[slumberdisrupt]

Where exactly do you suppose philosophy went wrong? In any case I've heard this assertion from Neil deGrasse Tyson for years; it's philistine. The phrasing of the assertion totally gives away its limits: what is the real world, and who else but a philosopher is equipped to even ask that question? Then the question then becomes its opposite: where have the natural scientists gone who are interested in the real world?

[techno_tsar]

The assertion is not grounded in reality at all. It’s a common myth among people who live in a STEM echo chamber. Personally, I don’t know why people who haven’t even done more than a cursory overview of philosophy feel entitled to make meta philosophical claims. My only explanation is that it’s a way to defend a dogma of naive scientism. Why? I don’t know, probably the same reasons why people cling onto religion.

[slumberdisrupt]

I brought up Tyson because I watched a video recently where this guy argues that this whole perspective is an especially American phenomenon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD0S1rH8AiE

I'm sympathetic to this even if this lethargic attitude goes back to the religious period as you say. We can at least find the roots of it in the Enlightenment with Newton's "hypotheses non fingo".