I am glad Lawrence wrote this piece, and glad that he is trying to keep his remarks from tarring all of the field of Philosophy with an overly broad brush. That there are some bad philosophers (e.g. WLC) does not mean that Philosophy itself is bad. Lawrence writes that philosophical ideas do not impact his practical work. No surprise there, because the bulk of the positive influence happened long ago in the development of the Scientific Method and the formal logic that it uses. Every day he uses Occam's Razor and the idea that reality can be modeled by the most practical implementation of formal logic, mathematics. He does not have to deal with that because he is standing on the shoulders of past philosophical giants going back to when all of science was "Natural Philosophy."

As I wrote on another thread the "nothing" Lawrence writes about is the real nothing, that he very properly describes in the OP as having no things. Metaphysical Nothing is an idea that came to mind back when philosophers did not know about the quantum world and how our brains make ideas that don't necessarily have corresponding situations in reality. Yes, there are going to be philosophers who are going to hang on to a Platonic ideal of "nothing" but ask them to show you some or prove that there ever has been any, and what you will get from them as evidence is, nothing.