Contemporary metaphysics is frivolous (tip: hide it from the scientists)

I think the problem with philosophy-bashing physicists, such as Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson, is that they are way too nice. Why are they so nice? Because they probably do not read much academic philosophy. If they knew how bad the situation really is in philosophy, they would be even more rude.

"Leaf through a handful of recent works in metaphysics and you will soon find yourself on trips to possible worlds populated by zombies, disembodied spirits, unicorns, dragons, trout-turkeys, writer-cucumbers, gunk spheres, and - in a chummy in-joke - the mereological fusion of David Lewis and a talking donkey. Even the most unrepentant of analytic metaphysicians should be willing to concede that it at least looks bad that such paraphernalia is the stock-in-trade of today's metaphysicians, given their pretensions to be engaged in a noble intellectual pursuit.

... 

the idea that a gunk-sphere or a zombie is somehow very much a 'real' possibility does essential work in the arguments in which they are cited, since their very possibility is often taken to refute a rival thesis. As such, taking these preposterous entities ontologically seriously is crucial in the analytic context, and the seriousness that we feel able to impart to metaphysics correspondingly diminished." (Steven French and Kerry McKenzie, Rethinking Outside the Toolbox)

Scientists are naive in the sense that they interpret philosophers too charitably. They do not realize how silly almost all of academic philosophy really is. Listen to Daniel Dennett:

"[Some scientists] have thought that when philosophers were comparing zombies with conscious people, they were noting the importance of emotional state, or neuromodulator imbalance. I have spent more time than I would like explaining to various scientists that their controversies and the philosophers' controversies are not translations of each other as they had thought but false friends, mutually irrelevant to each other. The principle of charity continues to bedevil the issue, however, and many scientists generously persist in refusing to believe that philosophers can be making a fuss about such a narrow and fantastical division of opinion." (Sweet Dreams, 2005)