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sodiummuffin


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 03:26:09 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It is the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion.




More like a quarter of the way towards its conclusion. Low-productivity migrants are very expensive: this blog estimates the net lifetime tax contributions of Somalian migrants in Denmark to be around negative $1.4 million USD. Meanwhile, Givewell estimates that preventing a death from malaria costs $3000 to $8000. For the cost of improving the life of a single Somalian by allowing him to migrate, you can outright save the lives of hundreds of other africans who remain in Africa. (Before you object that saving the lives of poor third-worlders just results in more third-worlders who need saving, note that it apparently only costs $36 to a contraception charity per third-world birth prevented.) Poor third-world countries have a lot of low-hanging fruit where small amounts of money go a long way, so it shouldn't be too surprising that helping third-worlders in their own countries is vastly more efficient than letting them migrate.


The drowning child thought experiment says it shouldn't matter if the child is in front of you or in another country, which is quite unlike the instinctual morality that says cheap foreign aid programs saving millions of lives is a minor side-issue that only becomes morally urgent when one of them manages to get closer and throws himself into the water. Sometimes literally, with those ocean-rescue NGOs that transport migrants to Europe if they go out onto international waters and in some cases deliberately sink their own boats. Old 2016 article, I haven't kept up with how the situation has changed since then:


Time: Don't Blame Rescue-at-Sea Organizations for Migrants Coming to Europe




When 22-year-old Mohammad left Libya’s coastline in a decrepit wooden boat headed for Italy in August, he had no illusions about where he would end up.


Unlike many smugglers in Libya who lure clients in with false promises of reaching Europe within hours, his agent was brutally frank. It would take about three hours to reach international waters, he explained. Once there the boat would drift until spotted by one of the humanitarian rescue vessels plying the central Mediterranean, at which point he and his fellow passengers would be taken aboard and transferred to Italy, where they could apply for asylum.




This is the opposite of trying to maximize the most good for the greatest number in a location-insensitive way. It's like a thought-experiment someone invented to show how certain implicit moral premises are incoherent and produces counterproductive results, except that people are doing it for real. As for what actually qualifies as "the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion", I suspect it's some longtermist thing where you realize that the number of people in the future is potentially large and helping them by keeping society from collapsing and advancing technology is dramatically more efficient than anything else. That has a lot more uncertainty though, so providing Africa with bednets and contraception is still fairly reasonable, unlike helping them by allowing migration.