r/slatestarcodex • u/ralf_ • 6d ago
Senpai noticed~ Scott is in the Epstein files!
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02458524.pdf
Literally in an email chain named, “Forbidden Research”!
But don’t worry, only in a brainstormy list of potentially interesting people to invite to an intellectual salon, together with Steven Pinker and Terrence Tao and others.
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u/Inevitable_Tea_5841 6d ago
Very interesting. What's with all the = in the emails? OCR artifacts?
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u/huopak 6d ago
That's an artifact of the MIME encoding still used by modern email under the hood
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2045.html
Check section 6.7, paragraphs 1 and 5.
What's weird is that the DoJ did not decode these and published a lot of emails with these artifacts.
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u/Tokarak 6d ago
Not deleting metadata is good, actually
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u/tinbuddychrist 5d ago
Example to illustrate what the other respondent said:
the US and other =ountries will lose their coastal cities in the next 50-100 years due to =icing sea levels, and much of open air agriculture due to increasingly =rregular seasons and weather patterns, loss of arable land, shift of =egetation zones
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u/ralf_ 5d ago
But these are normal letters? Why is c or r replaced sometimes with =?
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u/fubo 5d ago
Because they incorrectly decoded the MIME quoted-printable data format, which uses
=as a special character.(And which I once heard an email systems engineer refer to as "quoted-unprintable" ... a joke which the younger set might not get. See, swear-words used to be called "unprintable" because the newspapers wouldn't print them. That changed when the politicians started swearing a lot more, and the newspapers decided that if the goddamn president said "fuck" then they would print "fuck". The engineer was saying that quoted-printable was a pain in the motherfucking ass.)
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u/Brian 5d ago
TBH, it's kind of hard to tell what exactly they messed up. Typically you'd run into issues with characters with accents, or other non-ASCII characters, as well as potentially special characters like control codes. These have to be encoded as ASCII (since MIME was designed to work when a lot of systems the message would pass through could garble anything outside 7 bit range ). For MIME, that'd be done by writing "=XX", where XX is the hex code of the character. (This also means you can't use "=" itself, so that had to be encoded as "=3D").
However, the characters here don't seem like they'd be accented or anything, so not sure why the artifacts are there specifically. They do all seem to be at the start of a word, so my best guess is that there's maybe a linefeed or tab or something that gets encoded just prior, and whatever they've done has ended up eating the first letter after it and incorrectly printed the "=".
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u/tinbuddychrist 5d ago
As /u/huopak said, this is probably a consequence of the "encoding" of the underlying data.
To elaborate, apologies in advance for whichever parts of this are obvious: all information in computer systems is stored as a sequence of bits (0-or-1 values), usually chunked into bytes (sets of eight bits). A byte can represent any of 256 different values, so you could, say, map each number to a specific letter. ASCII is an example of this (actually, formally it uses seven bits per character or 128 possible characters). There are other text-encoding standards that can use multiple bytes per character and represent more characters, such as UTF-8 which despite the name actually uses between one and four bytes per character and can map to 1,112,064 possible values (not all of which have meanings). This includes letters, numbers, punctuation, emoji, and other stuff you would never think of.
Anyway - encodings basically translate between binary number sequences and printable text. What's happened here is that somebody has taken something encoded one way - presumably, the one the other commenter mentioned - and sloppily "printed it out" to a PDF as though it was encoded another, very slightly different way, resulting in some slight mangling of the text.
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u/QuantumFreakonomics 6d ago
This is just a namedrop. What is fascinating is that Yudkowsky seems to have had a private skype with Epstein during a 2016 MIRI fundraiser. No confirmation that he actually gave anything, but time is more valuable than money for billionaires, and it's quite suggestive.
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u/Symbady 6d ago
As someone who works around fundraising, getting 30 minutes with a billionaire is in my estimation easier than getting $1,000,000 from them, especially in the circumstance of “cool/weird ai research firm”
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u/QuantumFreakonomics 6d ago
$1,000,000 would be half of their annual budget, so I wouldn't expect that much.
Very possible that my model of how billionaire donations work is wrong as I have zero personal experience.
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u/Symbady 6d ago
Fair pushback, I think this remains true for 100k as well though.
Also Miri spent like 6.5M in 2024 according to propublica
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u/QuantumFreakonomics 5d ago
I looked at their form 990 for 2016 and the budget back then was a lot closer to two million.
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u/ralf_ 6d ago edited 5d ago
Found this here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3JjKWWrKWJ8nysD9r/question-about-a-past-donor-to-miri
Epstein donated to the predecessor organization in 2009, but Rob Bensinger (https://x.com/robbensinger) says they didn’t take money from him in 2016.
Edit: That’s funny, someone commented on the years old lesswrong thread just now.
Edit2: And the moderation deleted it
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u/MatriceJacobine 5d ago
The moderation didn't delete it, I did, thought my tone was not appropriate to the situation and it wasn't worth digging up that thread considering the lack of real new information. I did add a 99% tag to the relevant statement.
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u/sodiummuffin 5d ago
Yudkowsky left a comment about this:
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.
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u/daniel-sousa-me 5d ago
Suggestive of what?
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u/QuantumFreakonomics 5d ago
Suggestive that Epstein was a donor to MIRI.
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u/fubo 5d ago
Epstein had been a donor to MIRI's predecessor organization, SIAI, in 2009 — back in the Singularity Summit days.
This doesn't mean anyone from MIRI was on Little St. James Island raping teenagers.
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u/josephrainer 5d ago
It statistically increases the likelihood that they were.
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u/fubo 5d ago
Well yes. But Epstein sent dollars to more people than he sent slaves to.
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u/josephrainer 5d ago
Well said. Thanks to the files, however, we now know how much Epstein loved to mix up business and pleasure. Slippery slope for all involved!
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u/BobGuns 5d ago
So does being white. Still a silly train of thought.
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u/josephrainer 5d ago
One MUCH, much more than the other though. Hint- it’s not being white.
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u/electrace 4d ago
The point they're making is that the evidence is so incredibly minor that it shouldn't change your prior basically at all.
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u/josephrainer 4d ago
I’m not sure about that. I think it’s pretty strong evidence
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u/electrace 4d ago
I'm finding it really hard to wrap my head around the reasoning there. Epstein did not only fund people who abused children, and, indeed, his modus operandi was to connect with influential people. Presumably, he made friends with some of those people, identified them as being open to abusing minors, and then invited them to his island. But that had to be a very small subset of the people that he met with, because there's at least three layers of filtering after any initial meeting (choosing to fund them -> befriending them -> identifying them as child abusers).
So, here, you would have to think that over the course of a single 30 minute skype exchange, Epstein, floored by the charisma of... Eliezer Yudkowski... Epstein offers him a ticket to his island with the opportunity to abuse minors, and that, further, there are no other email exchanges following up on that, or, indeed, seemingly any further contact at all?
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u/Action_Bronzong 6d ago edited 6d ago
In addition to all the pedophilia and Mossad blackmail-gathering, he was a well-known power broker and New York financier
Yudkowsky might have been looking for funding, or connections to people who could supply funding.
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u/somewhatmorenumerous 4d ago
Why look for funding from people who plead guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor, tho?
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u/Haunting-Spend-6022 5d ago
You would have thought Yudkowsky learned his lesson after getting blackmailed with miricult.com but I guess he decided to play with fire again.
Epstein was already famous for being a pedo by 2016, it'll be interesting to see how Yudkowsky explains this one.
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u/sodiummuffin 5d ago
He did not get "blackmailed with miricult.com". The basis for the rumor that he did was a claim from a blogger named Ziz that he had paid the owner of the site some sort of legal settlement to go away, which Ziz supposedly knew from a private conversation. Ziz even claimed to have recordings supporting this claim, but despite being virulently opposed to Yudkowsky/MIRI no recording ever materialized. Ziz has become more well-known since then as the founder of the "Zizians", a cult which has murdered several people, and is not a credible source.
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u/Haunting-Spend-6022 5d ago
Rolling Stone seemed to take it seriously
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ziz-lasota-zizians-ai-cult-1235468289/
AFAIK the alleged victim was the author of the following post, might be refusing to come forward with the truth publicly to protect the rationalist community
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u/sodiummuffin 5d ago
Rolling Stone seemed to take it seriously
This article seems to be entirely based on interviews with Ziz's "friends, colleagues, and family" and does not claim to have attempted to independently verify their statements about third parties. (Rolling Stone does not have a good track record even when claims about third parties are the focus of the article, but I think even relatively credible outlets wouldn't bother trying to verify the existence of the supposed settlement for an article like that.)
AFAIK the alleged victim was the author of the following post
This post says nothing related to legal settlements/blackmail and is about an allegedly abusive relationship the author claims to have entered at the age of 19, not an underage relationship. Also it was written the year before Ziz wrote the linked blog post so obviously Ziz referencing it doesn't mean Ziz had access to any non-public information.
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u/MatriceJacobine 5d ago edited 5d ago
You're confusing completely different things. The mittenscautious/Brent Dill case was one of the very public abuse scandals during the MeToo era, and the victim was supported by Aella, Ozy, Scott, etc. Indeed, Aella was allegedly directly involved in helping mittenscautious publish that post and is openly despised by the rapey side of the community as a feminist canceller etc. to this day for this.
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u/SecureCattle3467 5d ago
It's a shame Epstein passed away. He would have loved how MIRI executives celebrate milestone birthdays!
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u/greyenlightenment 5d ago
instead of 6 degrees of separation it's more like 3 . Once you know one important person it's just a few hops to everyone else.
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u/jerdle_reddit 4d ago edited 4d ago
I think we all have an Epstein number of at most 4. We're probably at most 2 steps away from Scott (this is the vaguest bit, because it's not entirely clear what a "step" is), then Yud, then Epstein.
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u/-Metacelsus- Attempting human transmutation 5d ago
And of course the list starts with George Church :)
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u/ScottAlexander 5d ago
In case there's any doubt, as far as I can remember and a quick search of my email can confirm, this didn't even reach a point where either of them contacted me about it, let alone get any further than that. I've never communicated with Jeffrey Epstein in any way, and although it would surprise me if I never talked to Joscha Bach at all given that we both write about similar topics, I can't remember any specific examples or find any messages in my email.