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Most of academia works this way outside of the sciences. I suspect a couple of things lead to this.
First, most of these topics are literally useless outside of the academic world. Nobody who isn’t majoring in a particular branch of the humanities gives any thought to the subject. And to an extent, they’ve always more or less been something like what they are now — useless subjects studied by essentially nerds who are just really into the subject. And much like there’s no need for serious rigor when a bunch of Star Trek nerds discuss the Trek canon, there’s no real rigor in discussions about English literature. (This is somewhat better in a history class which still requires that a description match up with primary sources) if Shakespeare has a queer reading, it can be anything you need it to be. Nobody outside the subject is going to interrupt because seriously, who else is reading these papers?
The second is that because these subjects are useless and worthless, nobody who is smart really chooses to do them. If you’re a smart individual looking to study something, you’d go toward things that actually matter. Studying physics can unlock the secrets of the universe. Chemistry can let you invent some new materials to solve real life problems. Accounting can be used in business. So immediately you have a problem because the people doing the work are people who don’t really have the intelligence to recognize bullshit. In fact, they’re constantly making their works difficult to understand with absurdly complex vocabulary to hide that they’ve said nothing interesting. Philosophy especially seems to be really bad about spending hours debating the meaning of every word used that it obscures the fact that the papers rarely make any sort of claim with implications outside of academia. In other subjects, jargon is used to describe things happening in the field and to make it clear what my results actually mean. When I redefine common English words in philosophy, the point is quite often to make a simple argument sound profound.
And as a final point. Because of the first two problems, it tends to create bubbles. The people in these subjects are not moonlighting in attending physics symposiums on quantum mechanics, or reading books outside of the field. They’re in one world, and thus to them, these silly papers about nothing sound intelligent to them.
This is just the reverse of the phenomenon @RenOS mentioned. STEM people think STEM is the best thing and people studying other fields are wasting their potential (at best) or never had it. It's just as valid, which is to say it isn't valid at all. Some of my smartest school mates were humanities majors, they aren't just less capable people studying something easy.
It's not that STEM is the best. It's that there are sciences with a tight feedback loop with reality, and those without. In the former, which is most of natural sciences, it's hard too go off the deep end, in the latter, which is most humanities, it's extremely easy. There are a few special cases such as math - math has a tight feedback loop with some very basic parts of reality through its assumption - proof - conclusion structure - but you can still go some crazy places with weird, hard-or-impossible-to-prove assumption. This makes clear statements and fair marks in the humanities almost impossible, so the researchers and teachers err on the side of kindness.
In particular, this makes the humanities appeal to a certain kind of person, mostly activists, who don't actually care much about reality but care a lot about forcing their worldview on the rest of society. Also, classes in the humanities are easier on the account of literally everyone I know who has ever taken them, including full humanities majors, some even flat-out told me they're taking humanities specifically bc it's easier. It's also an objective fact of universities that there is a pecking order of difficulty where people who fail one degree always move down, but never up, when trying again even if the NC (numerus clausus, the required marks to get started) of the upper fields is technically lower. As an example, at my medicine-focused university, "applied math in life science" is among the top despite having literally no NC at all, one of the next is "molecular life sciences", one of the next is "nutritional sciences", the next are all the "care sciences" (midwifery etc.). As in this example, humanities are almost always lower than the STEM fields in this order.
There are also many great, smart & careful students & scientists in the humanities, since they still are very valuable and interesting fields to study but tbh at this point I think they're probably in the minority, and definitely not in charge.
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Do you have any examples of published philosophical works that do this? (I'll grant that you might be able to find something - some published philosophy is just bad, after all. But, I can easily point you to works that don't do this as well.)
Some amount of discussion about the definitions of terms is necessary. Think about how often we debate the appropriate definition of terms like "left" and "right" on TheMotte. We just had multiple sub-threads last week about what "cultural Marxism" means. Do you think the posters here are just being irrational or intentionally obscurantist when they engage in discussions like that? I don't think they are. I think it makes sense that we would debate what those terms mean, because they're contentious terms that get used in different ways by different people, so we need to get clear on what they actually mean in order to have a productive conversation.
Again, what sorts of examples are you thinking of? I really don't think this happens often at all in philosophy. There's jargon, certainly, but much of this jargon ("epistemic", "qualia", "a priori") is unique to philosophy and wouldn't be confused for ordinary English terms. If anything, philosophers like to invent new words and phrases to use in place of ordinary words if the ordinary words are too ambiguous (see for example the use of terms like "error theory" and "expressivism" to describe more precise sub-variants of what non-philosophers would call "moral relativism").
How much academic analytic philosophy have you read? They really do go out of their way to make the writing as straightforward (and, frankly, dry) as possible.
Writers in the "continental" tradition are known for writing with more of a poetic flourish, but, so what? They're having fun and it makes their works more fun to read, so, good for them.
Yeah, that post puzzled me too. I'm not saying the tendency he describes doesn't exist but philosophy, or at least the analytic tradition that is dominant in English-language departments, is one of the fields least guilty of it outside the hard sciences.
So it's weird the way he gives "philosophy" as his main exemplar. Like, say there was a flaw in a lot of recent American vehicles' onboard computers, and it was found to affect 17 Ford models, 14 GM ones, and 2 Chrysler ones (and an overall share of their respective sales roughly proportionate to those numbers). It's as though someone went on a big rant about that, and got a lot right, except they explicitly claimed it was mainly a Chrysler problem.
Absent the concrete examples you very reasonably asked for, I suppose the maximally charitable interpretation is that he thinks the continental tradition is all that exists.
(EDIT: First sentence of the second paragraph wasn't very accurate previously, toned it down.)
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