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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   3058 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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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.

I think there's a difference between accepting one-time invitation - which I'd accept from a lot of people, if only out of (somewhat morbid) curiosity - and entering a prolonged association while receiving tangible benefits. I wouldn't fault a person who met Epstein once or maybe got introduced by a common acquaintance and didn't immediately threw a drink in his face and run away screaming. People don't do such things. But I would fault a person who had prolonged, extended, beneficial relationship with Epstein while fully knowing who he is. You can't really control who you meet. But you can control who you maintain friendship with.

But I would fault a person who had prolonged, extended, beneficial relationship with Epstein while fully knowing who he is.

That's the key here. How do you prove someone fully knew who he was? My contention is that the people who were curious about it were probably satisfied pretty easily. From my original comment:

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 [okay with people hiring escorts] wouldn't have bought that excuse

Absent seeing him mess with underage girls, or noticing a lot of underage girls in his company, it's probably not that legible.

How do you prove someone fully knew who he was?

For example, AFAIR we have communications from Chomsky where he specifically discusses Epstein's troubles and gives him advice as to how to handle it. I think it's sufficient to establish he knew. There other pieces of evidence which mention specific details enough to establish knowledge. In some other cases, the perp just brags about it - like Polanski, who AFAIR said something like "everybody wants to do it, they are just jealous I got to do it".

Then there's a plausibility criteria. As they say in the legal speak, "knew or should have known" - we're not talking about some naive children, a lot of these people are mature, experienced adults who have a top positions in some very competitive fields and have considerable power. You don't get this by just stumbling around blindly. You get this by acquiring, processing and using a lot of information, and the information about who Epstein was were widely available in public at least since his first conviction, and a lot of non-public information was definitely also available for anybody who knows how to ask and has access - and those people were exactly the people who had access and knew how to ask - otherwise they would never achieve the position they were in. There could be an occasion case of genius savant who achieves high position somewhere but is entirely naive in the ways of the world otherwise - but that could not be the case for dozens of people for decades. Virtually all of them were in the position where you know such things, and thus it is proper to conclude they knew - or were willfully blind, which is the same as knowing because to purposely not to look into something you need to know there's something there you don't want to look at.

oh, that. yeah, it was a thing

With Epstein, just as with a number of others, it never was one thing. Even in initial conviction in 2008 there were 36 identified victims. You don't get a party island and a plane called "Lolita express" for an one-time thing. And that thing continued after he got his wrist slap. When you're doing it constantly, there's always a pattern. And if the pattern keeps for years, it becomes noticeable. He didn't do it alone in the dark basement. That was the point - he invited people. And eventually it becomes common knowledge to people who are in the same circles as the perpetrator is. The whole point is Epstein did not move on, he kept on, and a lot of people were involved too.

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