As you point out, however, this exercise of looking at what was said and retrospectively judging whose worldview seemed “less surprised” by what happened is definitely not the same thing as a forecasting track record. It’s too subjective; rationalizing why your views are “less surprised” by what happened than some other view (without either view having specifically predicted what happened), is not hugely more difficult than rationalizing your views in the first place.
As an example of the kind of point that one might use in deciding who “came off better” in the FOOM debate, Hanson predicted that “AIs that can parse and use CYC should be feasible well before AIs that can parse and use random human writings”, which seems pretty clearly falsified by large language models—and that also likely bears on Hanson’s view that “[t]he idea that you could create human level intelligence by just feeding raw data into the right math-inspired architecture is pure fantasy”.
As you point out, however, this exercise of looking at what was said and retrospectively judging whose worldview seemed “less surprised” by what happened is definitely not the same thing as a forecasting track record. It’s too subjective; rationalizing why your views are “less surprised” by what happened than some other view (without either view having specifically predicted what happened), is not hugely more difficult than rationalizing your views in the first place.
There was a lot of other stuff in that debate.