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 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 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.
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 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.
Where do you think I was “spam”ming?
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.