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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.
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.
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.
This is especially amusing in the context of Eliezer "Bomb the Datacenters" Yudkowsky being the only rationalist listed.
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.
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?
That would follow from Minsky dying before the paper was published, unless the Epstein files were of an entirely different communication medium.
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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