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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24342 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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I hesitate to post this one, but I'm doing so because it hits a near-perfect intersection of the hobby horses of something like 70% of the regular posters here. It turns out that Dario Amodei's wife is in the Epstein files, after his public conviction for sex offenses.

A year later, she reached back out to Epstein. At first he didn’t remember her. She replied that they had been introduced by John Brockman a year earlier. “We have the free luxury porn company. Does that ring a bell?”

Epstein replied: “Yes, a loud gong.”

Clark joked back. “Haha, I was going to say, you would be the first person that didn’t remember us.”

She pitched him on investing in her company, saying they had just hired someone from Oprah Winfrey’s company and Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst, the media company behind shows like “Punk’d.” “Are you still interested?”

Epstein, then a registered sex offender, replied, “Can’t do sex TV.”

There's a lot to unpack here.

First, Epstein really was balls-deep in AI research. Marvin Minsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Joscha Bach was in direct communication with Epstein. Elon Musk was in direct communication with Epstein. Eliezar Yudkowsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Noam Chomsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Overall, Epstein's emails are a who's-who of AI research. Prior to this, Amodei had no known links to Epstein, and now he has one at one remove.

While the headline story is salacious and amusing (and probably a targeted hit job on Amodei), I wand to use it as a springboard for a few other topics.

A brief, non-rigorous analysis of the files suggests that AI researchers are over represented in the files after 2011, both in frequency and in message length. A charitable person could argue that it's because the average AI researcher didn't know that Epstein was a convicted sex offender after his public trial and conviction in 2011, but I don't buy that. I was a dumb 20-something in 2011 and I knew about it. It was in the newspapers. It was on the news on the TVs at the gym. These people are allegedly smarter and more plugged-in than I am. 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.

Over the last few decades, utilitarianism really seems to have taken over popular discussions of ethics. Sometimes I wonder if that doesn't represent a failure of ethics in itself. As far as ethical systems go, Utilitarianism is easy to hack. Ignoring second order effects, choosing peculiar utility functions, using unrealistic time scales - it's all wrapped up together.

Moving on from that, I'd always known that bay area tech is pretty incestuous, but I don't think I'd realized how small, insular, and weird it was until recently. Clark having a personal relationship with Eric Schmidt and parlaying that into funding later was a surprise. Is that just how SF business gets done out there?

Overall, I'm not sure what to think about this. It feels like a targeted hit piece. I'm a cynical man, and my gut feeling is that it's a shot at pulling Amodei out of the big chair at Anthropic. I have no proof of that, but the timing relative to their alleged IPO is interesting, and coincidences are hard to believe when the players are all so tightly coupled as they are in the AI industry. If it is true, though, it makes me wonder who could be involved.

I think his gf is far more interesting than the Epstein mild connections. She married a 60 year old at 20. Then later dated 30-year older Eric Schmidt and then somehow ended up with the slightly younger Amodei. I am not going to think she was born with some outstanding ability of seduction at a young age or I assume she could have done better when she was 20. But it’s like once she was the tech slut she got passed around. And they seem to have bad processes for figuring out how to get better girls into their network.

Being able to talk nerdy as a 7+ and/or have both the attraction to engineering types and the ruthlessness is a superpower. Aella discourse same thing

Is it a super power? Mira Murat actually does research and appears to be hot enough to be rich by just being a SAHM. Surely there’s something in between 40+ year old college drop out and Mira Murati quality.

This strikes me as Amdoei and a few other tech guys having a weak mate search function and just going for whatever is readily available. Right time right place. He’s not even bad looking.

Funny aside: Murati is talented, but she went from product at Leap Motion to VP at OpenAI. That's a pretty big jump, even in 2018.

How? Well, she had a coworker at Leap, the head of revenue, who had substantial connections to OpenAI and who introduced her to Brockman. One thing led to another, and Murati was hired as VP.

That coworker? Cami Clark.

What does VP even mean in tech? In finance it means nothing.

Most women can't overcome the ick on dealing with passive moderate autists enough even when there's massive upside in taking charge. IMO most women find it way easier to deal with the Dubai Portapotty kinda role since the proverbial Sheikhs will be cartoonishly aggressive, whilst taking on an autist (especially one tangled up in 2020s norms around workplace fraternization) should be taking candy from a baby but most women can't frontfoot.

Sounds like we’re living in a mental asylum if this behavior is a defining feature of 2026.

Mark Twain once had a quote about bankers where he said, “A banker is someone who’ll lend you his umbrella, but wants it back the moment it begins to rain.” The problem the attitudes you alluded to or with things like “pretending to be someone you’re not” or “acting like you don’t care,” to get someone is that once you internalize the attitude of “not caring” to win someone over, you really… don’t… care. Your desire for it diminishes. The appeal of it is no longer there and so it ends up defeating the whole purpose. That behavior is the allure that will allow you to get them but now that you get them, you no longer want them. It’s the same thing. And it isn’t a coincidence the dissolution of a life script for people to follow has coincided with the growth of social and relationship anarchy, with people hopelessly lost and can’t tell their ass from a hole in the ground or what to do or how to relate to other people.

One thing I’ve noticed though is that wisdom isn’t completely lost on Gen Z. They’ve slowly achieved insights. When I hear them say things like, “A man will sacrifice his happiness for his family. A woman will sacrifice her family for her happiness,” or “If a woman likes you you’ll know. If she doesn’t like you you’ll be confused,” my eyebrows raise and I give it a bit of a nod and I say “Mm. Yeah, that’s pretty on point…”

Most women can't overcome the ick on dealing with passive moderate autists enough even when there's massive upside in taking charge.

In other words, the autist is breaking the rules of gender: he is assuming the woman's gender role by being passive and not taking charge.

Women generally aren't attracted to lesbians those in the female gender role, least of all [transgender] men such as these.

I think this is all that is.

Exactly, and being a woman who has a good 'eye for talent' and can tolerate actually driving somewhat with passive moderate autists can likely get you into incredible positions.

Assume you're a normal straight man. Then consider the following statement:

If you can't find any women to date, just date men instead.

Your emotional reaction/repulsion to that is what normal women feel when they're told to do this. That's why they can't/won't. (The ones who can tend not to be normal.)

I feel like cultural practices of 'just date men instead' are more abundant than women actually frontfooting relationships. Enough communal sodomy twink concepts flying around human anthropology.

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Mira Murati actually does research

Does she? Her first job was PM at Tesla, followed by some startup roles (from memory) before becoming an executive and then CTO. Now she runs her own AI company. That trajectory screams manager/business not AI researcher. Just the kind of area where being a 7+ and able to talk nerdy is super useful. I remember looking at her career path years ago and realizing I could never nepo-baby that hard.

You may be right that she’s more of a manager than pure engineering.

I have no idea though on the nepo-baby comment. No one from Albania comes from much money. But being attractive, social, and a tier 2 mind seems possible. A Dartmouth Engineering degree isn’t easy. Schools like Dartmouth do sometimes push kids to more engineering management than pure engineering.

No one from Albania comes from much money.

You'd be shocked how much illicit money from the region ends up in Albania for various reasons. Plus general Gini coefficient of places like that and being able to enforce your will onto the world fairly cheaply means the top 0.1% are actually kinda cartoonishly rich and powerful.

It's probably not nepotism in the strict definitional sense. But I've almost never heard of someone coming out of undergrad straight into project management at a prestigious company. Let alone from a non top 10 engineering school. Call it connections, familial or platonic. But she got into her positions based on some amount of capability and likely a large amount of "who you know" and was at least capable enough to build on that. But my realization was that technical knowledge and skill and actually attempting to do the work will not get as far as knowing the right people, being able to schmooze, and social climb your way into a prestigious position. Probably a bit of sour grapes.

Murati was a product manager, not a project manager. Project managers are, as a rule, dummies; I'd say less than a tenth are any good and the rest are ZMP at best and they frequently become project managers right out of college.

That said, I've had classmates at my state school become product managers at FAANG right out of college as well so I don't think that that's as rare as you make it out to be either.

as rare as you make it out to be either.

I don't think being a prod manger or proj manager out of school is rare, I have classmates that did it. But they aren't then parlaying that into becoming CTOs of AI research companies. Her trajectory is weird. Becoming a CTO at 33 after 2-3 years PM-ing at Tesla, 2 years at a startup, followed by being a VP at 29 is really fishy.

I'd register that she's an aggressive mercenary social climber in lieu of being a high quality engineer or PM

Zuckerberg, SBF, Chamath. Seems like a lot have done it. In Musks orbit it seems like he does it a lot even with non-attractive people. His Doge choices were young. Nikita Bier at Twitter.

PM roles aren’t pure engineering. Dartmouth outside of HYPS is as prestigious as anywhere and coming from Albania getting into a top school is hard (white and had fewer resources). Albania to Dartmouth Engineering is a strong indicator of ability and agency. Only MIT, Stanford, and Caltech are more prestigious of the engineering schools. If my goal coming from Albania was to get into US tech I would probably rank Dartmouth as my 9th choice after Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, University of Chicago, and Colombia. Maybe CMU is better but Dartmouth opens up better trad finance jobs too. And probably about half a dozen schools at the same level. A poor white you would basically choose whichever lets you in and/or consider their aid. Seems a little weird to me to not consider Dartmouth engineering as prestigious enough not to get a foot in the door to perform.

Though she did backdoor Dartmouth thru a guaranteed transfer program, but again she’s essentially poor unconnected white so getting Ivy isn’t easy.

She's a white woman in engineering, emphasis woman. There is never enough women of any race in engineering, she meets the quota. Doubly so at some Ivy League where they explicitly discriminate for it. I doubt she paid a lot out of pocket or was sufficiently put out by it.

would probably rank Dartmouth as my 9th choice after Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, University of Chicago, and Colombia. Maybe CMU

We have very different definitions of good engineering schools. You seem to be ranking them based on international prestige. The Ivies aren't great engineering schools. They aren't horrible, you'll get a great education, but they don't crack the top ten, though I guess this list includes Princeton. Ivies are schools for kids of the elite. Elites don't go become engineers.

Engineering School Rankings

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and likely a large amount of "who you know"

Know in the Biblical sense, maybe.

Let's see, this Reno girl married a local architect 40 years her senior before she could even drink, divorced him after 3 years for what's probably a serious payday by Reno standards, traded up to Eric Schmidt, and then cougared Dario? (I say cougared based on the relative psychological maturity)

Move over Mrs. L.S. Bezos, there's a new queen in town.

As someone who grew up in Reno I’m profoundly disappointed that she isn’t in the prominent residence section of the cities Wikipedia page.

Are we playing six degrees from Jeff Epstein? Really? Like if you manage to become a party pad for some subset of wealthy influential people you're now connected, at least at some unusually-low degree of removal, to all of them, because wealthy influential people like to associate with each other.

Coincidence? Very plausible.

Especially the fundraising/VC space where once somebody is identified as rich and open as a possible source of investment, everybody will beat a path to their door and be as convivial as possible to try and extract some of the sweet techbux. Sure Epstein had a rich seam of interest in whoremonging but he was also a billionaire who was incredibly connected

The reallll interesting questions come from how he became a billionaire and how he got those initial connections.

Its possible that he managed to social-proof his way into elite circles and was exceptionally good at convincing rich people he had a magic touch.

It is very, VERY rare for someone to become a 'legitimate' billionaire without starting a company that takes off to success/getting early equity in a startup, or being a famed celebrity who leverages their image heavily.

He did neither of those.

Which suggests (to me) some sort of organized criminal enterprise as the last likely option. And virtually no such enterprise can operate at such levels without either intimidating, buying/bribing, or being tacitly approved by some government entity.

So I dunno, what hypotheses do we have for how he bootstrapped the connections and billions whilst leaving very, very little trail of how he did it.

Epstein was a millionaire, not a billionaire.

Secondly, There is a very large, very ordinary gray zone of questionable to even illegal wealth portfolio that does not require a "global child sex trafficking" conspiracy to explain.

His connections begin to make sense when you treat "the elites" in his orbit as ordinary human beings capable of stupidity, vanity, and bad judgment than as a cold, coordinated hivemind operating from the top floor of Evil Inc.

Both "victims" and "connections" tell us he was an ambitious smooth talker who was super duper good at attaching himself to powerful people and making them feel like they were getting something valuable. His knowledge about the architecture of modern finance was impressive, we're told. Combine his knack for sociability with above average intelligence and it's easy to see why men like Chomsky would be charmed by him.

Charisma is the ability to get someone to do what they would not otherwise do. That is a higher-base-rate explanation for things like the Wexner relationship than a sophisticated, government tolerated and Mossad-led blackmail enterprise that somehow left almost no operational footprint. At least nothing to actually.... convict any of his friends.

And this is an age where such large scale, systematic trafficking and blackmail of the kind imagined would generate multipple records, witnesses, communications, financial trails, opportunistic leaks and competing incentives among so-called participants. To me, that's a much harder sell than a disordered, opportunistic socialite who climbed socially, engaged in some illegal sexual activity with underage girls (personally), and left behind a mess that looks more chaotic than engineered.

Epstein was a millionaire, not a billionaire.

Gotta be specific when there's 3 orders of magnitude of space there.

He was alleged at $600 million at the time of his death, although that surely fluctuated a lot, although much of that wasn't liquid. He worked hard to keep it from public disclosure throughout his legal process.

That's a HUGE amount to reach if you start from the bottom. I reserve some probability for a series of 'lucky' trades. A dude in New York in the '90's and early 2000s could stumble around and turn 10 million into 200 if he had some pure luck and a little bit of finagling the system.

But I find some form of massive insider trading to be the most likely way to bootstrap whatever seed money he obtained into the secretive empire he actually did create.

And yet, if he was really insider trading for decades you'd expect him to probably get even richer than he apparently was. So the part where I go out on a limb for real is the assumption that much of his wealth did not actually belong to him and was occasionally siphoned off for other purposes.

Both "victims" and "connections" tell us he was an ambitious smooth talker who was super duper good at attaching himself to powerful people and making them feel like they were getting something valuable.

Plausible, but also what one might expect people to say to slough off some blame and avoid further investigation. It is 'proven' that plenty of important people he associated with stayed quiet about whatever activity they observed, for a long time, so he sure used some method to keep things under wraps.

Its not proof that "EVERYONE WAS IN ON IT!" but it suggests some unifying factor keeping people from commenting. Similar to the Diddy situation. One guy was the nexus of a whole ton of bad behavior, and virtually nobody of import was willing to be the one to break omerta for years and years (except 50 Cent that glorious bastard). And Diddy is like an inverse Epstein in that he was CONSTANTLY seeking public attention.

And this is an age where such large scale, systematic trafficking and blackmail of the kind imagined would generate multipple records, witnesses, communications, financial trails, opportunistic leaks and competing incentives among so-called participants.

The thing is IT DID generate such records, there were various leaks and both victims and staffers occasionally coming forward to add details, although it was mostly about the sex trafficking stuff.

The problem being that the financial trails are the ones that we've gotten very little insight to, and have been kept particularly secret... which is where I think the meat of the actual conspiracy would be found.

And being clear, I don't believe that blackmail was the primary goal of anything he did. If intelligence agencies want Kompromat on someone, they have a bajillion other ways to get it.

My theory is that he ended up as the nexus/fall guy of some kind of slush fund for, at a guess, one or multiple state intelligence agencies. Maybe Mossad, CIA, or whatever. A 'good' way to launder and multiply such a fund would be aggressive but secretive insider trading or similar 'inside' deals. His initial appearance/rise happened right around The Iran-Contra affair. No I am not alleging a connection there, just illustrating that we have an existence proof of this sort of conspiracy. A good way to keep such deals and talks 'off the books' it to have them in person. ESPECIALLY on a plane or island you control to minimize surveillance and eavesdropping risk. If you want to convince a VIP with insider knowledge to make an in-person appearance, a good inducement is promising sexually available young women. That some of them are underage by a couple years helps to align the incentives against mentioning the meeting. Basically, get people with specialized knowledge on your plane and on your island, show them a good time, and insinuate they ought not disclose anything that was done or discussed. Pump out insider information that you can then trade on to keep the piggy bank topped off.

I agree he was indulging his own personal proclivities, but I also think that was his recruitment pipeline so as to have such girls available on short notice.

I am not convinced that he was doing everything with primary motivation of maintaining his own lifestyle at that level indefinitely. At some point, it would be easier to 'retire' to Eastern Europe or Thailand or something if you just want to molest teenage girls constantly with minimal risk.

I do not go all the way down the "satanic child sacrifice rites and adrenochrome harvesting" rabbit hole. I'm trying to avoid too large a complexity penalty.

I point as another piece of evidence to this:

Ghislaine Maxwell's ability to remain hidden for a relatively long time. It makes very little sense that she would be able to orchestrate the creation of various shell companies, buy a huge property, hire and maintain armed security, and otherwise maintain her cover without the assistance of competent third parties to act on her behalf. Suffice it to say I entirely DISBELIEVE she's enough of a mastermind to pull if off through only her own volition.

The fact that she's still alive is, to me, conditional proof (conditional on such a conspiracy existing) that things have 'moved on' and there's very little she can do to disrupt their current activities.

So in short, I think his 'secret sauce' was insider trading, funded by Gov't agencies that needed off-books ways to make and clean money, and he was a reliable and controllable asset, with proven ability to ingratiate to otherwise hard targets to extract information they used for rapid financial gains, and maintaining an image of elusive megarich eccentric playboy was in fact good cover for moving large sums of money around without raising eyebrows. Indulging his proclivities was both part of his tactics, and a good way to keep him in line, and thus 'they' stuck a thumb on the scale when lesser government agencies tried to snag him for the sex stuff.

That last part really is the most compelling for me. It remains unclear why else he'd have gotten such a sweetheart deal when he was pretty well dead to rights on various serious charges, and other wealthy dudes in the area were sent to prison despite aggressive efforts to avoid it.

But if he really just a charismatic manipulator who did it all for the love of the game, by and large, I'd still want to know that truth because holy cow that's some dedication, the psychology of such a person has to be fascinating.

That's a HUGE amount to reach if you start from the bottom.

And you still don't need a conspiratorial explanation for this. In private wealth management, especially when one ultra high net worth client dominates the book, the gap between “assets under management,” “assets under control,” and “personal net worth” is routinely large and not so transparent. Confusing the three is how the mythology gets built.

And yet, if he was really insider trading for decades you'd expect him to probably get even richer than he apparently was.

Why? It's not a video game score. Returns are consumed, diversified, parked in illiquid assets, spent on lifestyle, used to maintain the social machinery that generated the access, or simply not compounded at the theoretical maximum. A person can extract large sums over time and still end up with a mid-to-high 9-figure estate rather than a clean, ever growing billion dollar balance.

So the part where I go out on a limb for real is the assumption that much of his wealth did not actually belong to him and was occasionally siphoned off for other purposes.

Again, assets under management, assets under control, and personal beneficial ownership are different things. An asset manager with broad discretion over a principal’s non-core assets can live extremely well, direct capital, and accumulate personal wealth through fees and extraction without those assets ever being “his” in a balance sheet sense. You do not need a siphoning conspiracy to explain the gap between apparent power over money and audited personal net worth.

Its not proof that "EVERYONE WAS IN ON IT!" but it suggests some unifying factor keeping people from commenting.

People stay quiet for ordinary reasons. Reputational risk, civil liability, not knowing the full scope, and simple conflict avoidance. This is not unique to "Epstein friends".

The problem being that the financial trails are the ones that we've gotten very little insight to, and have been kept particularly secret... which is where I think the meat of the actual conspiracy would be found.

Take it from a CA, the absence of a clean, public track record of investment returns is not the smoking gun you might think it is. Many private managers never publish audited, strategy-level performance. When the client is one dominant principal who has granted broad authority, the usual external checks are weaker still. That creates room for both scummy but legal fee capture and for misappropriation.

My theory is that he ended up as the nexus/fall guy of some kind of slush fund for, at a guess, one or multiple state intelligence agencies. Maybe Mossad, CIA, or whatever.

This is retrofitting a few nothingburgers. If you take every awkward fact, supply the most elaborate remaining narrative that can absorb them, and treat the absence of contradiction as support, BOOM. A very coherent conspiracy. Aggressive, secretive insider trading run for the benefit of one or more state agencies is possible in principle. It is also an extremely complex, high risk activity. Professional intelligence services already have established channels for moving and growing covert funds. Inserting a flamboyant, sexually reckless, attention seeking private operator as the central node adds operational risk without obvious compensating advantage.

The thing is IT DID generate such records, there were various leaks and both victims and staffers occasionally coming forward to add details, although it was mostly about the sex trafficking stuff.

Two of the four witnesses in the Maxwell trial, Annie Farmer and Anouska De Georgiou, were found NOT to have suffered illegal sexual activity. Check out this whole thread and the links within the comment.

It remains unclear why else he'd have gotten such a sweetheart deal when he was pretty well dead to rights on various serious charges

They did not have him dead to rights. Many of the encounters involved teenagers who were themselves part of the recruiting network. Many of them admitted to lying about being 18 and also instructed the new recruits to lie as well. That creates credibility and motivation issues at trial. Witnesses who were paid, who brought others, who gave changing accounts, or who had their own exposure. The lead detective’s later deposition makes the difficulty explicit:

WEINBERG: So Ms. [redacted] did not engage in prostitution, but others did, during the course of the investigation?

RECAREY: I wouldn’t say others did. It’s a negotiation. If you’re paying for a sex act, it’s a negotiation. You get X for Y.

WEINBERG: So that if the negotiation was purely for a topless massage, then there was no prostitution?

RECAREY: Not in my eyes, no.

WEINBERG: So in your eyes, were any of the so-called victim/witnesses, did any of them engage in prostitution?

RECAREY: Do you mean since that time, or—

WEINBERG: Well, let’s start with that time, when Mr. Epstein was the customer. Were any of the women going to his house engaging in prostitution, in your opinion?

RECAREY: In my opinion?

WEINBERG: Yes.

RECAREY: No.

WEINBERG: And that included those who were going to his house who were above 18 as well as below 18, correct?

RECAREY: Like I was told, people that I interviewed that were above 18, what happened between them were between two consenting adults.

WEINBERG: And in fact, had some of these girls that went there who were under 18, had they been over 18, then this entire case would have been a consenting massage case, correct?

RECAREY: If they were over 18?

WEINBERG: Yes.

RECAREY: That it would have just been what, a massage case, you said?

WEINBERG: It would have been a case between two consenting adults, other than prostitution.

RECAREY: Unless we got a complaint.

Then there was the difficulty of reconstructing specific acts years later, and the risk that a jury would see a messy, transactional, partially consensual-appearing activity rather than the forced commercial enterprise the more serious statutes contemplate. The case wasn't unwinnable, but not without risks. Prosecutors genuinely feared Epstein might get an acquittal in 2007. So what happened 12 years later? The Trafficking Victims Protection Act became more elastic and more aggressively used in the intervening years. Witness availability, civil litigation, and political attention had also changed.

Finally, the NPA was hardly a "sweetheart" deal. Sex offender registry is not a gentle slap on the wrist, not in Florida of all places. It restricts housing, employment, travel, and ordinary social life in general. Sure, he was not yet the global symbol he became after 2019, but the relevant circles already knew him as a rich man who had taken a sex offense plea involving minors and was required to register. That status limited certain forms of respectability even if it did not expel him from every elite room.

I am not convinced that he was doing everything with primary motivation of maintaining his own lifestyle at that level indefinitely. At some point, it would be easier to 'retire' to Eastern Europe or Thailand or something if you just want to molest teenage girls constantly with minimal risk.

My take is that he was just stupid. Norms were different. The girls consistently say they claimed to be 18. He was reckless and didn't check IDs well. Often they brought fake IDs. I think he thought he wasn't going to get caught. Then when he did he correctly predicted he would get a reasonable, survivable sentence, since it was 2008 and nobody was woke yet. He then failed to predict the government would betray him after radical feminism leveled up over the next 10 years. Ghislaine Maxwell failed to predict she would be the next target. As a French citizen, all she had to do was fly to France when Epstein was arrested and move several million to a French account and be content to hang out with Polanski for the rest of her life. Nope. She thought the media was the only thing to fear so she hid out in New Hampshire with some security guards. She must have been surprised when she found out the United States is no longer the «free country» she grew up in through the harsh reality of the cuffs going on and never coming off. My only conclusion is they were boomers that thought they had freedom and still lived in 1976. At this point Europe may be poorer but it is substantially freer.

At this point Europe may be poorer but it is substantially freer.

Only on this one axis (of dubious value IMO). They don't have free speech, guns, or a Fourth/Fifth Amendment.

Fourth/Fifth Amendment.

I believe this is a big part of the axis we are discussing, and they have better privacy and due process in most countries than the US now. Many European countries have guns (as if that's important), and they have almost as much free speech as the US. I will say the US wins on free speech due to only the topic of HBD and no other topic, although that can be done remotely so doesn't matter. Just do your free speech in English from US servers while living in Europe if talking about race is really that important (That's the only topic they lose on in free speech). Fun fact is most of the HBD intellectual sphere is based in Europe and, there are no hate speech arrests, in part because they do this.

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My take is that he was just stupid.

Objectively, he hobnobbed with some incredibly smart people, some of whom openly considered him a friend.

I consider that Bayesian evidence against him being stupid, despite his lack of credentials.

Either way, those smart people had some reason to be around him, and he probably could have gotten some advice from them to further his own goals, so this doesn't really change my read.

My model of the situation doesn't have him as the genius mastermind, anyway.

I consider that Bayesian evidence against him being stupid, despite his lack of credentials.

In terms of his general intelligence, I concur. It was at least top 10% in the nation, which is hard to call stupid. Nonetheless, it was foolish. Considering he stopped what he was doing I think he must have realized it eventually. As for the later arrest, old people decline and regardless tend to stay stuck in the past. He still modeled the US government like it was a reasonable and fair entity, as worked in 2008 and before. He was not ahead of the curve with updating to it being more of a USSR-style tyranny where nearly every sentence is close to life unless you're a common criminal, and deals can't be trusted because they won't be honored. Which is exactly what happened to him. In a very USSR style way, the state threw out their deal to not prosecute over the events before 2008 and only in jail did he realize it would be like being shipped off to Siberia, not like facing a fair trial with a humane, 8th amendment respecting sentence.

I don't know how many arrests will have to be made for fake «very serious» crimes that were most definitely not very serious 50 years ago will have to be made, based on witnesses that are testifying about events from so long ago that under a reasonable statute of limitations it would be inadmissible, who are also getting paid or looking to make money from lucrative parallel lawsuits, until people with superior options and exposure to this kind of thing flee like it's East Germany and start hanging out wherever else, non-Anglo Europe mostly, maybe Dubai and adjacent places. Andrew Tate is a recent example. He reasoned with Romania, he will likely not reason with the UK, to whom he was shipped to by «United States federal law enforcement» for «very serious» crimes. And if he does, should he come back to the US, that will be his last mistake, because a sealed federal indictment (very Soviet of the United States) will be waiting for him and one day he will disappear into federal prison never to come back out.

Epstein was a millionaire, not a billionaire.

The best published estimates of Epstein's peak net worth are around $350 million.

Epstein's main source of wealth is his relationship with Les Wexner, who founded L Brands, a retail empire which ended up owning (among other brands) Victoria's Secret, Abercromie & Fitch, and Bath & Body Works. Googling suggests Wexner had a peak net worth of $9.6 billion, so Epstein got about 4% of it. Epstein was, over a 20-year period, managing basically all Wexner's assets apart from his L Brands stock, as well as large parts of his personal life.

It is just about plausible that Epstein was exploiting Wexner's trust to charge ridiculously high fees (charging 2-and-20 to buy leveraged S&P futures is a good living if you can get it) to manage Wexner's non-L Brands assets and made the $350 million in a legal-but-scuzzy way. It is also possible, and in my view more likely given Epstein's history of criminality, that he was embezzling. But you don't need a non-Wexner sources of dirty money to explain Epstein's wealth.

Incidentally, Wexner met Epstein before Maxwell did (1987 vs "early 1990's") and was deeply involved in pro-Israel activism, so if Epstein was a Mossad asset it makes a lot more sense that Wexner rather than Maxwell made the initial contacts. Top conspiracy theory is that of course Wexner did not in fact display uncharacteristic naivety in his relationship with his majordomo, and was in fact deliberately overpaying Epstein as a way of paying him under the table for his work for Israel. (I'm not sure why I don't believe this one - it actually makes a lot of sense).

I don’t think the full truth of Wexner and Epstein’s relationship will come out for a while, if ever. My understanding is that Wexner was always zionist (as zionism generally becomes more fervent the smaller a jewish community is outside of israel, growing up in ohio probably made him moreso than most), but that Epstein pushed him to become more involved in galas, events, the MEGA group in part as way to expand Epstein’s own social circle. He did this with plenty of secular / non-Jewish civic events too, hence the endless pictures of Epstein at everything, but that was part of it.

But the money isn’t particularly interesting. Israel in the late 80s and early 90s was poor, much poorer than most other developed countries. GDP per capita was half that of the UK for example, which Israel has now overtaken. The Mossad did not have hundreds of millions of dollars to spare to channel through Wexner or anybody, if they had the money by whatever means, they had other things to spend it on instead of a vague 40 year influence operation with as yet completely unclear outcomes led by a compulsive liar with no real loyalty to Israel beyond his ethnicity (and given even Israeli Jews have been arrested for spying for Iran in the most recent war, that’s hardly a guarantee).

A real diversified retail conglomerate type billionaire with (unlike say a lot of tech billionaires) a lot of relatively liquid assets is a whale fall event for anyone who has any proximity to the money, especially in a decade when equities returned like 500%. 2 and 20 was more than enough, even with Epstein making relatively poor financial decisions (and he mostly seems to have just handed Wexner’s money to a few big Wall Street banks, which would have made him one of their largest and most lucrative wealth management clients ever - since other people with that net worth would have more competent family offices unwilling to hand $20m a year to JP Morgan to do nothing) he could siphon several hundred million dollars.

His net worth actually seems to have peaked in 2008, but he lost a lot of money in the crash having invested in some CLO funds.

The Mossad did not have hundreds of millions of dollars to spare to channel through Wexner or anybody, if they had the money by whatever means, they had other things to spend it on instead of a vague 40 year influence operation with as yet completely unclear outcomes led by a compulsive liar with no real loyalty to Israel beyond his ethnicity

I think I agree with you there - if Wexner was paying Epstein to run a Mossad-linked blackmail ring, he was using his own money and not Mossad's.

Googling suggests Wexner had a peak net worth of $9.6 billion, so Epstein got about 4% of it. Epstein was, over a 20-year period, managing basically all Wexner's assets apart from his L Brands stock, as well as large parts of his personal life.

It is just about plausible that Epstein was exploiting Wexner's trust to charge ridiculously high fees (charging 2-and-20 to buy leveraged S&P futures is a good living if you can get it) to manage Wexner's non-L Brands assets and made the $350 million in a legal-but-scuzzy way.

Did he even need to charge that much? 0.25% of $9.6 billion is still $24 mil annually, and over 20 years... hell, if anything, only charging a 0.25% AUM fee would have probably been seen as too low to have value by someone with that worth.

Most of Wexner's net worth was his L Brands stock, which Epstein won't have been taking a management fee on. If Wexner was like other founder-CEOs his non-L brands net worth would have been less than a billion for most of the period.

If Wexner was paying Epstein a management fee on his own stock in his own company of which he was the full-time founder-CEO, we are back in the territory of "Wexner was using fund management fees to pay Epstein under the table for something else"

I'm not sure why I don't believe this one - it actually makes a lot of sense

For one, this theory is notably light on specifics. What was the work performed? What information was obtained, and what outcomes were achieved? And why was this particular channel chosen over more conventional ones? Absent those details, it functions more as a way of making the residual awkwardness of the relationship feel intentional rather than foolish.

Someone needs to do an old-school Glenn Beck-style chalkboard conspiracy diagram connecting everyone in the SF effective altruism/AI community. Daniela Amodei (Dario’s sister) is married to GiveWell and Open Philanthropy founder Holden Karnofsky. Im not sure what this means, but I’m sure it means something.

A charitable person could argue that it's because the average AI researcher didn't know that Epstein was a convicted sex offender after his public trial and conviction in 2011, but I don't buy that. I was a dumb 20-something in 2011 and I knew about it. It was in the newspapers. It was on the news on the TVs at the gym

I really don't think this is true. In fact, you don't even remember the year correctly. It did have some news coverage but not much and basically nobody cared. The story started to pick up steam with the weird-online-right years later with pizzagate, it became a mainstream right wing talking point during biden but mainstream media continued to mostly avoid it until last year.

Even on google trends you can see that few were interested before he died. Bill Gates for reference.

It's very possible that for those people Epstein was just this guy with access to money that knew everyone. He had served a sentence but he was fully discharged and it was for getting a massage from a girl he might or might not have known to be underage, so whatever.

Over the last few decades, utilitarianism really seems to have taken over popular discussions of ethics. Sometimes I wonder if that doesn't represent a failure of ethics in itself. As far as ethical systems go, Utilitarianism is easy to hack. Ignoring second order effects, choosing peculiar utility functions, using unrealistic time scales - it's all wrapped up together

Ethics its one of the most bullshit branches of philosophy. All ethics needs to conform to your gut feeling of what is right and wrong and since that's not based on any a priori simple rule system they all need to be malleable enough to be made to conform. Outside of completely irrelevant thought experiments they also all end up being homomorph. How about we pretend they were christian? It says in the book of virtues that rape is bad but you also have to forgive, he paid penance, he shows contrition, Mary Magdalene and shit. There you go.

At the end of the day many evangelicals vote for an adulterer who grabs em by the pussy, why? Because there are other considerations, more important things. Ethics needs to be flexible, to bend which ever way. This is a good thing actually. The worst people in the world were the ones that took ethics seriously enough to suppress their gut instinct.

This seems most plausible. However...

It did have some news coverage but not much and basically nobody cared.

I CARED.

I was in high school circa 2007, and I only really had an awareness of it because it happened right near my hometown so it was more featured in local newspapers, which I read voraciously at that age. And I mean the actual, physical paper.

And even then the coverage was rudimentary in terms of explaining what was happening. Dude was allegedly soliciting, possibly banging 16 year olds. In that neck of the woods, occasionally a socialite goes down for that.

So the story about some relatively mysterious, wealthy guy doing pervy old guy stuff wasn't the talk of the town. But me, reading virtually ALL the news about it... noticed the strange circumstances surrounding the situation, including the extremely light-handed sentencing and the odd level of privileges the guy was getting. By 2010, the guy was holding secret meetings at Harvard WHILE ON PROBATION.

And then weird dots that nobody ever actually put together but there was enough out there to put my spidey sense tingling in 2006-2008:

https://archive.is/CATIy

https://web.archive.org/web/20110616194257/http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2006/08/14/m1a_EPSTEIN_0814.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20120514032017/http://www.page2live.com/2007/09/12/lewinsky-prosecutor-joins-defense-of-clinton-crony/

https://web.archive.org/web/20080209131505/http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2008/02/06/0206EPSTEIN.html

Note how almost all of those are under the "local news" category.

The "Original" Epstein list was A journal with the names of the girls he predated that turned up after sentencing.

From a 2006 article:

Epstein was different from most sexual abuse suspects; he was far more powerful. He counted among his friends former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew, along with some of the most prominent legal, scientific and business minds in the country.

When detectives started asking questions and teenage girls started talking, a wave of legal resistance followed.

If Palm Beach police didn't know quite who Jeffrey Epstein was, they found out soon enough.

Epstein, now 53, was a quintessential man of mystery. He amassed his fortune and friends quietly, always in the background as he navigated New York high society.

All of this was open and known in 2006. It wasn't like he died in 2019 and suddenly all his connections to celebs came out. At literally NO POINT during any of this did the man himself ever make any public appearance or plea or otherwise attempt to preserve his reputation IT WAS LIKE HE DID NOT CARE if people thought he was a sexual predator. And as you can see from OP's post, apparently many a prominent person did NOT care... assuming they knew. Google was a thing and fairly popular at the time.

Compare that to the New York Times Article when he got sentenced, and how it skimps on details that were more prominent in the local stories.

Look, I read a lot of mystery books in my youth, lot of Sherlock Holmes, Hardy Boys... Scooby Doo. I could sense there was a lot to this story and also that someone(s) were very interested in keeping it tamped down. On the superficial level this fits a "rich guy escapes legal consequences" narrative alright, but there's a lot of missing pieces or pieces that do not fit. Then 10 years later he dies, Covid happens, Pizzagate, many events occur in rapid succession, oh and Ghislaine Maxwell is found hiding out in New Hampshire with armed, private security and yet still, nobody was able to effectively put together the full picture of exactly WHAT this guy's deal was, and who kept the lid on it. Not even me. Its a question I plan to ask God about should I arrive at the Pearly Gates, even if I'm denied entry I REALLY WANT TO KNOW. And if I'm denied I hopefully can go and ask the guy personally.

In my country, a guy raped 4 girls and sexually violated 1, and his sentence was a 9 month home detention. The guy went on to commit MORE sexual assaults against underage girls just hours after his bail. And this is not a billionaire heir or some politician's son. It's not unusual for serious offences to be sentenced lightly due to messy legal technicalities.

Regarding Epstein, Michael Tracey has multiple write ups on what the investigation was really about, and why prosecutors reached the NPA. Basically, the case carried real evidentiary and legal risks, including problems with victim credibility, the difficulty of proving the newer “trafficking” elements, and the lead detective’s own later testimony that much of the conduct did not meet his definition of prostitution or coercion. In that context, securing a state guilty plea, registration as a sex offender, and a jail term (however work-release-heavy) was not an inexplicable gift. It was a negotiated outcome in a messy, winnable-but-risky case involving a wealthy defendant with top counsel.

Look, I read a lot of mystery books in my youth, lot of Sherlock Holmes, Hardy Boys... Scooby Doo

Well, there you go. Most real life villains are a lot less smart, calculating and I suppose, more boring than Professor Moriarty. Perhaps it's narrative attractive to treat gaps, coincidences, and preferential treatment as deliberate clues pointing to a hidden master plan. Real life problems are more mundane and ironically more frustrating. Uneven institutional responses, weak or compromised witnesses, and later narrative inflation that rearranges the same facts into something tighter and more cinematic than they ever were.

It's not unusual for serious offences to be sentenced lightly due to messy legal technicalities.

In Florida, it is, if you're as dead to rights as Epstein looked. We're one of the few states that still executes people with regularity. We recently expanded the death penalty to certain sex crimes against children. This ABSOLUTELY would have included Epstein's charges back in the day.

"Funny" coincidence, in Palm Beach County (i.e. where all this Epstein Drama unfolded) they JUST TODAY arrested the County Clerk of Courts himself for child sexual abuse. I do NOT expect this guy to get off easy despite his prominence and connections.

Happy to place bets on or at least follow up on that outcome.

There's even another high profile case involving an obscenely wealthy defendant that happened sort of around the time the Epstein legal drama unfolded where they happily prosecuted him and secured a conviction despite many legal shenanigans and pulling in elite legal counsel. I also followed that one closely back in the day. His ass is still in prison, although he's getting released in the not-too-distant future. Hmmm.

I posit that even with a 'weak' case, not even getting to the case teed up for trial is pretty odd for Florida, and VERY odd to give him a deal that, in effect, FULLY ACCOMMODATED his ability to keep doing whatever he did to make money.

Uneven institutional responses, weak or compromised witnesses, and later narrative inflation that rearranges the same facts into something tighter and more cinematic than they ever were.

They also create the exact conditions that would allow a moderately competent, highly connected conspiracy to delay detection and disruption. Just sayin'.

However I don't think the 'real story' is going to be all that cinematic, honestly. I do think money that flowed through him was probably used for some 'interesting' stuff, but his role in it all might be comparatively mundane.

they JUST TODAY arrested the County Clerk of Courts himself for child sexual abuse. I do NOT expect this guy to get off easy despite his prominence and connections.

He has no relevant connections, it's 20 years later, and it's a different crime. This guy molested a little kid. All his connections are local and are generally the type of people to drop a connection once the other person has been arrested for child molestation. Epstein had massages with teenagers, and naturally his rich friends did not care.

There's even another high profile case involving an obscenely wealthy defendant that happened sort of around the time the Epstein legal drama unfolded where they happily prosecuted him and secured a conviction despite many legal shenanigans and pulling in elite legal counsel I also followed that one closely back in the day. His ass is still in prison, although he's getting released in the not-too-distant future. Hmmm.

He's been in prison for 14 years for a car accident. I don't think he'll do it again. Anyway the difference here is that Epstein's investigation went on for a long time because the case was complex and relied on many witnesses. During this time he hired private investigators to discredit the witnesses, and many witnesses recanted or changed their stories. He also had plenty of time to privately investigate the officials investigating him. Despite this, and knowing that a jury trial would be difficult because their evidence was terrible, the government still did not drop the charges. Ultimately, he spent more than enough time in prison for his crimes and stopped doing them afterwards. Regardless, the government lied to him and just 10 years after getting out of prison, reopened the case wherein he killed himself because he knew they would give him life in prison as revenge. Ghislaine Maxwell is sitting in prison for essentially the rest of her life right now for chauffeuring a few girls from point A to point B for Epstein.

Anyway the difference here is that Epstein's investigation went on for a long time because the case was complex and relied on many witnesses.

Well, it was also MASSIVE in terms of the apparent number of victims and the guy was intentionally elusive. It is entirely possible, though unlikely, that I was personally acquainted with some of the girls involved. They had to scout out when his plane was at the airport and they had the trash pickup company turning over his garbage to the cops as part of the process.

The sheer number of charges they could in theory have brought should have given an appreciable chance of at least a few of them sticking. The federal indictment had like 60.

Regardless, the government lied to him and just 10 years after getting out of prison

Point of fact, he never went to prison until 2019, which is part of the oddity here.

From the wiki:

While most convicted sex offenders in Florida are sent to state prison, Epstein was instead housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County Stockade, a minimum security detention facility. 113  Epstein was housed at the Stockade's previously unstaffed infirmary, after agreeing to cover the cost of security to watch him. Costs totaled around $128,000, which he covered through the Florida Science Foundation, a foundation he created shortly before reporting to jail.

It is really not clear why, in addition to the plea being lenient, he was functionally able to dictate terms to the point his life was minimally interrupted. I know of no precedent to this.

So from my perspective "I notice that I am confused." Whatever secretive talks happened to get to this point (and the fact that they're secretive isn't odd, all plea bargain discussions are kept completely secret) somehow he got virtually everything he could possibly have wanted whilst still technically eating a 'punishment.' I have to imagine the leverage on his side was substantial, far and beyond the prosecution merely having a 'weak' case.

I mean, my opinion is that prosecutors don't like going to trial as a general rule, but they are also accustomed to wielding punishments as a bludgeon to get the defendant to back down.

Or maybe he gave them a full on Saul Goodman speech and rolled Nat 20 on persuasion?

And now we have a comparable case with Diddy, too. They stuck him on two minor counts and gave him 4.5 years. Harvey Weinstein caught 16 years. R. Kelly finally went down for 30. Is that because we're now living in the post #metoo era that enforcement has ramped up, and that's why Epstein got picked up the second time?

The sheer number of charges they could in theory have brought should have given an appreciable chance of at least a few of them sticking. The federal indictment had like 60.

Fair tactic in the United States in 2026. It's possible in 2007 that the look of tyranny would have been too embarrassing, so they did not go with the Soviet path of just charging him with every crime they can think of and making him defend himself on 70 counts at a trial where the judge has been picked to gag his attorneys and forbid him from using exculpatory evidence and lines of defense, as is extremely common now.

It is really not clear why, aside from the plea being lenient, he was functionally able to dictate terms to the point his life was minimally interrupted. I know of no precedent to this.

In his interview with Steve Bannon he discusses how his life was in fact more than minimally interrupted. He was in fact incarcerated and was not allowed to work or take calls. For example, he was inside during the crash of 2008 and could not participate save through a couple of standard collection-calls from the jail. It is not unclear why he was housed in the jail -- he secured it as a part of his plee. It is in fact common and not unprecedented for people who are going to do time who are negotiating to request where they do time. Facilities differ a lot and typically if someone is taking a plea deal for a specific amount of time for a crime that can receive minimal security imprisonment, they in fact try to secure placement at such a facility. Epstein's reason for this was multi-faceted. First off, the good-old idea that sex offenders get killed in jail. Not exactly true in all cases, but every stereotype is based on something. Second, that myth is aggravated in Epstein's case: everyone would have known what he was in for. He was infamous. Third, which he discusses in the interview, his money. He was going to be a target for his money. At the jail he was always asked for money, intimidated for money. Everyone knew he was rich. That is why he worked to secure imprisonment where he did. Why should the government insist on him serving time specifically in state prison? So he can receive more than the agreed-to sentence in the form of beatings, being shived, etc?

So from my perspective "I notice that I am confused." Whatever secretive talks happened to get to this point (and the fact that they're secretive isn't odd, all plea bargain discussions are kept completely secret) somehow he got virtually everything he could possibly have wanted whilst still technically eating a 'punishment.'

You should read this report on the original case and the plea deal.

I mean, my opinion is that prosecutors don't like going to trial as a general rule, but they are also accustomed to wielding punishments as a bludgeon to get the defendant to back down.

Especially when in a time and place that values liberty and due process significantly more than now, while also facing an excellent defense team, prosecutors must offer a plea deal that is worth taking. It is not legal for them to tell the judge what to sentence. It is not legal for them to intimidate someone out of their right to a trial. In fact that violates a federal law called conspiracy against rights and it is a felony that is suppose to have a sentence of up to 10 years in federal prison. Many prosecutors and judges may be guilty of this crime today, but in 2008 I'm guessing it was less.

Law and Order made an Epstein episode of trafficking underage girls in 2011. Knowledge or a belief that he was doing more has been out there a lot longer. They just didn’t care.

Law and Order isn’t red tribe or even blue tribe. And obviously they eventually turned establishment woke. The idea he was doing more has been out there a long time. And they also got him out of trouble thru high level military/intelligence connections.

At the end of the day many evangelicals vote for an adulterer who grabs em by the pussy, why?

They don't even mind adultery as long as she's not 17.

It's very possible that for those people Epstein was just this guy with access to money that knew everyone. He had served a sentence but he was fully discharged and it was for getting a massage from a girl he might or might not have known to be underage, so whatever.

The issue at hand is the same people that don't mind adultery think that over a year in jail and life on the sex offender registry is not enough negative utils to compensate for the negative utils done to the underage girl who participated in the massage. This is despite the fact she said she did it willingly. To me, her utils couldn't have been that negative; she could have simply stopped coming. Surely something like 10 days in confinement would make up for her discomfort, so I think Epstein got a super disincentivizing sentence. And indeed, all the evidence I can find suggests he quit his activities after getting out of jail. So, the problem was solved, insofar as there was one. But for some reason, many people think he should have received somewhere near life in prison, and, lacking that, he ought to have been persona non grata while out of prison, and anybody who does or feels otherwise is guilty.

Surely something like 10 days in confinement would make up for her discomfort, so I think Epstein got a super disincentivizing sentence.

The issue is the long term psychological effect, not immediate discomfort.

A lot can be said about this. First off, shouldn't we be sure that exists before destroying someone's life over it? I have seen no convincing evidence for «Freudian» psycho trauma from consensual sex. Generally people forget a lot of what happens after 5 or so years, so it makes no sense that initial discomfort, or even joy, would somehow turn into long-term agony. If we weigh Epstein's rights against the science but are still super careful about justice for the girl, assuming should could experience double the discomfort over the years by thinking back to her experience with Epstein and feeling some lingering discomfort, we could up his sentence to 20 or 30 days, a whopping 2x to 3x increase. Decades is still not plausible; each girl would have to cut her wrists every day for decades over Epstein for that to add up, which they do not do.

Second off, head-on. Turns out the only study on this I can find is Rind et al. You can read about here. It says there is no negative long term psychological effects from behavior like Epstein's on young teens.

Third off, what is actually happening. I don't know for sure. But I like to read the women's side of things because I think something creepy is going on here. Consider Virgina Roberts. Being harsh with Epstein makes sense if and only if he caused her suicide. He did not cause her suicide, and it would be heavily premotivated bad science to say otherwise. She comes from a long line of mentally ill women who have high-heritability extreme mental illnesses. That's why she was involved in psychiatry, not because she partied as a teen with a billionaire who treated her as a full-on girlfriend and showered her with gifts (the horror). All I will say now is I see this pattern play out in other cases, like Christine Blasey Ford. She was genetically mentally ill and started seeing a therapist decades after her alleged encounter with now-Justice Kavanaugh. They somehow arrived at the idea that her innate sickness was caused by decades-earlier bad sex that she had mostly forgotten. Memories are then «unearthed» ... the Satanic Panic worked the same way except it claimed to unearth stuff that we're pretty sure did not even happen. Now the fad is to do the unearthing with stuff that probably did happen but which is not in a million years plausibly traumatic. Part of all this may be the blank slate and its consequences. When you look at men like a Darwinist you can feel bad for Epstein, and when you look at women like a Darwinist you can roll your eyes at a lot of his accusers. When you believe a mishmash of mumbo jumbo about the human mind, maybe you do really get caught up in the idea that a horny man is a wicked Satan and a crying woman is a traumatized damsel. It becomes easier to ignore the huge restitution fund which empirically was useful at producing those tears decades after the fact (they weren't exactly forthcoming before its existence, cf Michael Tracey on this).

And the last point, a comparison to my childhood traumas, which nobody cares about. Did you know that summer break lowers the suicide rate a significant amount? And, if I recall correctly, yes, it is caused by school letting out, because the same happens on Christmas break too. It's not the seasons, or the weather, or anything else. And the timing varies between location based on the school schedule. Despite Caplan's work, people apparently think this is a worthy sacrifice. In fact I know of at least one girl who killed herself over some drama at school. Plausibly summer break would have saved her. I have never heard of a girl killing herself over consensually dating an older man. It would seem our trauma priorities are suspiciously selective on top of being empirically weak.

Given Epstein can no longer provide any personal accounts, I'm not sure we can really take much from this. Maybe he was really interested in AI and thus was naturally responsive to funding discussions. Maybe utilitarian AI researchers thought a somewhat disgraced financier was a good target. Maybe he received a normal amount of contacts from AI researchers and if we went through the emails of all the big VCs and private investors we'd find a similar number of emails from AI people.

I'm sure we have a fair few people here who have done the start-up funding gamut and could say the same, but for me getting the attention of potential funders is a pure numbers game (it's apparently much easier in the US compared to my experience in the UK, but still). There are only a small number of rich people and VCs, and a very large number of potential funding projects. You'll do anything to get a call back or a bit of interest. Some Epstein guy sends you an email? Get in, and he's rich. GoGoGo. It's only later you might bother to look into him.

Overall, I'm not sure what to think about this. It feels like a targeted hit piece. I'm a cynical man, and my gut feeling is that it's a shot at pulling Amodei out of the big chair at Anthropic

Not sure on this. It could be, but it doesn't feel nearly salacious enough. I'd imagine it's much more likely that muckrackers are looking in general for pieces like this on the major AI founders and this was one of the more interesting, and publishable tidbits, as opposed to something targeted.

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.

So either they were incompetent, or chose to interact with the publicly convicted sex offender anyway.

They probably chose it. So what? Here's what was in the media at the time:

Investment banker, science patron, self-made billionaire, philanthropist and former math teacher Jeffrey Epstein can add a new title to his impressive resume – convicted sex offender.

The Manhattan moneyman appeared in a Florida courthouse today where he pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage prostitute, and immediately began serving an 18-month jail term, which will be followed by one year of “community confinement,” which is essentially house arrest.

As a result of the plea deal, Epstein, 55, will be placed on the national sex offender registry.

...

His spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, said, “Mr. Epstein accepted responsibility for the charges relating to conduct that occurred several years ago” and “fully resolved his case.”

Under the terms of the plea deal, Epstein will have to undergo an HIV test by Wednesday, with the results being handed over to his victim, identified in court papers as “Jane Doe.”

Doe was a 14-year-old high school student when Epstein paid her $200 for a massage at his Palm Beach mansion in early 2005. In court papers, she said he used a vibrator on her while he masturbated.

The guilty plea came after protracted negotiations and a lengthy investigation by Palm Beach police, who were investigating the virtual conga line of young women that Epstein had going in and out of his 13,000 square fooBt mansion.

Epstein, who’s rubbed elbows with the likes of Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump over the years, could have faced up to five years in prison if convicted at trial.

...

Epstein maintains he thought all the girls who were brought over to his house were 18 or over, and that they knew the massages would be “erotic.”

Why is it an invalid opinion that Epstein didn't know the girl was under 18? Why should polyamorist AI researchers care that he had a litany of young women in his mansion? Why would it be anybody's duty to not socialize with him after he's out of jail and served his time?

Why is it an invalid opinion that Epstein didn't know the girl was under 18?

(1) Because of course if the guy is guilty, the first thing the defence will try is "Your honour, my client had no idea this girl was not [quick, what's the legal age of consent here?] 16/18/21"

(2) Epstein liked them 14 or so. He liked them 18 as well, but he had track record of being inappropriate with younger girls, from his time at the Dalton school (where he also made his first contacts with parents who could get him referrals to finance jobs*). A guy who can pay for 'em young and is interested in 'em young will damn well know the difference between 14 and 18, even just to complain to the pimp or procuress "you tried to pawn off that older girl on me last time, don't try it this time, I'm paying for 15 so I want 15".

Now, there can be reasonable mistakes as to age. Girls can dress and act and use makeup to make themselves look older. Ages of consent vary within countries and between countries. But Epstein had too many encounters of that kind to brush it off as "he genuinely thought she was 18 and not 14".

Ms. Kitziger said she became close to Mr. Epstein at a time when she was struggling at home with her parents’ divorce. She confided in him, and remembered him as caring and attentive.

“He listened,” Ms. Kitziger recalled. “I was a 14-year-old and he helped me through a time when there wasn’t anybody else to talk to. I felt like he really cared that I was having a rough go.”

She stressed that Mr. Epstein was always professional with her.

But other students, including Millicent Young, a graduate of the school’s 1976 class, saw things differently. Ms. Young never had Mr. Epstein as a teacher, but the school was small enough that she would spend time around him. She recalled observing Mr. Epstein flirting with the girls at the school, which drew her attention because it was so different from how other teachers behaved.

“There was a real clarity of the inappropriateness of the behavior — that this isn’t how adult male teachers conduct themselves,” Ms. Young said.

Epstein was 21 to 23 years of age while he taught at the Dalton school. Now, maybe a 22 year old male teacher really is interested in being a big brother to a 14 year old girl student. Or maybe his interest was less benign. We don't know, since the girl says nothing happened, but he was certainly getting a reputation for hanging around the students. He was of course young himself, not very much older than the oldest students, but 'attending parties where there is underage drinking' is not professional behaviour, even in the sense of protecting yourself from being involved in any complaints should the parents find out the kids are boozing and partying:

Another student, who also requested anonymity, fearing reprisals from Mr. Epstein, recalled seeing Mr. Epstein at a high school party in an apartment on the Upper East Side where students were drinking and socializing. Mr. Epstein was the only teacher there, which raised eyebrows among the students.

“It was weird,” said another former student, Paul Grossman, a 1978 graduate who did not attend the party but remembered hearing about it. “Everyone talked about it,” he said.

*In early 1976, Epstein attended an art event where he met a Dalton father who worked on Wall Street. The man thought Epstein was "wasting his time" at Dalton, given his knowledge of mathematics, and rang Alan Greenberg – a senior executive at Bear Stearns – to recommend a potential hire. The timing was suitable, as Epstein was soon dismissed from Dalton due to poor performance.

Why is it an invalid opinion that Epstein didn't know the girl was under 18?

Mens rea doesn't matter in religious crimes.

(The religion in question is functionally just "sex is bad and women have no agency", exactly as evolution dictates. 18 is just the compromise number; the religious wanted it at infinity but it was unworkable.)

1 out of 2 ain't that bad. as far as being right about fundamental axioms on which to structure your society goes.

You’re telling me that having a low Epstein number isn’t all that exclusive a club?

These files follow the same statistical rules as Scott’s classic post about Atlantis. The central example of “links to Epstein” is somebody who went to his creepy island and spent time with some teenage girls. The more you expand that definition, the more people are going to fit into it, but the less meaningful it gets. Marrying someone who once pitched him a business opportunity is a much wider circle.

I think your last point is right. This is at the intersection of several cultural bubbles, which elevates it from trivial to gossip-worthy. Don’t draw too many conclusions from it, you know?

Lmao I bet I have an Epstein number under 3 via Moot.

My Epstein number is 2 via multiple routes, so everyone reading this comment is a 3. The conspiracy is bigger than anyone imagined!

Mine is also 2, counting only people I've actually interacted with in real life.

Most Barclays employees are going to be at 3 (Peon -> MD -> Jes Staley -> Epstein)

Anyone with a Clinton number of 2 has an Epstein number of 3, and that is a lot of people.

The guy was one of the best-connected people on the planet - he makes Paul Erdos and Kevin Bacon look like nobodies.

You’re telling me that having a low Epstein number isn’t all that exclusive a club?

After running those searches, my main takeaways were:

  1. God damn Epstein really liked AI
  2. Academics will go to insane lengths to secure funding.

Which reminds me: I hope you’ve read the latest Bay Area House Party.

This would be funny if I hadn't just read the piece on leverage research.

At some point if you want to play six degrees of separation, why don’t you just throw in Jimmy Hoffa and the Pope while you’re at it? I mean what’s the point of all this to say? Elites rub shoulders with elites? The implication being there’s a super secret underground cabal of pedo’s who enslave children with AI and flock cameras? At least for the time being, we can say that ended with Epstein until they find the next pedo ring somewhere. I don’t get how people get caught up in this stuff. I’m something of a believer in the concept of “guilt by association” too, but even then it doesn’t always mean just because I sent someone an email or stood with them in the same room that it’s evidence of a crime.

I can never prove it but I suspect that obsession with Epstein and everyone around him getting a comeuppance has more do with the plebs not being invited to the party. So f**k em all, ya know? And let Zeus, who demands a modicum or respect for even beggars, sort 'em out. (Yes I just Odyssey last night.)

Zeus is the perfect pantheon head, he smites heathens with lightning, he sleeps with your King's wife shape shifted as you are waging some bullshit war, to spite you. He shapeshifts into a horse to seduce maidens. Truly the Mediterraneans had it figured out.

Zeus was a visionary. Bro had the whole female zoophilia thing figured out eons before “dogpill” was coined as a phrase and when the seven-foot-tall minotaur could only be found in a labyrinth and not in romance novels.

To be fair the whore of Babylon was getting wet reminiscing the transgressions of her youth and the heathen (checks notes...) Egyptians and their horse sized dongs.

That was a fictional woman from the OT representing Jerusalem, not the Whore of Babylon from Revelation.

Ezekiel 23:
1 The word of the Lord came to me:
2 “Son of man, there were two women, daughters of the same mother.
3 They became prostitutes in Egypt, engaging in prostitution from their youth. In that land their breasts were fondled and their virgin bosoms caressed.
4 The older was named Oholah, and her sister was Oholibah. They were mine and gave birth to sons and daughters. Oholah is Samaria, and Oholibah is Jerusalem.
5 “Oholah engaged in prostitution while she was still mine; and she lusted after her lovers, the Assyrians—warriors.
6 clothed in blue, governors and commanders, all of them handsome young men, and mounted horsemen.
7 She gave herself as a prostitute to all the elite of the Assyrians and defiled herself with all the idols of everyone she lusted after.
8 She did not give up the prostitution she began in Egypt, when during her youth men slept with her, caressed her virgin bosom and poured out their lust on her.
9 “Therefore I delivered her into the hands of her lovers, the Assyrians, for whom she lusted.
10 They stripped her naked, took away her sons and daughters and killed her with the sword. She became a byword among women, and punishment was inflicted on her.
11 “Her sister Oholibah saw this, yet in her lust and prostitution she was more depraved than her sister.
12 She too lusted after the Assyrians—governors and commanders, warriors in full dress, mounted horsemen, all handsome young men.
13 I saw that she too defiled herself; both of them went the same way.
14 “But she carried her prostitution still further. She saw men portrayed on a wall, figures of Chaldeans portrayed in red,
15 with belts around their waists and flowing turbans on their heads; all of them looked like Babylonian chariot officers, natives of Chaldea.
16 As soon as she saw them, she lusted after them and sent messengers to them in Chaldea.
17 Then the Babylonians came to her, to the bed of love, and in their lust they defiled her. After she had been defiled by them, she turned away from them in disgust.
18 When she carried on her prostitution openly and exposed her naked body, I turned away from her in disgust, just as I had turned away from her sister.
19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt.
20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
21 So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.

Here, for example, we briefly discussed how it appeared Pinker, of all people, sounded a bit salty that he didn’t make the Island roster.

I wouldn’t be surprised if hip hop and trap personalities brag in their tracks that they’re “Epstein-tier,” “Epstein-worthy,” “Epstein-approved,” “Island-initiated,” and the like. Especially since such personalities tend not to come from backgrounds who share the Western PMC pearl-clutching mentality about age of majority, age gaps in general, or viewing teenaged girls and young women as sex objects (even if that’s how they choose to present themselves).

I kind of doubt it, seeing as the bipartisan conspiracy theory scene has noticed Epstein's Jewish-supremacist tendencies, which black people actually have a fairly easy time talking about, especially by rounding them off to white supremacy. Last I heard the going rumor in the black community, with nonzero support from the files, was that Epstein hunted black people for sport on the island.

At least for the time being, we can say that ended with Epstein until they find the next pedo ring somewhere.

How does that follow?

What you are describing is an organized criminal conspiracy of which two members were arrested. If that is a correct description, what happened to the other members?

I haven't been around here consistently over the past few years, so I'm not certain what the average opinion on the Epstein files is on TheMotte. For myself, I follow Michael Tracey Thought on this: basically, it was a total non-event that only had legs because of the ideological ammo it gave to both right and left wing conspiracy theorists. Epstein was a creepy guy, but he was nowhere near the monster people have made him out to be.

The AI-Epstein connections you listed are either irrelevant or barely there. Yud is the only real connection, and no one with any power in the labs even listens to him, though of course he's influential on some of the rank and file, and everyone's heard of him. It doesn't appear that he had any direct connection to any of the leaders of the big three. Dario's wife is just another hustler who was pitching anyone she could; doesn't mean anything to me.

I point towards a recent badly phrased post I made.

The energy against the target (in this case Epstein) isn't because of the target. It is just because they were the first to be uncovered.

Energy gets built up in a subconcious societal consensus that something wrong is happening. When society finds evidence that they were right, then all of that pressure is unleashed on the unlucky first stumbler.

It feels like a targeted hit piece. I'm a cynical man, and my gut feeling is that it's a shot at pulling Amodei out of the big chair at Anthropic.

I specifically call this out.

First, Epstein really was balls-deep in AI research. Marvin Minsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Joscha Bach was in direct communication with Epstein. Elon Musk was in direct communication with Epstein. Eliezar Yudkowsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Noam Chomsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Overall, Epstein's emails are a who's-who of AI research. A brief, non-rigorous analysis of the files suggests that AI researchers are over represented in the files after 2011, both in frequency and in message length.

Wait, are they? Minsky and Bach are basically totally irrelevant. In fact, Minsky died before the transformer paper was even published. Musk and Chomsky are not even AI researchers. Of the people you listed, only Yudkowsky is even associated with rationalism or EA, and he's really not much of an AI researcher either.

It would seem the demand for rationalist EA AI researchers in the Epstein files outstrips the supply.

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.

This is especially amusing in the context of Eliezer "Bomb the Datacenters" Yudkowsky being the only rationalist listed.

Utilitarianism is easy to hack. Ignoring second order effects

I'm a little baffled that you claim the guys famous for autistically writing out detailed models to make predictions ignore second order effects. I'm not trying to get in an argument over whether the models are good, but the point is they certainly don't ignore second order effects and it's quite easy to slot them into a utilitarian framework.

Pre-Transformer AI research had a very distinctive vibe. Chūnibyō is the word that comes to mind. It was essentially a pseudoscience, laundered behind scraps of legitimate science. A typical AI researcher would manage to get one thing working, and then spend the rest of his career extrapolating that into a vast overarching worldview that encompassed all aspects of psychology, ethics, futurology, metaphysics, etc. These experts would maintain some credibility from success in their narrow technical field, but all the other speculative stuff was really little better than the mad ravings of the contemporary "quantum crystal mystic" crowd.

This sort of thing was like catnip for Epstein. His interest in science wasn't in incremental improvements, or even just making money, but in total world-shaking, paradigm-shifting, mind-blowing stuff. (This also explains his interest in genetics and biology.)

The rationalist/EA/utilitarian milieu is kind of descended from this (via the Extropian/Singularitarian movement), but it's not the same thing. Epstein would've had little interest in mosquito nets or shrimp welfare, for example.

I object to your pre-Transformer AI research description. There's a grain of truth in it, but it's better described as a kind of grad student descent than mysticism. People saw these kinds of systems could do very weird and surprisingly things; how do we put it together in a useful way? Try various permutations, loop repeatedly, get marginally better. And vision and NL both had achieved meaningful commercial success before AIAYN: there's a reason Google was already dumping billions of dollars into DL research at that point.

Pre-Transformer AI research had a very distinctive vibe. Chūnibyō is the word that comes to mind. It was essentially a pseudoscience, laundered behind scraps of legitimate science.

Maybe Pre-Neural Net AI research. Again depends on where you draw the line on what is "AI", before I get into another conversation with the other AI researcher here. But Machine Learning is entirely considered under the "AI" umbrella and has for a long time, at least a decade and half pre-transformer. Charitably you are describing the Minsky-esque AI researchers who were big into Symbolic AI which was a thing in the 70s-80s, ie almost 3 decades before the transformer.

The 70s may have been when the Woo Era of AI began, but (I would contend) it lasted all the way until the rise of Transformers in ~2017. It's not that neural nets and other Transformer-precursors didn't exist, but they were just one tool among many, alongside symbolic AI, and any of these tools had a seemingly equal claim to be the secret-sauce for general intelligence. In this environment, it was still the galaxy-brain-types like Minsky who could claim the intellectual highground by saying, effectively, "Well yes, that's a cute trick, but it's already incorporated as just one small part of my grand overarching paradigm..."

Of course, the reason why the field attracted so much woo (including Epstein) is because the AI was seen as a "type" of the human mind itself, and so it was thought that by building an AI we would finally understand ourselves and thereby solve in one fell swoop all the age-old problems of philosophy. We saw this e.g. with early (pre-2017) LessWrong, where Bayesianism was put forth as the ideal form of reasoning not only for a hypothetical AI, but also for you, the rational human. And not coincidentally, this was also the time when Ben Goertzel (another close Epstein associate) was most active in that sphere.

Nowadays the woo has been sidelined, not just because we actually have stuff that works, but because there's no longer much hope that AI will help us understand the human condition any better. If we manage to build human-level AI under the Transformer paradigm, we will find its workings just as inscrutable as ourselves.

Does anyone know what, if anything, the connection is between the work that led to transformers and the rapid developments in corporate big data/machine learning (particularly recommendation algorithms and similar marketing strategies) going on at around the same time? The model of AI history in my head has the post-Woo era of AI beginning with the Netflix recommendation algorithm in 2006, but I don't know how accurate it is.

Thanks for this, I wasn't really aware of that history. Almost my entire interaction with neural nets was through the medium of computer vision object recognition and Caffe, plus Q networks when they came along; I attended lectures where people discussed how you could use RNNs to turn Shakespeare into Shakespearish but it never occurred to me how far it would scale or that it was really worth paying attention to.

I would say only partial.

Recommendation algorithms were generally clustering approaches and support vector machines, I think. Neural networks were regarded as a potential (but not very good) way to do clustering for the most part, and one of the clusterings they were trying to do was vision (image class analysis). The breakthrough moment in my opinion was the publication of AlexNet in 2012, which demonstrated that neural networks weren't just a way to do clustering and image analysis, but that if done right they were a better way to do it and produced a step change in performance on a task usually considered impossible.

Transformers came out of google's work on translation, which has a fairly different heritage. That's less about clustering and more about sequence analysis using autoencoders, recurrent neural networks, etc. Data-driven neural networks were already pretty much considered SOTA in that field if I remember rightly (Google's lead researcher famously said, 'our translation performance goes up 10% for every linguist I fire') but benefited from the massive increase of interest in neural networks, hardware for driving neural networks, collecting big data pools, and general theoretical work on representations/efficiency/etc.

I don't know that AlexNet et al were truly breakthroughs in and of themselves so much as a logical extension of existing NN stuff enabled by the step-change in GPU hardware -- as I recall LeCun was doing similar work in the 1980s, and I myself did a project with a simple one-layer LSTM network in the late 90s in which I had to work at night because the server load involved was bringing down other (so-called) "important workloads" at my department (at a major university) during the day.

None of this was really feasible, even as research, until pretty near 2010 -- the hardware just wasn't there yet.

They weren't, really, I agree. "Deep learning" as in Massively-Multilayer Neural Networks was known to be a good thing ages ago, we needed the hardware to do it. I would say AlexNet was a breakthrough in the since of marking a step change from, 'hey guys if you gave us some really massive computers I bet this toy would do something useful' to 'holy shit guys, see what I can do'.

All credit to the neural network guys for sticking to their guns until the hardware caught up, of course.

RankBrain (2015) was pre-Transformer and was used in production search. Basically a learned embedding model for semantic relevancy.

AlexNet was the turning point, I agree.

Symbolic AI which was a thing in the 70s-80s, ie almost 3 decades before the transformer.

I have a few AI books from that era that I've been meaning to flip through again just to get a kick out of the huge vibe shift in the field. When I remember acquiring them 15-20 years ago, it seemed it was all attempts to create bespoke approaches to each aspect of the human experience. Hand-coded language models ("verb", "subject", "object"), visual edge detection, spectrograms for speech recognition, physical world models, and so forth. Nowadays, "lolz, just throw data and compute at it" seems the preferred approach.

To be fair, the limitations of the bespoke methods were known at the time: different words can serve different roles in different contexts. Sometimes we noun verbs and verb nouns. And so on for the other spaces.

Nouning verbs is dangerous. It uses a word that pointedly fails to describe itself, and if you as much as think the word "non-self-descriptive" then you will no longer be capable of coherent thought.

Verbing nouns is safe as long as you verb the noun "verb" first. Whether "verb" is a self-descriptive word or not is unclear, but not dangerous.

This sort of thing was like catnip for Epstein.

I hadn't considered it from that angle. I could see how that would create a self-reinforcing loop in the research community.

Guy says lofty things --> Some dude named Jeff shows up and showers him with money.

A lot of rationally self interested people would, at that point, start considering if they should wax philosophical.

Suppose that’s how it actually went. Is there no money dirty enough for you to take? If it turns out I took money from someone in an exchange that he robbed someone else for to pay me, does that make me complicit in the crime? In the court of public opinion that’s fertile ground for every rumor out there. I’m already guilty, no matter what I say; even if I had the knowledge of what the other party was up to. But if you did know and you chose to accept the money anyway and that’s the full extent of your involvement, how guilty are you?

But if you did know and you chose to accept the money anyway and that’s the full extent of your involvement, how guilty are you?

I've only been in a situation where it came up once in my life. I was working for a caterer when a local pillar of the community and upstanding businessman hired the company for a private event. The guy had a reputation for getting handsy with the help. He specifically wanted to hand-pick "the girls" who would be on the floor. I, along with several other members of the crew, refused to work the job. We all got fired for it.

It sucked living on potatoes and cabbage for a month, but I'd do it again.

I think there’s a difference in kind with your case, but I agree with your experience and the actions you took. But implicit in that is the simple reality that if I look through my wallet and count the money I have, at some point and with no doubt, that money has passed through the hands of drug dealers, wife beaters, probably murderers and who knows who else. If someone then comes along and wants to start connecting dots, it would be trivially easy to throw dirt on my name and reputation. It reminds me of the Maddox comic several years ago.

If you know you know, if you don’t you don’t

You know, I always thought there was something off about that @Tretiak guy...

… 😤.

I think you are correct.

I would love to get Epsteins ability to get random super successful people to email me back. Maybe this is just a part of the maxim that no publicity is bad publicity and everyone assumed he got away with pedophilia because he was a highly connected guy. If your rumored to be Mossads number 1 spy then I guess I should return your emails?

By all accounts he seems to have been genuinely charming and personable. So much of his career depended on lucky breaks where he convinced someone with influence or even just "I can get your foot in the door" access to back him, simply because the person liked him, thought he was smart, thought he was wasted wherever he currently was, and wanted to help him along. He also seems to have had incredible luck, or at the least the ability to discern when it was time to get free of the sinking ship well before it sank.

His real golden goose was Leslie Wexner. An incredibly rich, incredibly socially awkward (and probably closeted gay) fellow Jew who much preferred being at home in Ohio but perforce had to be in New York for business and networking reasons, and who was delighted to meet a personable, charming, socially skilled guy who was both able to help him navigate the social scene and manage his wealth for him. This enabled Epstein to jump into a circle of really rich, really influential people and he worked that for all it was worth, making contacts and establishing himself as the guy who knew all the right people and threw all the best parties.

I would love to get Epsteins ability to get random super successful people to email me back.

In the academic/philanthropic space here I think it might be sufficient to just have money. Full professors at research institutions are, from having talked with several, largely focused on raising money to pay for grad students and postdocs to do the real work (and a large fraction for university overhead). Other university leadership is looking to put names on new buildings or departments. The startup/VC ecosystem seems largely similar, where I've seen founders stoop to surprising levels in the interest of closing a funding round, and only later go on to great success. These people aren't fools, but having it known that there are nine or more digits in your bank account makes them take you seriously, laugh at your dumb jokes, and tell you how great your ideas are. The comparisons to, uh, escorts (which Epstein also seemed to like hanging out with) write themselves.

Known philanthropists can get academics and other people whose work is funded by similar patronage-begging to email them back for the obvious reasons. In addition, Minsky and Bach were affiliated with the MIT Media Lab, whose director Joi Ito was deeply committed to keeping the Epsteinbucks flowing to the point where (assuming the information about Neri Oxman which became public during the epic Ackman-Big Academia social media feud is roughly correct) being willing to put on dog-and-pony shows for Epstein was a condition of continued employment.

Chomsky is a piece of shit who didn't do anything for Epstein that he wouldn't have done for Pol Pot, of course.

If your rumored to be Mossads number 1 spy then I guess I should return your emails?

My understanding is that Maxwell was mossad's number one spy, and Epstein was mossad's number one receptionist for mossad's number one spy.

Robert Maxwell was deeply involved with the Israeli deep state, but the dates don't line up for him to have recruited Epstein. Mossad membership is not hereditary, and nothing apart from her parentage points to Ghislaine being Mossad. If she was, she wouldn't have been senior enough to be Epstein's handler (in any case, as a diaspora Jew who never lived in Israel she would not have been eligible for the required Israeli security clearance). Plus there are plenty of other Israeli figures in the Epstein files, up to and including former Prime Minister Ehud Barack, who could have recruited and/or handled Epstein, if he was in fact Mossad.

I find Epstein being Mossad plausible, but on balance less likely than not because I think Mossad would have tried to cover up the sex crimes if he was their top asset. I don't find either Maxwell being responsible plausible.

I think Mossad would have tried to cover up the sex crimes if he was their top asset

"It's not the crime, it's the coverup" would have applied here, no? The sex crimes were too numerous to cover up entirely, and any half-successful attempt at a cover-up would have required a bunch of meddling that would have made "but his partner's dad!" look like a lot more than a conspiracy theory.

Plus don't forget the distinction between "asset" and "agent". Epstein being a Mossad agent seems implausible to me, but any major spy agency to whom he wasn't an asset should be ashamed of that. There's a publicly-known creep who's hosted ex-Presidents and future-Presidents and ex-prime-ministers and princes and billionaires and physics geniuses and so on and so on, and you couldn't even get your hands on copies of a few of his incriminating video discs before they mysteriously disappeared? What are you even getting paid for?

What exactly does "being Mossad" entail? Some people seem to imagine that you have to go through an initiation theory in a dark cellar with guys in robes chanting and skull lanterns and everything, while a weaker version at least involves an explicit interview and training or being told that you are working for Israel and are to make periodic reports on some burner phone in return for a paycheck turning up under your garbage bin. I could see many instances being much more tacit, though: at some point you are made to realise that you dodged a legal or reputational bullet in ways that seem to be more unlikely than regular luck, and then a friend of a friend asks to have a chat and strongly hints that it really was not luck after all and maybe you can casually tell him your best gossip about how much Prince Andrew enjoyed himself on your island.

In fact, Minsky died before the transformer paper was even published.

Minsky and Epstein were in communication with each other before the transformer paper was published. I'm not sure what the thrust of your argument is? Is it that any discussion of AI before 2017 is irrelevant?

Minsky and Epstein were in communication with each other before the transformer paper was published.

That would follow from Minsky dying before the paper was published, unless the Epstein files were of an entirely different communication medium.

I'm not sure what the thrust of your argument is? Is it that any discussion of AI before 2017 is irrelevant?

The thrust is that minsky and Bach are nobodies, irrelevant to where things stand today; Minsky didn't even believe that you can just train AI massive amounts of data to build intelligence until his death. The only relevant AI researcher listed is Yud, everyone else is a literally who. Does one guy count as over representation? You be the judge.

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The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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