If I were invited to this conference, I would have an intense “your approval fills me with shame” moment.

Who the balls is the market for an AI-glazing “documentary”? The more one likes the technology, the shorter one’s attention span.

From the second link:

Aella is someone with whom I’ve been on friendly terms for some years now; though we have our — sometimes rather extreme — differences, and though I think that she is probably evil, I nonetheless have valued my conversations with her, and would love (though I am not optimistic) to see an outcome to this local situation that allowed us to keep talking from time to time.

whaaaaa

From the replies:

But every man under the age of 30 that I’ve ever met at Lighthaven, that I’ve had the opportunity to speak with privately, has completely and totally integrated IQ differences into their ontology.

The entirety of Lighthaven needs locker insertion

It’s someone who learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb.

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.

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.

And apparently, one of their FOUNDING BELIEFS, is that I had sex with somebody underage (mutually desired sex, according to the Zizians)… and then MIRI, a nonprofit I started, paid money (to a third-party extorter) to hush that up… which payment, according to the Zizians, is in violation of DECISION THEORY… and, therefore, for THAT EXACT REASON (like specifically the decision theory part), everything believed by those normie rationalists who once befriended them is IRRETRIEVABLY TAINTED… and therefore, the whole world is a lie and dishonest… and from this and OTHER PREMISES they recruit people to join their cult.

Yudkowsky is the first person I have ever seen describe this as a load-bearing belief of the Zizians. Offhand, I don’t recall the news stories about the murders even mentioning it.

Or maybe society would run a prediction market about whether ten years later the 24-year-old would think that it was a terrible terrible idea for them to have microdosed LSD as a kid. If society’s rules were that sensible

Wha’the fuuuuuck

weird flex but OK

… maybe not OK, at that