As for who should “run diligence on donors”, a random epidemiologist on BlueSky has a “no money from bastards” policy for his lab. This is the sort of thing Yudkowsky could have learned if he got a Master’s degree rather than just attending the occasional conference.
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.
Also a plot point in the erotic horror comics I linked a few weeks ago!
Yes, in the 2016 emails Yudkowsky hints that he knows Epstein has a reputation for pursuing underage girls and would still like his money. We don’t know what he knew about Epstein in 2009, but he sure seemed to know that something was wrong with the man in 2016. And that makes it harder to put Yud’s writings about the age of consent in a good light (hard to believe that he was just thinking of a sixteen-year-old dating a nineteen-year-old, and had never imagined a middle-aged man assaulting fourteen-year-olds).
This is not the worst academics and pundits in Epstein’s network, this virologist named Nathan Wolfe is new to me. If an American academic had their career ended by fraud or misconduct there is a good chance that he or she was trying to make nice with Epstein afterwards.
Joscha Bach introduced Michael Vassar to Epstein in 2018 with:
My friend Michele Reilly asked me to reintroduce her to you; you met her and Michael Vassar a few years ago on the island
Vassar is best known for the MetaMed startup which bet that LessWrong posters were better at diagnosis than MDs. He also founded one of the LessWrong splinter movements that Scott Alexander warns people against.
There is a MIT computer scientist and popularizer called Michele Reilly although he could have meant someone else. My career has not been very successful but at least I never asked a friend to introduce me to a pederast or accepted an invitation to a sex criminal’s private island.
Some names are missing like Sabine Hossenfelder, the GMU economists, Brad Delong, and Hoover Institute staff. And I would not underestimate the number of people in this network who just went to the right university, met the right people, got the right job, and started to climb the ladder of fame.
The Weinstein brothers, Michael Vassar, Peter Thiel, and Yudkowsky were the names that leapt out at me. I don’t know that Vassar has any mainstream intellectual or academic achievements.
Learning that Rebecca Watson emailed Epstein for comment on a quote she was going to discuss, and Lawrence Krauss emailed Epstein because people like Rebecca Watson were outing him as a sex pest, reminds me of what a small world that was.
I don’t plan to link every figure, but will do so if they are sleazy or the name is unfamiliar. Many of them seem like distinguished academics or popularizers.
Also likely to be concentrated in the USA, whose government is helpfully screaming at the rest of the world “disconnect your economies and your IT systems from ust!” Most of us are busy doing that as fast as possible although it takes a while to get everyone on board.
its a very useful skill when reading the internet to learn to see when “in the US and UK” or “in SoCal and London” should be appended to a sentence. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.
Since it comes up on one in 216 characters with random stats rolled on 3d6, shouldn’t INT 18 be three standard deviations above the norm?
Its a surprisingly modest claim about Marty Stu (Cheeliax with 20 million people, most of them poor given stated infant mortality, has 20 equally bright women available for breeding duty).
Some LIbertarians avoid marriage or common-law relationships, not sure if Yud has expressed an opinion on the topic though.
Yud was married to a woman in 2019 and mentions other partners and playmates. He said he met her in 2013. The post from 2013 is an infohazard.
considering his confidence in an AI apocalypse I heavily doubt it
He argues that the way to prevent the AI apocalypse is to breed superbabies from high-IQ stock, and a major plot point of Project Lawful is that the hero wants to prove himself worthy of having more children than average and nation he isekais himself to agrees but wants any future children to use their genes for evil.
I wonder if Yud has biological children? He is mercifully discreet about his home life even if he shares his kinks like he has a five-book contract with Baen Books.
I am starting to suspect that Yud never learned to compartmentalize knowledge and put it in different epistemic categories. To him, AD&D alignments, Large Language Models, and race pseudoscience are all nerdy ideas he read about on the Internet, all equally real and true. He does not seem to file a carpenter telling him how to frame a roof, a rabbi teaching theology, and a random twitter account in different categories like most of us would.
Its Project Lawful, his D&D novel about eugenics and BDSM cowritten on a forum with many of our dear friends
A few people in LessWrong and Effectlve Altruism seem to want Yud to stick in the background while they get on with organizing his teachings into doctrine, dumping the awkward ones down the memory hole, and organizing a movement that can last when he goes to the Great Anime Convention in the Sky. In 2022 someone on the EA forum posted On Deference and Yudkowsky’s AI Risk Estimates (ie. “Yud has been bad at predictions in the past so we should be skeptical of his predictions today”)
A Christopher DiCarlo (cwdicarlo on LessWrong) got AI doomerism into Macleans magazine in Canada. He seems to have got into AI doomerism in the 1990s but hung out being an academic and kept his manifestos to himself until recently. He claims to have clashed with First Nations creationists back in 2005 when he said “we are all African.” His book is called Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It.
There must be many such cases who read the Extropians in the 1990s and 2000s and neither filed them with fiction not turned them into a career.
Over on Old!SneerClub, Dembara asked Yud what he would do if he learned that a mature adult was grooming fourteen-year-olds into sex. Yud says he would tell nobody outside the community. The r/HPMOR editors erased the exchange but its still available under the two usernames.
I hope he gets a chance to talk to Cardinal Pell about how well that response to sexual abuse works. A million years should do it.