Reddit - The heart of the internet
www.reddit.com

originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important

Posted on r/HPMOR roughly one day ago

full transcript:

Epstein asked to call during a fundraiser. My notes say that I tried to explain AI alignment principles and difficulty to him (presumably in the same way I always would) and that he did not seem to be getting it very much. Others at MIRI say (I do not remember myself / have not myself checked the records) that Epstein then offered MIRI $300K; which made it worth MIRI’s while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy, and ask if there was a reasonable path to accepting his donations causing harm; and the upshot was that MIRI decided not to take donations from him. I think/recall that it did not seem worthwhile to do a whole diligence thing about this Epstein guy before we knew whether he was offering significant funding in the first place, and then he did, and then MIRI people looked further, and then (I am told) MIRI turned him down.

Epstein threw money at quite a lot of scientists and I expect a majority of them did not have a clue. It’s not standard practice among nonprofits to run diligence on donors, and in fact I don’t think it should be. Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation, and this kind of scrutiny is more efficiently centralized by having professional law enforcement do it than by distributing it across thousands of nonprofits.

In 2009, MIRI (then SIAI) was a fiscal sponsor for an open-source project (that is, we extended our nonprofit status to the project, so they could accept donations on a tax-exempt basis, having determined ourselves that their purpose was a charitable one related to our mission) and they got $50K from Epstein. Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn’t a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it.

This reply has not been approved by MIRI / carefully fact-checked, it is just off the top of my own head.

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    2 days ago

    This was in October 2016, eight years after Epstein was convicted of soliciting sexual services from girls as young as 14. MIRI spent 2014 and 2015 fighting and eventually setting with a former staffer who accused board members of statutory rape. Their legal expenses in those years were around $250k, similar to the money Yud says Epstein offered. So Yudkowsky was very familiar with the concept of older men seeking sex from underage girls and the risks of associating MIRI with it at the time. I don’t remember the exact timeline of Brent Dill’s Bay Area phase but that would have left Yud very familiar with another case where an older man abused younger women and girls.

    The original email thread includes this exchange:

    Yudkowsky: “… (Sorry for the delay in answering; I was checking with Nate (Executive Director) to see what we knew about why the fundraiser is going slowly.)”

    Epstein: “Were you clearing my name with him”

    Yudkowsky: “Not sure what you mean. Nate (Soares) knows you’re Jeffrey E. I check not-yet-published info/speculation past him before saying it.”)

    The phrase “worth MIRI’s while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy” sounds like Yud has been listening to Scott Alexander and Scott Aaronson about how rich or educated white men are the real victims and hos be liars. It sounds like he was familiar with the substance of the accusations and thought there was a good chance they were untrue and not the tip of the iceberg.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsMEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      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 took a meeting 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.

      Meanwhile, in 2019:

      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.