This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link