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