I’m about to go to sleep but I am a bit confused about Epstein stuff.
In 2019, @Rob Bensinger said that “Epstein had previously approached us in 2016 looking for organizations to donate to, and we decided against pursuing the option;”
That doesn’t feel a super accurate description. It seems like there was a discussion with Epstein after it was clear he had been involved in pretty bad behaviour. (In 2008 he pleaded guilty in a Florida state court to procuring a minor for prostitution and soliciting prostitution, was required to register as a sex offender, and served about 13 months in custody). Likewise the discussion involves a lot of information sent to Epstein and probably a skype call. It wasn’t just him approaching and MIRI saying no.
I guess I wonder if it might have been more appropriate to say, “We discussed funding with Epstein but decided not to go forward with it. In hindsight even the discussion was an error”
Yudkowsky: Not sure what you mean. Nate knows you’re Jeffrey E. I check not-yetpublished info/speculation past him before saying it.[1]
So I guess, do we think the discussion was an error? I think I would not endorse discussing funding with a known sex offender, but it’s hard to get in frames of mind I’m not in and much still wasn’t known.
I guess:
Are the emails real?
What do Yud and Nate think of talking to Epstein now?
What does Rob Bensinger think of his 2019 communication
What are some broader thoughts on this?
I don’t have a strong view. I find it’s worth moving slowly. Appreciate everyone’s time.
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.
I understand many in this world think guilt-by-association is valid, but that doesn’t mean it is. Talking with a felon is not itself a crime (nor a bad thing) and you should generally not ostracize people for who they talk to.
Furthermore, accepting a donation from a felon is not inherently bad. Being paid off to launder their reputation is a bad thing, and insofar as you lend your reputation to them in exchange for money, that’s unethical, but I think it’s clear that it’s not healthy for all felons to be barred from donating to charity/non-profits. The money is not itself tainted, it’s their reputation that must be kept straight.
I think even “launder their reputation” is too cynical. If a bad person does something good, via donation or otherwise, then that’s arguably indeed good. Imagine trying to hinder bad people from doing good deeds with the justification that this would launder their bad reputation. That would assume that a bad person doing something good is actually bad, which is seems false. It is true that doing good things makes them seem less bad, but that’s only because doing good things actually makes you less bad overall. (How much less bad is another question.)
As Eliezer himself notes, Epstein do seem to have personally benefited from improving his image through philanthropy as social cover for his trafficking ring, so in this case in particular (not necessarily in all cases of felons or even sex offenders) taking money from him seems straightforwardly bad.
I mean yes: If you do good things, your image will probably improve. As I said, that part doesn’t seem wrong to me.
Apart from that, I’m not convinced we actually know that he didn’t have genuine altruistic interest in donating money to certain charities. Do we have evidence one way or the other?
Also, just practically speaking, if it was for publicity, it would have been more effective to donate to cancer hospitals or starving orphans in Africa than to a weird and seemingly cult-like organization like SIAI.
Surely if you’re around those parts you should know that billionaire philanthropy is generally ineffective and not focused on effective interventions in global health and development. Epstein was primarily known as a philanthropist focused on academic and nonprofit scientific research, hence the high amount of famous/Ivy League scientists in his social circle. According to Eliezer’s account he didn’t understand SIAI’s beliefs on alignment.
shrug I think sharing the info is good & fine. I think you have some responsibility for the hypotheses you privilege. Having an algorithm where you spam ppl with low-quality moral accusations just because a different social scene is generating them, is kind of attention-wasting.
I tend to agree with you that it was in hindsight an error to even discuss with at all, but I don’t think @Rob Bensinger is being dishonest here. “decided against pursuing the option” do mean they took some time to make the decision and didn’t just ghost him without exchanging any more information (which I agree would have been preferable in hindsight).
I’m about to go to sleep but I am a bit confused about Epstein stuff.
In 2019, @Rob Bensinger said that “Epstein had previously approached us in 2016 looking for organizations to donate to, and we decided against pursuing the option;”
Looking at the Justice Dept releases (which I assume are real) (eg https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00814059.pdf)
That doesn’t feel a super accurate description. It seems like there was a discussion with Epstein after it was clear he had been involved in pretty bad behaviour. (In 2008 he pleaded guilty in a Florida state court to procuring a minor for prostitution and soliciting prostitution, was required to register as a sex offender, and served about 13 months in custody). Likewise the discussion involves a lot of information sent to Epstein and probably a skype call. It wasn’t just him approaching and MIRI saying no.
I guess I wonder if it might have been more appropriate to say, “We discussed funding with Epstein but decided not to go forward with it. In hindsight even the discussion was an error”
From the emails it seems @Eliezer Yudkowsky makes clear that @So8res and he know who Epstein is:
So I guess, do we think the discussion was an error? I think I would not endorse discussing funding with a known sex offender, but it’s hard to get in frames of mind I’m not in and much still wasn’t known.
I guess:
Are the emails real?
What do Yud and Nate think of talking to Epstein now?
What does Rob Bensinger think of his 2019 communication
What are some broader thoughts on this?
I don’t have a strong view. I find it’s worth moving slowly. Appreciate everyone’s time.
I’m not sure what this third sentence means.
Here’s Yudkowsky’s memory of what happened:
I understand many in this world think guilt-by-association is valid, but that doesn’t mean it is. Talking with a felon is not itself a crime (nor a bad thing) and you should generally not ostracize people for who they talk to.
Furthermore, accepting a donation from a felon is not inherently bad. Being paid off to launder their reputation is a bad thing, and insofar as you lend your reputation to them in exchange for money, that’s unethical, but I think it’s clear that it’s not healthy for all felons to be barred from donating to charity/non-profits. The money is not itself tainted, it’s their reputation that must be kept straight.
I think even “launder their reputation” is too cynical. If a bad person does something good, via donation or otherwise, then that’s arguably indeed good. Imagine trying to hinder bad people from doing good deeds with the justification that this would launder their bad reputation. That would assume that a bad person doing something good is actually bad, which is seems false. It is true that doing good things makes them seem less bad, but that’s only because doing good things actually makes you less bad overall. (How much less bad is another question.)
As Eliezer himself notes, Epstein do seem to have personally benefited from improving his image through philanthropy as social cover for his trafficking ring, so in this case in particular (not necessarily in all cases of felons or even sex offenders) taking money from him seems straightforwardly bad.
I mean yes: If you do good things, your image will probably improve. As I said, that part doesn’t seem wrong to me.
Apart from that, I’m not convinced we actually know that he didn’t have genuine altruistic interest in donating money to certain charities. Do we have evidence one way or the other?
Also, just practically speaking, if it was for publicity, it would have been more effective to donate to cancer hospitals or starving orphans in Africa than to a weird and seemingly cult-like organization like SIAI.
Surely if you’re around those parts you should know that billionaire philanthropy is generally ineffective and not focused on effective interventions in global health and development. Epstein was primarily known as a philanthropist focused on academic and nonprofit scientific research, hence the high amount of famous/Ivy League scientists in his social circle. According to Eliezer’s account he didn’t understand SIAI’s beliefs on alignment.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Though I don’t think I regret asking questions about a thing that was troubling me in a polite way on the community forum.
shrug I think sharing the info is good & fine. I think you have some responsibility for the hypotheses you privilege. Having an algorithm where you spam ppl with low-quality moral accusations just because a different social scene is generating them, is kind of attention-wasting.
I tend to agree with you that it was in hindsight an error to even discuss with at all, but I don’t think @Rob Bensinger is being dishonest here. “decided against pursuing the option” do mean they took some time to make the decision and didn’t just ghost him without exchanging any more information (which I agree would have been preferable in hindsight).