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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.
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?
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.
"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?
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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.
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