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.

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.

Just so it doesn’t get lost:

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.

ChatGPT is using Grokipedia as a source, and it’s not the only AI tool to do so. Citations to Elon Musk’s AI-generated encyclopedia are starting to appear in answers from Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini, too. […] When it launched, a bulk of Grokipedia’s articles were direct clones of Wikipedia, though many others reflected racist and transphobic views. For example, articles about Musk conveniently downplays his family wealth and unsavory elements of their past (like neo-Nazi and pro-Apartheid views) and the entry for “gay pornography” falsely linked the material to the worsening of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The article on US slavery still contains a lengthy section on “ideological justifications,” including the “Shift from Necessary Evil to Positive Good.” […] “Grokipedia feels like a cosplay of credibility,” said Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush. “It might work inside its own bubble, but the idea that Google or OpenAI would treat something like Grokipedia as a serious, default reference layer at scale is bleak.”

https://www.theverge.com/report/870910/ai-chatbots-citing-grokipedia

The entire AI industry is using the Nazi CSAM machine for training data.

We will soon merge with and become hybrids of human consciousness and artificial intelligence ( created by us and therefore of consciousness)

—Deepak Chopra to Jeffrey Epstein

Back in 2019, Sabine Hossenfelder was a blogger with one book to her name. She hadn’t taken off as a YouTuber and fully embraced the grift. I’m not surprised she barely appears.

I don’t know of any either… To amend my earlier comment: it looks like a ghastly New Scientist/Forbes cocktail-party axis, with a dose of TESCREAL.

Great to hear from you. I was just up at MIT this week and met with Seth Lloyd (on Wednesday) and Scott Aaronson (on Thursday) on the “Cryptography in Nature” small research conference project. These interactions were fantastic. Both think the topic is wonderful and innovative and has promise. […] I did contact Max Tegmark about a month ago to propse the essay contest approach we discussed. He and his colleagues offered support but did not think that FQX should do it. Reasons they gave were that they saw the topic as too narrow and too technical compared to the essay contests they have been doing. It is possible that the real reason was prudence to avoid FQX, already quite “controversial” via Templeton support to become even more so via Epstein-related sponsorship of prizes. […] Again, I am delighted to have gotten such very string affirmation, input and scientific enthusiasm from both Seth and Scott. You have very brilliantly suggested a profound topical focus area.

—Charles L. Harper Jr., formerly a big wheel at the Templeton foundation

“Susan Backfield” should be “Susan Hockfield” (president of MIT from 2004 through 2012). The PDF reads correctly but apparently the OCR is screwed up, or something, and trying to copy the text gives a misspelling. Likewise, “Hcrr” should be “Herr” and “Iocman” should be “Zucman”.

So far, this mostly looks like a list of random public figures in science/tech/entrepreneur circles.

I think Watson e-mailed Krauss, who forwarded the message to Epstein.

“There is a rather nasty young woman called Rebecca Watson, who seems to be running some kind of a witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein.”

— Richard Dawkins

Gromov is a mathematician. There was a Why is Gromov in the Epstein files? reddit thread on r/math a while back.

“Friday? We’re meeting at Jeffrey’s Thursday night” —Stuart “consciousness is a series of quantum tubes” Hameroff

I am just over here mouthing “what the fuck”

over and over again

Jeffrey, meet Eliezer!

Nice to hear from you today. Eliezer: you were the highlight of the weekend!

John Brockman, October 19, 2016

Hops over to Wikipedia… searches… “Showing results for ruleal. No results found for ruliad.”

Hmm. Widen search to all namespaces… oh, it was deleted. Twice.

What TF is his notation for Turing machines?

None of these words are in the Star Trek Encyclopedia