to metaphysics discussion.

The mind body problem is key to much of metaphysics.

If we had satisfactory reductive models of all prima facie mental phenomena, there would be no mind body problem in the first place, any more than there is a heat-atom problem. So what does this piece of advice mean?

1. Lower the bar on what counts as satisfactory explanation?

2. Or dismiss the existence of what you can't explain?

There's plenty of evidence of both in the rationalsphere. There's a reluctance to treat reductive explanation as something that is capable of failing, a tendency to treat reductionism as something you believe by faith rather than something that produces predictions that can be confirmed or not.

And also a level of popularity to illusionism.

Care more about the actual subject matter of metaphysics — ultimate, objective reality

Whether reality is entirely objective is a valid question in metaphysics. You seem t be in the grip of a strong intuition.