Awful.systems is not debate club. Nor is it peer-review club. No one is obligated to nitpick individual sentences in a preprint or erect monuments of text about details within it, particularly when a discussion of the broader failings of the "research" culture in that area is more interesting, valuable and on-brand.
How much do people actually "like to claim to have read" books, rather than saying they want to read more big books but never have the time?
There's a letter in the book of Asimov's correspondence that his brother edited where Asimov says that he'd been asked "How close are we to George Orwell's 1984?" again and again in the years leading up to 1984, to the point that he was sick of it and dreading the actual year 1984, when no one would ask him about anything else. I figure he had a lot of venom built up in his system that came out here.
He was also a veteran of science-fiction fan club drama, after which he worked in academia, so yeah, he knew sectarian in-fighting.
Ryan Mac:
Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships.
We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies.
For example, here is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam in 2014 emailing w/ people around Epstein, including crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, asking to meet Epstein before the financier invested $3m in Coinbase.
Coinbase was a two year old startup. Epstein netted multimillion dollar returns from this.
Here is Epstein asking Peter Thiel if he should invest in Spotify or Palantir. Thiel was (and still is) Palantir's chairman and tells Epstein there is "no need to rush." This is one of several emails where Thiel gives Epstein advice.
Epstein later invested $40m into one of Thiel's VC funds.
One of @ering.bsky.social's great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the "optics" of telling founders that Epstein was involved.
So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.
At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.
[...]
While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.
I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.
https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3me4wmrgic226
I think Dominic Housatonic developed into a mushroom cloud as it progressed (past the interval captured by the slowmo).
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made mushroom clouds.
In the Baker test at Bikini Atoll, the bomb was underwater, dimming the initial flash and making initial transient effects more visible.
I was going to say that I had looked up Scott Aaronson in the files, and my conclusion overall was that nothing in them actually made him look worse than anyone already sees him. Joscha Bach name-dropped him as an interesting person (so what, really). Aaronson and Seth Lloyd each met with somebody who was working for Epstein (Charles Harper), at which there was some talk of making a "Cryptology in Nature" conference happen. As far as I could tell, that conference never did happen. It wasn't even evident from Harper's e-mails that Epstein had even been named at or before the meeting. I don't think Aaronson could be blamed for having a business lunch with somebody who had been a big wheel at a private foundation (Templeton, in Harper's case) and who said he could get private-foundation funding for a meeting in Aaronson's subject area.
And then Scott Aaronson had to go and write a blog post about his being in the Epstein files. Short version: He says he had lunch with Harper, after which Harper wrote him a follow-up that named Epstein "for the first time", and then he ignored Harper after hearing about Epstein's conviction. That sounds consistent with the "no real harm, no real foul" impression that I would have been willing to endorse after searching the e-mails myself. But then the epilogue! Scott comments on his own post:
I had a further thought. Back in 2019, when Epstein became a central topic of conversation following his arrest and then death, and lots of my scientific colleagues were telling stories about their contacts or near-contacts with him, it struck me that there were zero stories about any scientist—liberal or conservative, male or female, morally naive or morally astute—saying, “no, of course I want nothing to do with you, because you’re friggin’ Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous mass rapist!”
So I concluded that, if anyone now imagines that they would’ve responded that way, it’s almost certainly pure hindsight bias. Indeed, even after Epstein’s first conviction, a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.
Penrose and Epstein had met at a June 2017 conference on the science of consciousness in San Diego. "Although the topic [of consciousness] is not what I do, when I saw the list of speakers and was offered a plenary talk, I decided that it would be a good thing for me and a good audience to hear about my experiment," says [Ivette] Fuentes, a professor at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom whose work is supported by the Penrose Institute.
Shortly after returning home, Fuentes says, she and Penrose had a conversation. "Would I be interested in receiving funding from a wealthy man who had also been convicted of a sex offense?" Fuentes recalls Penrose asking her.
Fuentes immediately said no, citing ethical objections, and quickly forgot about the conversation. But 2 months ago, after reading that Epstein had been arrested, she called Penrose. "Was it Epstein?" she asked him. "And he said, ‘Yes, I think it was.' And I said, ‘Oh God.'"
I dunno, Scott. Maybe you should find better friends.
Yud:
Of course, anyone who pleads guilty to any crime is always guilty and a terrible person and no further effort is ever required to look into the matter slightly further to determine if, say, they actually did something terrible or just offended somebody in power and was forced into a plea bargain.
"In the story I just made up, Epstein was the victim. Checkmate atheists"
Yud in another comment:
If you don't like that answer, work to change laws and rebuild civilization in order to change my incentives. In dath ilan I'd have somebody who wasn't me to whom to report that sort of thing.
You do not hate this man enough.
On 19 October 2016, Epstein's Wikipedia bio gets to sex crimes in sentence three. And the "Solicitation of prostitution" section includes this:
In June 2008, after pleading guilty to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14,[27] Epstein began serving an 18-month sentence. He served 13 months, and upon release became a registered sex offender.[3][28] There is widespread controversy and suspicion that Epstein got off lightly.[29]
At this point, I don't care if John Brockman dismissed Epstein's crimes as an overblown peccadillo when he introduced you.
For example, I think Yudkowsky looks worse now than he did before. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the worst we knew prior to fhis was that the Singularity Institute had accepted money from a foundation that Epstein controlled. On 19 October 2016, Epstein's Wikipedia bio gets to sex crimes in sentence three. And the "Solicitation of prostitution" section includes this:
In June 2008, after pleading guilty to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14,[27] Epstein began serving an 18-month sentence. He served 13 months, and upon release became a registered sex offender.[3][28] There is widespread controversy and suspicion that Epstein got off lightly.[29]
At this point, I don't care if John Brockman dismissed Epstein's crimes as an overblown peccadillo when he introduced you.
Reading the e-mails involving Brockman really creates the impression that he worked diligently to launder Epstein's reputation. An editor at Scientific American I noticed when looking up where Carl Zimmer was mentioned seemed to be doing the same thing... One thing people might be missing in the hubbub now is just how much "reputation management"—i.e., enabling— was happening after his conviction. A lot of money went into that, and he had a lot of willing co-conspiritors. Look at what filtered down to his Wikipedia page by the beginning of 2011, which is downstream of how the media covered his trial and the sweetheart deal that Avila made to betray the victims... It's all philanthropy this and generosity that, until a "Solicitation of prostitution" section that makes it sound like he maybe slept with a 17-year-old who claimed to be 18... And look, he only had to serve 18 months! He can't have done anything that bad, could he?
There's a tier of people who should have goddamn known better and whose actions were, in ways that only become more clear with time, evil. And the uncomfortable truth is that evil won, not just in that the victims never saw justice in a court of law, but in that the cover-up worked. The Avilas and the Brockmans did their job, and did it well. The researchers who pursued Epstein for huge grants and actively lifted Epstein up (Nowak and co.), hoo boy are they culpable. But the very fact of all that uplifting and enabling means that the people who took one meeting because Brockman said he'd introduce them to a financier who loved science... rushing to blame them all, with the fragmentary record we have, diverts the blame from those most responsible.
Maybe another way to say the above: We're learning now about a lot of people who should have known better. But we are also learning about the mechanisms by which too many were prevented from knowing better.
view more: next ›
A polycule with Aella, otherwise known as a nightmare fuck rotation