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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   819 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026

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The other day, quantum computing expert(?) Scott Aaronson wrote about how he didn't meet Epstein and summed up in a comment something I had been thinking as well.

I had a further thought. Back in 2019, when Epstein became a central topic of conversation following his arrest and then death, and lots of my scientific colleagues were telling stories about their contacts or near-contacts with him, it struck me that there were zero stories about any scientist—liberal or conservative, male or female, morally naive or morally astute—saying, “no, of course I want nothing to do with you, because you’re friggin’ Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous mass rapist!”

So I concluded that, if anyone now imagines that they would’ve responded that way, it’s almost certainly pure hindsight bias. Indeed, even after Epstein’s first conviction, a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.

All of the pearl clutching about how powerful men (and women) who associated with Epstein must have clearly known what he was about and what he was up to as a convicted pedophile ephebophile, when it's almost certain that 97% of the population would have gleefully accepted an invitation to one of his parties filled with leading scientists from MIT and Harvard, heads of state, CEOs, inventors, billionaires, and the rest of the somebodys.

A man with that much social approval could easily say, if anyone ever confronted him, "oh, that. yeah, it was a thing with an escort. it was consensual. she said she was over 18. it got blown up into something. I paid my dues. trying to move on" and be happily believed. Due diligence: done. Very few people with the liberal morality to be condemning him for hiring an escort wouldn't have bought that excuse and gone back to dreaming of rubbing shoulders with the who's who and maybe getting a sweet private jet ride. "Can he really be such a bad guy if all of these other great people are hanging out with him?", thought all of the other great people hanging out with him.

This is extremely confounded by selection bias. Sure the kind of person who ends up in that orbit ends up going along for whatever reason of being ok with it, accepting social signals instead of reasoning from other principles etc.

But to extrapolate that to 97% of the population is a farce. This is ignoring all the other decisions and avenues that a person who said no also would have taken to avoid (intentionally or more likely completely unintentionally) ever being in the place to “tell Jeffrey off” in the face of an invitation.

Plenty of people quietly lived lives that didn’t get them into his invitation list in the first place

I still have a hard time believing the average person would not accept an invite to a party at a rich guy's mansion if it had a few household names in attendance. And feel chuffed to bits if Epstein took a liking to them and wanted to introduce them to more people, and would easily look past his minor legal trouble.

97% is hyperbole but it would be high.

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