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”
Inasmuch as you saw lots of other people in the world ostracizing people for having had email exchanges with a known felon, naively coming here and posting that people behaved badly by interacting with him feels spammy to me.
Analogously you can imagine if you saw a lot of people talking confidently about how the world is flat then came here and posted “I’ve been hearing a lot about this, I’ve not thought about it much but I propose we should be reflecting on our historical trust of scientists and lowering it as a result and apologizing to these people” I’d feel that this was noise/spam, and making a small demand of people’s time in an obviously wasteful fashion.
Let’s taboo the word “spammy”. Sounds like you think it was misguided of me to ask? Like it showed poor judgement? “an obviously wasteful fashion”.
I don’t think it was an obviously wasteful fashion. Epstein was someone who exchanged money for status. Had he funded MIRI, perhaps he would have invited Yud and Nate to some of his events. Perhaps they would have attended. Perhaps a high status person would have met and respected them and thought “hmm this Epstein guy seems okay”.
But notably, I think one should be able to ask such questions. I have been in communities where it is considered bad form to ask such questions and I didn’t like that. So now, if I have concerns, I tend to ask. If I understand correctly, @habryka wishes he’d been more public with his disagreements with SBF. Well maybe I wish I’d asked a few of my personal questions about that publicly. So I’m doing that here.
If people don’t like it they can downvote the comment and get on with their lives. In that sense the forum has voted. But if you want to discuss this personally, no I don’t feel bad to ask questions that concern me. Your (and Yud’s) initial response did cause me to change my mind, but this tone of ‘you shouldn’t even have asked about it’ seems bad. I am yet to be convinced of that. Seems plausible to me that while we should trust legal systems to do their job, that’s not the world we live in and Epstein was someone who traded money for reputation and MIRI was perhaps closer to doing that deal than I’d have liked, hence my question.
Surely SBF was also involved in similar trades. Should people have taken money from him, if they had suspicions? What about after the trial? If they hadn’t followed the trial but considered raising money from him, would that have been an error?
One’s strength as a rationalist can be measured by how much you are more confused by fiction than by reality. In group-rationality, one’s strength can be measured by how much true information is amplified and false information finds friction.
A special case of this is moral accusations. If legitimate moral accusation are passing through a social graph, do you clarify and sharpen them? If illegitimate moral accusations are passing through a social graph, do they find friction in you, do you pose them with the cruxes laid bare? Or do you amplify them, demanding answers to questions that hide their reasoning and make it harder to challenge them?
I think it’s currently the case that there’s a large and popular force on the internet reading through the personal emails of Jeffrey Epstein and moral criticisms being levied at people merely for being in the emails at all. (Example: It seems that a news contributor / health author lost his job due to exchanging many emails with Epstein, even though he never visited Epstein’s island nor is accused of any crimes.)
It’s good to raise moral concerns/criticisms that you possess about behavior in your social scene! I think a more reflective version of this post could’ve been net-positive. Something like “Obviously correspondence with a felon is not itself unethical; I think it is worth checking whether this relationship was anything more than that? Does anyone have any further info about any relationship with Epstein, or has Eliezer written about it?” and then getting the link to the answer. But I think you should know better than to also put your weight behind guilt-by-association as a credible moral accusation, and I think I should be able to hold people to that basic standard on LessWrong.
Lines like:
Inasmuch as you saw lots of other people in the world ostracizing people for having had email exchanges with a known felon, naively coming here and posting that people behaved badly by interacting with him feels spammy to me.
Analogously you can imagine if you saw a lot of people talking confidently about how the world is flat then came here and posted “I’ve been hearing a lot about this, I’ve not thought about it much but I propose we should be reflecting on our historical trust of scientists and lowering it as a result and apologizing to these people” I’d feel that this was noise/spam, and making a small demand of people’s time in an obviously wasteful fashion.
Let’s taboo the word “spammy”. Sounds like you think it was misguided of me to ask? Like it showed poor judgement? “an obviously wasteful fashion”.
I don’t think it was an obviously wasteful fashion. Epstein was someone who exchanged money for status. Had he funded MIRI, perhaps he would have invited Yud and Nate to some of his events. Perhaps they would have attended. Perhaps a high status person would have met and respected them and thought “hmm this Epstein guy seems okay”.
But notably, I think one should be able to ask such questions. I have been in communities where it is considered bad form to ask such questions and I didn’t like that. So now, if I have concerns, I tend to ask. If I understand correctly, @habryka wishes he’d been more public with his disagreements with SBF. Well maybe I wish I’d asked a few of my personal questions about that publicly. So I’m doing that here.
If people don’t like it they can downvote the comment and get on with their lives. In that sense the forum has voted. But if you want to discuss this personally, no I don’t feel bad to ask questions that concern me. Your (and Yud’s) initial response did cause me to change my mind, but this tone of ‘you shouldn’t even have asked about it’ seems bad. I am yet to be convinced of that. Seems plausible to me that while we should trust legal systems to do their job, that’s not the world we live in and Epstein was someone who traded money for reputation and MIRI was perhaps closer to doing that deal than I’d have liked, hence my question.
Surely SBF was also involved in similar trades. Should people have taken money from him, if they had suspicions? What about after the trial? If they hadn’t followed the trial but considered raising money from him, would that have been an error?
One’s strength as a rationalist can be measured by how much you are more confused by fiction than by reality. In group-rationality, one’s strength can be measured by how much true information is amplified and false information finds friction.
A special case of this is moral accusations. If legitimate moral accusation are passing through a social graph, do you clarify and sharpen them? If illegitimate moral accusations are passing through a social graph, do they find friction in you, do you pose them with the cruxes laid bare? Or do you amplify them, demanding answers to questions that hide their reasoning and make it harder to challenge them?
I think it’s currently the case that there’s a large and popular force on the internet reading through the personal emails of Jeffrey Epstein and moral criticisms being levied at people merely for being in the emails at all. (Example: It seems that a news contributor / health author lost his job due to exchanging many emails with Epstein, even though he never visited Epstein’s island nor is accused of any crimes.)
It’s good to raise moral concerns/criticisms that you possess about behavior in your social scene! I think a more reflective version of this post could’ve been net-positive. Something like “Obviously correspondence with a felon is not itself unethical; I think it is worth checking whether this relationship was anything more than that? Does anyone have any further info about any relationship with Epstein, or has Eliezer written about it?” and then getting the link to the answer. But I think you should know better than to also put your weight behind guilt-by-association as a credible moral accusation, and I think I should be able to hold people to that basic standard on LessWrong.