sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
20d ago
Most of them were involved in fundraising that, if done competently, involved a due diligence component. So either they were incompetent, or chose to interact with the publicly convicted sex offender anyway.
I think it's the latter. The AI research community is deeply entwined with both rationalism and Effective Altruism, and the latter is a rehash of utilitarianism with a peculiar utility function. Artificial super intelligence, if correctly formed, presents infinite utility. If that is true, then literally anything can be justified if it moves the future toward that end.
If Dario's wife was asking him for funding because 'AI justifies anything', she would presumably have asked for AI funding rather than trying to fundraise for a completely different company. Meanwhile Eliezer Yudkowsky is connected to Epstein because he accepted a phone call during a MIRI fundraiser...and then they turned down his $300,000 donation offer after doing due diligence. Here is a comment from him describing the interaction:
Epstein asked to call during a fundraiser. My notes say that I tried to explain AI alignment principles and difficulty to him (presumably in the same way I always would) and that he did not seem to be getting it very much. Others at MIRI say (I do not remember myself / have not myself checked the records) that Epstein then offered MIRI $300K; which made it worth MIRI's while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy, and ask if there was a reasonable path to accepting his donations causing harm; and the upshot was that MIRI decided not to take donations from him. I think/recall that it did not seem worthwhile to do a whole diligence thing about this Epstein guy before we knew whether he was offering significant funding in the first place, and then he did, and then MIRI people looked further, and then (I am told) MIRI turned him down.
Epstein threw money at quite a lot of scientists and I expect a majority of them did not have a clue. It's not standard practice among nonprofits to run diligence on donors, and in fact I don't think it should be. Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation, and this kind of scrutiny is more efficiently centralized by having professional law enforcement do it than by distributing it across thousands of nonprofits.
In 2009, MIRI (then SIAI) was a fiscal sponsor for an open-source project (that is, we extended our nonprofit status to the project, so they could accept donations on a tax-exempt basis, having determined ourselves that their purpose was a charitable one related to our mission) and they got $50K from Epstein. Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn't a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it.
This reply has not been approved by MIRI / carefully fact-checked, it is just off the top of my own head.
So the only example in your list of people of Epstein funding AI is the money he gave to MIT Media Lab and MIT AI Lab, which is connected to academic AI research but not to internet-rationalism or effective altruism. Also I suspect their policies towards accepting donations has much more to do with MIT-wide policies than anything to do with AI specifically. The only internet-rationalist organization is also the one that got a donation offer and turned it down. Rather than anything to do with rationalism, EA, or utilitarianism, I think this just reflects AI being one of the fields that Epstein thought was cool.
sodiummuffin
23d ago
Most people die for normal reasons, like terminal illness. If you convert a significant fraction of those deaths into MAID deaths, it is unsurprising if MAID deaths end up outnumbering abnormal causes of death like getting shot. This is pretty irrelevant to the question of how many MAID deaths are bad. (People disagree on exactly which MAID deaths qualify as bad, but "terminal cancer patient in pain chooses to die a couple weeks early" is pretty popular and "person who could have lived a long happy life successfully pursues MAID based on some bullshit condition because it gives institutional approval for suicidal tendencies" is not.) On one hand the raw number of MAID deaths doesn't indicate abuse of the system, on the other hand a high percentage of reasonable MAID deaths doesn't tell us whether or not there is a significant amount of abuse, since you would expect the normal deaths to be the majority regardless.
Fundamentally, nerds are more likely to hold non-mainstream political views because they are more likely to have picked up their political ideas from the internet, from other nerdy sources like political books, or from nerd peers who got their views from nerdy sources. Non-nerds are more likely to have gotten their views from sources like school, TV news, or non-nerd peers. Because non-nerd sources were more centralized they were more likely to be controlled by the political memeplexes that were already the most powerful, like mainline Democrats/Republicans, and not include niche or taboo views. The internet, on the other hand, favors views that are well-optimized for grassroots virality (with a secondary advantage for being good at taking control of website moderation, though this can also spark backlash). There may be psychological reasons why people favor the exact views they do, but first and foremost any analysis should keep in mind the viral nature of ideas.
Of course, this dynamic is changing as more of the population is heavily online, though there is inertia both on the individual level (people tend to stick with the views they are already committed to) and the group level (views that are already dominant in a social group have an advantage). Increasingly the nerd/non-nerd division is not between online and offline but between more and less nerdy websites (ordered something like political-blogs>Tumblr>4chan>Reddit>Twitter>Tiktok, though some of the biggest political blogs might have a less nerdy audience). As a result, niche and taboo views are increasingly popular among non-nerds, though the kinds of views which gain popularity on Tiktok are different from those that gain popularity from long-form political blogs. Furthermore, the internet provided a space for the development and refinement of once-niche views which in turn managed to seize control of (or at least influence) more mainstream institutions like news outlets and political parties. So even people who still get their views from the news and mainstream institutions tend to just be downstream of whatever internet memeplexes have managed to take over those institutions. This includes the linked article, which is essentially an extension of an internet flame-war where the ideology which now runs NPR is using it to take shots at those tech CEOs who have been converted by enemy ideologies.
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