In another thread, I have posted about Form 990 for SIAI in 2009: was a Ben Goertzel an employee, and was the $50k donation from Jeffrey Epstein passed on to another organization such as OpenCog or kept in house? Form 990 says “not an employee” and “kept in house” but people who were staffers at the time tell different stories.
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 © )
The power company wants money to power your datacenter. The refinery wants money to deliver five 40-foot containers of germanium to nvidia in Taiwan. OpenAI staff want money to buy houses in California. If you are really rich, banks will lend you money against OpenAI or nvidia equity, but then stock prices falling can trigger a chain reaction where the bank calls the loan, you need to sell equity to give them the cash they want, driving down the stock price, others get scared it will drop further and sell …
I don’t know if there has been any on-the-ground journalism about our dear friends except possibly the Zizian murders and some of the investigations into misogyny and sexual abuse. What reporter without a bankroll from EA has money to spend a few months in the Bay Area making friends with introverted bloggers?
One of the mentors at Inkhaven will be Jesse Singal who has said good things about pedophiles and KiwiFarms and is worried about so many young people identifying as trans. Does he have prior connections to eugenics or race pseudoscience? Pinkerite says he is Bluesky buddies with Razib Khan (one of the names RationalWiki can no longer mention).
They are organizing another Inkhaven in April, maybe because it brings in at least $80,000. I do not recommend committing to spend a month in the presence of our dear friends given their practice of allowing sexual, psychological, and substance abuse in their communities!
Fortunately, most of the rest of the world economy is heading in the opposite direction and building new free-trade zones without the US. I think the US in a few years will start to feel a lot like the UK today, with everything falling apart, everyone becoming poorer and less mobile, and anger about Hispanics instead of Poles and trans people.
Its not an original observation, but some people can’t imagine moral courage. They think everyone is on the make and the only difference is between brave and cautious.
Yudkowsky more often calls himself a libertarian. His tweets on policy look like a Libertarian Usenet group in the 1990s. American Libertarians are notorious for having a problem with the age of consent.
He is following up with thoughts on how sometimes someone pleads guilty of a crime they did not commit: edit link
CinnasVerses: Plea bargains work different ways in the USA depending on the race and status of the accused. I would read a wealthy white American who pleads down to one horrible sexual crime very differently than a poor black American pleading guilty to marijuana possession.
Yudkowsky: I’d read them differently, but still wouldn’t assume the former had been guilty solely upon hearing that they’d been successfully forced into a plea bargain, especially if they were so wealthy that they might have political enemies.
Epstein does, indeed, appear to have been guilty of much worse than what he plea-bargained for. That does not change my general position on, “I do not believe someone to be guilty solely upon being told that they entered a guilty plea bargain; additional information is required.”
It’s a classical liberal thing. We don’t automatically trust the government. We sometimes conclude that, yes, the government sure as fucking hell was right that time, but only after looking into it first.
All I will say is that the rules for felony conviction are stricter than the rules for “you sound creepy, we decline your invitation.” And that this experience is one I will draw on going forward when setting community norms to discourage abuse.
Edit: Isn’t Dath Ilan the setting of the Project Wonderful glowfic? The setting where people with good genes get more breeding licenses than people with bad genes?
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.
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.
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.
Also a plot point in the erotic horror comics I linked a few weeks ago!
Yes, in the 2016 emails Yudkowsky hints that he knows Epstein has a reputation for pursuing underage girls and would still like his money. We don’t know what he knew about Epstein in 2009, but he sure seemed to know that something was wrong with the man in 2016. And that makes it harder to put Yud’s writings about the age of consent in a good light (hard to believe that he was just thinking of a sixteen-year-old dating a nineteen-year-old, and had never imagined a middle-aged man assaulting fourteen-year-olds).
This is not the worst academics and pundits in Epstein’s network, this virologist named Nathan Wolfe is new to me. If an American academic had their career ended by fraud or misconduct there is a good chance that he or she was trying to make nice with Epstein afterwards.
Joscha Bach introduced Michael Vassar to Epstein in 2018 with:
My friend Michele Reilly asked me to reintroduce her to you; you met her and Michael Vassar a few years ago on the island
Vassar is best known for the MetaMed startup which bet that LessWrong posters were better at diagnosis than MDs. He also founded one of the LessWrong splinter movements that Scott Alexander warns people against.
There is a MIT computer scientist and popularizer called Michele Reilly although he could have meant someone else. My career has not been very successful but at least I never asked a friend to introduce me to a pederast or accepted an invitation to a sex criminal’s private island.
Some names are missing like Sabine Hossenfelder, the GMU economists, Brad Delong, and Hoover Institute staff. And I would not underestimate the number of people in this network who just went to the right university, met the right people, got the right job, and started to climb the ladder of fame.
The Weinstein brothers, Michael Vassar, Peter Thiel, and Yudkowsky were the names that leapt out at me. I don’t know that Vassar has any mainstream intellectual or academic achievements.
Learning that Rebecca Watson emailed Epstein for comment on a quote she was going to discuss, and Lawrence Krauss emailed Epstein because people like Rebecca Watson were outing him as a sex pest, reminds me of what a small world that was.
I don’t plan to link every figure, but will do so if they are sleazy or the name is unfamiliar. Many of them seem like distinguished academics or popularizers.
They could easily afford to hire a good admin assistant to sort out their organizational structure and bookkeeping. Why they chose nor to hire and listen to her or him I leave as an exercise for the reader.