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In May 2025, Piers Morgan hosted a debate between two scientists1 where one was engaging in good faith, and the other was not. I described it back then as:
[…] physicist Sean Carroll kept making a stupid curricular argument like "of course if anyone has any better theories we'd use them! It's just that no one has...oh what about theory X (which came from outside their paradigm), no well you see, it's incompatible with our paradigm, so, we don't even consider it scientific! It's not even worth looking at. So..."2
the dumbest thing is that this works, I looked around twitter and Reddit and everyone was like "wow this poor physicist, that other guy was so mean to him!"
What happened on that Piers Morgan debate was that one of them was debating as a scientist, the other as a politician. Rock beats scissor, politician beats scientist.
We know this because Sean Carroll failed Feynman’s Razor. He was not trying to explain anything scientific to the audience, he assumed the audience would not understand, and focused primarily on convincing the audience of his authority, and then using that to dismiss the other guy. So, he came out looking like the winner - to people who don’t understand anything.
The people who are capable of understanding what these two guys were talking about didn’t get a chance to understand it from this “debate”. If they were already familiar with the work of each, their opinions varied3.
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Thanks for reading!
I have been wanting to write about this ever since Yudkowsky convinced Bernie Sanders of his political cause. An impressive win. Bernie has no visibility into the AI industry. He sees coalitions fighting, and he’s not sure what their beef is with each other - but he has political power & resources he can give, and he wants to give it to the ones that seem to be doing good.
In a future essay, I want to write about how the game of Anatomy of an Internet Argument is about giving you that visibility that you need to make your decisions. The problem I wish to solve is:
Q: If you are a politician, or a layperson, and you want to figure out which of these scientists is telling the truth & is engaging in good faith, but you yourself are NOT an expert in this domain. What do you do?
My answer (TODO - elaborate on why & how this works): Find a beginner to the field that you trust, watch them learn & see what questions they ask
Good faith experts are willing & able to pass Feynman’s Razor. The other guys are not.
See YouTube video here, and sample of how the general public received it on this reddit post.
In the last section of A Journalist is A Laywer I describe how the correct way to resolve cross-paradigm disputes is by having a “lawyer” for each paradigm. You cannot objectively measure one paradigm from inside of another and call it a fair assessment.
Sabine Hossenfelder’s take for example is that Eric Weinstein’s theory is probably not fruitful to invest in, but neither is the other guy’s work, and he’s just refusing to debate in good faith because he doesn’t want that scrutiny applied to his work/field/research.
This article feels incomplete, it feels like you were building up to a point and stopped half way. You are saying that for a 1hr event yud didnt take it seriously, he is a politician more than scientist and then go into some situations that were similar where you describe the mechanism of rep management but dont actually go into what the issue is with yud? Even carl sagan smoked weed lol
Ironically, my read—listening to the audio alone—was something of the reverse.
47 (self-reportedly) arranged the debate in order to make a payment to Yudkowsky and thus, in 47’s eyes, gain the ability to restrict Yudkowsky’s AI rhetoric on grounds of “trade libel and commercial disparagement”. 47 did not intend to hold any “real” debate and, it would seem, Yudkowsky treated the debate with the same seriousness.
Politician behavior inside the “debate” was largely on 47—half-baked, under-researched, overtalking, nothing new in the discourse—it was not a good faith debate to find the truth from the start, more so a pile of rhetoric.
And it conceivably could have been a debate, silly hats and all! With a bit of effort to find out Yudkowsky’s (widely) published positions-re: e.g., against violence and in favor of international treaties—there could have been an interesting conversation, maybe.
Maybe not, the actors being who they are, could not do otherwise. But I’d more accurately characterize as, “Yudkowsky could have had a serious conversation wearing kaleidoscope glasses—but 47 came in flying by the seat of his pants with no intention to have that conversation.