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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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