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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.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsMEnglish
    7·
    23 hours ago

    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.

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      21 hours ago

      He is following up with thoughts on how sometimes someone pleads guilty of a crime they did not commit: edit link

      CinnasVerses: Plea bargains work different ways in the USA depending on the race and status of the accused. I would read a wealthy white American who pleads down to one horrible sexual crime very differently than a poor black American pleading guilty to marijuana possession.

      Yudkowsky: I’d read them differently, but still wouldn’t assume the former had been guilty solely upon hearing that they’d been successfully forced into a plea bargain, especially if they were so wealthy that they might have political enemies.

      Epstein does, indeed, appear to have been guilty of much worse than what he plea-bargained for. That does not change my general position on, “I do not believe someone to be guilty solely upon being told that they entered a guilty plea bargain; additional information is required.”

      It’s a classical liberal thing. We don’t automatically trust the government. We sometimes conclude that, yes, the government sure as fucking hell was right that time, but only after looking into it first.

      All I will say is that the rules for felony conviction are stricter than the rules for “you sound creepy, we decline your invitation.” And that this experience is one I will draw on going forward when setting community norms to discourage abuse.

      Edit: Isn’t Dath Ilan the setting of the Project Wonderful glowfic? The setting where people with good genes get more breeding licenses than people with bad genes?

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        4 hours ago

        Huh. Are the remaining “classical liberals” in the wild just naturally covered in this much slime, or is it something Yud applied to himself specifically for this conversation?

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        20 hours ago

        Edit: Isn’t Dath Ilan the setting of the Project Wonderful glowfic? The setting where people with good genes get more breeding licenses than people with bad genes?

        Yep, Project Lawful. dath ilan is Eliezer’s “utopian” world the isekai’d protagonist is from. It is described in dath ilan that if you have “bad” genes you lost your UBI if you had kids anyway (it was technically Gregorist-style citizen’s dividend, but it basically UBI) and if you had “good” genes you got extra payment for having more kids.

        Eliezer is basically saying unless the government meets the “standards” of his made up fantasy “utopia” he won’t cooperate with it, even in prosecuting literal child raping pedophiles or carrying out social repercussions against said child rapists.