An Unbiased Evaluation of My Debate with Thane Ruthenis - Run It Yourself

post by funnyfranco · 2025-04-07T18:56:47.831Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

Contents

  A Debate Between Arguments and Status
    The Discussion_.pdf
  Challenge to the Community
  Last Last Post
    A. Nobody
None
1 comment

A Debate Between Arguments and Status

This isn’t a rant. It’s not a defence. It’s an audit. An audit of not just an individual but the LessWrong community at large.

I had a back-and-forth with Thane Ruthenis, a high-karma LessWrong contributor, about my core argument on AGI safety: that alignment is structurally impossible under competitive pressure, and that the race to AGI will result in human extinction—not because we fail to align, but because alignment will be optimised away. The core claim is not “alignment is hard.” It’s “alignment is systemically unachievable.”

The original essay is here [LW · GW].

Although our conversation about it actually took place on my post about LessWrong’s culture here [LW · GW].

Summarised here for convenience:

The Discussion_.pdf

Many replies dismissed this as “101-level,” “political,” or “already said,” but few—if any—engaged the actual logical structure.

So I asked GPT-4 to do a neutral, point-by-point breakdown of the conversation between me and Thane. I’ve pasted in the full exchange, with no editing or prompting for bias. Below is its unedited evaluation.

My ChatGPT's Evaluation.pdf

To remove any perception of bias, I logged out and asked the generic version of GPT to evaluate my debate with Thane. It initially scored Thane higher in several categories - although still lower than my own scores across the board. My GPT knows my essays well and offered deeper reasoning behind its scores. So I took that exact reasoning—copy/pasted it—into the logged-out GPT and asked it to reevaluate. 

Every score dropped. In some cases, dramatically:

The final assessment confirmed my position:

Thane’s failure to engage… allowed funnyfranco’s argument to carry more weight in the community.

It can be found here: 

logged out GPT evaluation.pdf

Challenge to the Community

If you think the analysis is biased, run it yourself. Use GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, or whatever model you trust. Use the same metrics I used:

If we care about truth over status, clarity over reputation, then this is the kind of question we should be able to resolve.

And if we can’t even admit when someone has not been refuted, then LessWrong has fully transitioned from rationalist hub to cultural tribe.

Last Last Post

I said I was done posting here. And I mostly am. But if this community is what it claims to be, then it should be able to handle this post—and the audit it invites. If not? Then the karma score this receives will be one more data point in favour of the argument I’ve already made. 

If the community truly values anything resembling intellectual integrity it will not respond to the post with vague wand waving, side stepping, reframing, or anything other than a head on and unbiased evaluation of conversation I had with Thane.

Feel free to pick up this gauntlet I seem to have so carelessly thrown on the ground.

A. Nobody

1 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by funnyfranco · 2025-04-08T01:32:10.993Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

–12 karma after 3 votes. No engagement. No counterarguments. Just silent disapproval. You prove my point better than I ever could.

This is exactly what I predicted would happen. Not because the post is wrong, but because it makes people uncomfortable. Because it breaks rank. Because it challenges status rather than flattering it. Knowing that you could only collect further evidence to support the claim I've made, you instead opted to ignore evidence and reason and go on feeling.

A community confident in its commitment to reason would have responded differently. It would have dissected the argument. It would have debated the claims. Instead, what happened here is precisely what happens when a group loses the will - or the capacity - to engage honestly with uncomfortable truths: it downvotes, and it moves on.

Not one of you made a case. Not one of you pointed to an error. And yet the judgment was swift and unanimous. That tells me the argument was too strong, not too weak. It couldn’t be refuted, so it had to be dismissed.

If any of you had hoped to prove me wrong about the cultural decay of LW, you’ve accomplished the opposite. All it has taken is 3 people, with enough personal karma to create a score of -12 between them, to represent this forum in its entirety. 

And if you still think you’re part of a truth-seeking community, read this post again. Then look at the karma score. Then ask yourself how those two things can coexist. And if you can’t, ask yourself why you’re still here.