Eliezer’s response to being in the Epstein files

Maybe Jeffrey Epstein offered us a large sum of money, maybe he didn't. I'm not sure and I will make a public statement without bothering to check with anyone. We keep getting large donations so often it's easy to forget whether we did or did not receive an offer of three hundred thousand dollars from the random nobody called Jeffrey Epstein. What I do remember is that whether we got the offer or not (not that I can remember if we did) we certainly looked into whether he was a bad guy or not, even though it's not standard practice and I don't we should have to do so either. In any case we looked into him and maybe turned down the offer he may or may not have made. Probably. Again, I'm making this statement without checking with anyone who knows for sure but I heard someone say something to that effect. Later we took a fifty thousand dollar donation from him anyway, but that's such a small sum we barely even noticed it.

I assume my lawyer would advise me to keep posting things like this (I have not checked myself).

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.

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.

it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation,

Now wait just a goddamn minute, I thought the whole schtick here was that our gracious correspondent is better than anyone else at evaluating situations that are relatively rare but nonetheless highly consequential

EA in general has this problem where they let rich people use their "charities" for social cover. It is part of how the FTX scandal was made possible and it is a contributing factor to how and why they keep getting played by the LLM companies.

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

you see, the problem with Epstein was that maybe he made some sparkly elites feel unsafe after the fact, you see. maybe all those fourteen year olds should have just known better, dontcha think?

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.

funniest possible outcome would be if epstein actually didn't offer them money because yud had such bad vibes

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.

Multiple cases and/or active recruiting would probably have me convene a star chamber to expel Jiff from community events, based on my expectation that at least one of those cases was statistically liable to end in victimful harm. I would not go to the police because of my expectation that law enforcement would be painful, tedious, and ineffective. https://old.reddit.com/user/EliezerYudkowsky

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.

For reference the open-source project appears to be OpenCog, founded by "Ben Goertzel" who at least up until 2010 held the title of "Director of Research" at SIAI, the relation stopping because he wasn't a true believer in doom.

Over on Reddit, somewhatmorenumerous has been looking into Form 990 for the 2009 Epstein donation. Yudkowsky says:

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.

The Epstein files say the recipient was someone called Ben Goertzel with a project named OpenCog or something like that. somewhatmorenumerous has doubts:

MatriceJacobine, if SIAI paid out a grant of more than $5k to Goertzel, it should show up in their tax records. It doesn't.

If Goertzel was an official Director of Research at SIAI in 2009, he would need to have been listed in Part VII. Compensation of Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, Highest Compensated Employees, and Independent Contractors (he wasn't).

I'm not disputing that Goertzel got money from SIAI, or that he and SIAI called him Director of Research: I'm pointing out that SIAI's official tax records don't reflect what Eliezer and Goertzel say happened. That's not good: you're supposed to file accurate tax records.

But maybe there's documentation that proves me wrong! SIAI is, after all, a 501(c)3, a public charity, and Eliezer is here in this chat trying to be transparent. I assure you I would be the most delighted person in this chat if such documentation were provided. ...

Also, "sponsorship" isn't a thing that costs money: it is a nonprofit funding structure in which organizations that DO have 501(c)3 status can provide a path to tax-deductible donation for entities that DO NOT have 501(c)3 status. People donate to the parent 501(c)3, which then passes the donation to the sponsored project.

SIAI's 2009 Accomplishments lists Ben Goertzel as an employee.

I don't think this is as serious as telling the Internet you would cover up a mature adult in your organization having sex with multiple minors, but inaccurate tax paperwork can cost you your nonprofit status.

Edit to escape (c) (renders as (c) )

One more quote. Three years ago, Charlotte Alter investigated sexual harassment in the Effective Altruism movement (a movent which formed around Yudkowsky's mailing lists and blogs) for Time magazine.

This story is based on interviews with more than 30 current and former effective altruists and people who live among them. Many of the women spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid personal or professional reprisals, ... Their accounts were corroborated by other parties to the incidents, by people to whom the women spoke shortly afterward, and by contemporaneous documents and screenshots. While a few women have raised these issues on online forums, many spoke to TIME about their experiences with sexual misconduct in EA communities for the first time.

One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational. Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college. A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”

A necessary but not sufficient response to stories like that is to make it utterly clear that this kind of behavior is not tolerated in your community and that you will take complaints of sexual harassment very seriously. Three years later, Yudkowsky is still blathering about how statutory rape is not always wrong and its important not to move too quickly to judgement.

Edit: See also this response by a professor who was asked why he had asked Epstein to fund a 2016 conference on sexual consent and campus rape.

I was not then and am not now aware of any evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was a ‘pedophile’ in the technical sense; his sexual preference appears to have been for young women aged 16-22, which would at most reflect partial ephebophilia. Although most of the women who were involved with him at that age retrospectively regret it, I am unaware of any evidence that the contacts were non-consensual at the time. (it goes on. I do not advise reading further but I note that Epstein's known victims were as young as 14)

The professor left Austin TX on retirement and now lives in California.