In 2007, with the support of luminaries like Steven Pinker and Alan Dershowitz, Epstein managed to finagle from Alex Acosta a non-prosecution agreement for human trafficking that ultimately resulted in a country club sentence that allowed him, during his short custodial sentence, to work from his own private office for 12 hours every day.
The problem people have with Epstein's "support for science" is that he spent his life collecting influential people, and, in at least once notorious instance but likely many others, deploying the influence of those people to his ends, which included the trafficking of minors for rape. One reasonably asks, "was Epstein actually trying to fund science at Harvard? Or was brokering donations for programs he could brag about having a hand in getting off the ground just an easy way to create social bonds with the world's most influential people?" One then looks at what Pinker did for Epstein in 2007 and, probably, quickly finds the answer to that question.
This was also the problem with the MIT Media Lab's policy of denying named donations for Epstein while allowing him to broker donations behind the scenes. They were getting money from powerful people, because of Epstein's work. But MIT and the Media Lab's management missed what Epstein was getting out of the deal.
I agree that one may reasonably ask that. But there are much easier ways to acquire power and influence if you are extremely wealthy.
The only reasonable conclusion you can draw about the man is that he was both legitimately interested in furthering science and interested in acquiring personal power. That doesn't make anything he did any better, and we shouldn't say things like "well, he did all this sexual abuse, but he also funded science". I'm not advocating that.
But I also think it's overly reductionist and cynical to say that he was funding science for the sole purpose of insulating himself from legal prosecution for abusing women. It's just a ridiculously inefficient way to do that, if that's your only goal.
My broader point is that I think we need to be better about handling moral, not ambiguity, but...ambivalence? Epstein is not a morally ambiguous character, but he did do more than one thing in his life. Some of those things were good, some of those things were bad. The bad things unequivocally outweigh the good things, but it doesn't mean we have to erase them, or find some way rube-goldbergian way to re-evaluate them as actually sinister.
Which is also not to say that we shouldn't think carefully about the kind of power/legitimacy conferred by Epstein's activities. I think that's a legitimate and important discussion. But i'd find the inability to handle multi-dimensionality in some of these discussions strange.
No-one is arguing that humans can't be complicated enough to have separate and complex facets to their lives.
We're arguing that, in this case, the facets weren't actually separate.
Here is a quote from a New York Magazine writer, quoting Epstein when he (the writer) asked to interview him about his conviction for molesting a 14 year-old:
> "Have you managed to talk to many of my friends?" Epstein had been supplying me the phone numbers of important scientists and financiers and media figures. "Do you understand what an extraordinary group of people they are, what they have accomplished in their fields?"
This is an attempt to intertwine the two aspects of his life that you claim were disconnected. It was not the only similar attempt.
I'm not saying they were completely disconnected. What i'm saying is that he very clearly had a legitimate interest/passion for science. He could have acquired power and influence in much more efficient ways than funding the MIT media lab, but he chose the things he did because he liked them.
I think people here don't want to believe he legitimately liked science because they think of that as a "good" trait, and they don't want a "bad" person to have any "good" traits. And I think that way of viewing the world ends up doing more harm than good.
It's not that clear. The sense I picked up from reading accounts of people who've met him in scientific contexts is that he would ask nonsensical questions, exhibiting an unwillingness to put in the effort to understand the basics of the fields he sponsored. It doesn't sound very passionate to me.
For example, from an article:
> The Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker said he considered Epstein as an "intellectual impostor”.
That seems to fit even better, albeit it in a different way.
Rather than funding science to make a good contribution out of personal interest (and understanding), he could have been motivated out of a feeling of admiration, or intellectual inadequacy. Monetary funding would then appear to place him as a peer among these scientists, which would be a bit of an ego boost either way.
This would make claims about his "extraordinary group" of friends make a lot of sense. He might have associated with those people thinking that it made him feel and appear to be an interesting, intelligent, overall better person.
Seems like exactly what an "intellectual imposter" would do, more than someone trying to build a personal shield.
Besides, we all know scientists have no political influence worth harnessing.
Or he knew that donating to influential science organizations would buy him good will, put him in touch with other rich donors, be good for media coverage and get him a list of people who might vouch for him when called by a journalist because they've received funding from him.
> This would make claims about his "extraordinary group" of friends make a lot of sense.
I don't know, it sounds like a slightly better worded version of "I know great people, they're the best people really, and I am one of them". They're extraordinary and they are his friends => wow, that must be quite the great guy, or he wouldn't have those kinds of friends.
Scientists might not directly have political influence, but especially the very successful ones are well-connected and have friends in the media. If you have lots of money to spend and you want to buy good will, wouldn't you just spread it? If a journalist ever thinks about you and talks about you at a private party, what better could happen than a science guy saying "oh I know him, he funded our important research" and an author saying "oh, yeah, that guy, he donated money to some literary program" and a finance guy saying "wow, yeah, he's very successful".
I find that a much simpler explanation that fits well into the picture.
> wow, that must be quite the great guy, or he wouldn't have those kinds of friends.
All I was really saying was that maybe he believed this himself. Like his mum paid for an expensive party and invited the cool kids and they were mostly polite and now he thinks they like him and he’s part of the group.
Key difference being belief in his own delusion, before bragging to others about being one of the cool kids.
Even if he had a legitimate interest in science, who cares? There are two huge problems with Harvard allowing him to continue like that.
1. He exploited his connections to obtain a very lax sentence which allowed him to continue to rape children.
2. It damages the integrity of the scientific research as laid out in the article.
I have a bigger issue with the first than with the second, but I don't see how the question of whether he also had a legitimate interest in science is relevant to either.
> 2. It damages the integrity of the scientific research as laid out in the article.
A major point in this thread is that that makes no sense. The integrity of the scientific research here is fine. Is the suggestion here that there is a paedophile agenda to promote science and technology? Do we expect to be able to identify paedophiles because of their unusual dedication to the advancement of human knowledge?
The answer is a pretty solid no to both of those questions. There is no link between paedophilia and science.
> 1. He exploited his connections to obtain a very lax sentence which allowed him to continue to rape children.
Harvard isn't a courthouse. It is probably illegal in some way for them to revise court decisions. If the court gives a light sentence Harvard has to respect that. This point isn't related to Harvard.
We might disagree on those two points (I am abivalent about the research integrity one, anyway) but I hope you can agree with me that whether Epstein has a legitimate interest in science is completely immaterial to both of them. That's what my comment was about.
> But there are much easier ways to acquire power and influence if you are extremely wealthy.
Please elaborate, and include details of how those ways don't involve currying favor (using money and other things) with highly influential people and the institutions they are associated with.
It's not so easy to bribe a public prosecutor, which is why the extremely wealthy in need of a reputation bailout purchase it from those who are currently publicly reputable by virtue of the institution they are associated with (i.e MIT or Harvard).
The dimensions of people's lives are not as independent as you suggest which is why we have the concept of the conflict of interest.
> Please elaborate, and include details of how those ways don't involve currying favor (using money and other things) with highly influential people and the institutions they are associated with.
Invest in local politicians by making dinners, hosting parties, etc..and slowly work your way up the stack. It's true that Epstein did some of this, but from a pure power perspective, he would have gotten better returns by allocating his science money/time towards politicians directly.
> The dimensions of people's lives are not as independent as you suggest which is why we have the concept of the conflict of interest.
To be clear, i'm not suggesting that acquiring power/insulation was not one of the purposes of his science funding. What I am saying is that I don't think it was his sole motivation, and that describing it that way seems to me like an over-simplification designed to other him, so that we can all feel like he's completely unlike us. People on HN like science and technology, which means he shares something in common with us, and I think that makes people uncomfortable, so they want to deny it.
There's no evidence he had even a basic understanding of science, never mind a genuine interest in it.
There's no reason to believe his "interest in science" went any deeper than creating social leverage - at best.
Cultivating scientists, philosophers, and other intellectually prominent people is a far less risky and far more directly rewarding strategy than cultivating politicians - although in fact he did plenty of that too.
But politicians are usually considered sleazy, and someone who is courting them is clearly playing a political game and likely to be sleazy themselves.
Courting scientists and academics is much cleaner and provides exactly the kind of cover you're attempting to justify.
And of course no one should have a problem with othering Epstein. Considering his record, he's about as other as it's possible to be.
> It's true that Epstein did some of this, but from a pure power perspective, he would have gotten better returns by allocating his science money/time towards politicians directly.
That carries the risk of ending up with a felony campaign finance violation like Dinesh D'Souza's. Epstein was evil, not stupid.
> Invest in local politicians by making dinners, hosting parties, etc..and slowly work your way up the stack.
No amount of dinner parties is going to get people with reputation to lend it to you to cover the kind of horrifying stuff Epstein did. That sort of reputation cover costs money, and lots of it.
He was insulating himself from criminal charges for abusing children. He raped children. He had children trafficked so that he could rape them, and then hand them off to his influential friends to rape again.
Werner Von Braun was an actual nazi. He was also a great scientist. The world is just complicated sometimes.
The idea that all his science funding was an elaborate ruse to insulate himself from prosecution is just not a very well grounded view. His chosen method of insulation was terribly inefficient with respect to time and money. He would have gotten a much better ROI by investing in politicians directly, the fact that he chose to focus more on science than politics makes it pretty clear that he had a genuine interest/passion for it.
I don't see why he can't like science for its own sake and be a child abuser. The two things are not mutually exclusive.
Have you considered the option that Epstein didn't like science as such but liked the influence and air of respectability that hanging out with scientists and being seen as a supporter gave him? It could easily be a form of whitewashing of his reputation that he would not be able to do otherwise. Nothing spells 'good guy' more clearly than large donations to science and education.
> Werner Von Braun was an actual nazi. He was also a great scientist.
Some recent research suggests he might not have been that great a scientist after all. The story goes that he was an impostor who got to his position mostly due to his influential father and whose main skill was managing others who did the actual work.
Here's a bachelor's thesis from 2018 and an interview with the author - both in German, unfortunately:
But that doesn't tell us whether he had one motivation or two motivations in donating the way he did.
I could understand if you were saying "we should focus on his horrific crimes, and not care about what his motivation was in donating". But that can't be it, because you've also been posting in-depth about what his motivation was in donating.
So why are you making this post? I really hope it's not that you're trying to make it so awkward to respond that you 'win' the argument. But I can't think of any other non-hypocritical motivation.
Oh, you're complaining about one badly-chosen word. Women instead of girls.
Well I look dumb. Sorry.
But do you have any response to the other 99% of that post?
> I think I was plenty clear.
Normally people, especially those already in the reply chain, reply to the main argument of posts, so I don't think it was sufficiently clear. I would suggest quoting the part you're responding to if it's that small a section.
You stated it in a particular context. Either it was intended for this context and therefore meant to defend child sex trafficking, or it was not meant for this context, and thus off-topic.
If you meant it to be more nuanced than that, maybe include that nuance in your comment.
All of which are bad things, but are examples of how money can corrupt people's ethics not how the money corrupted research. Corrupting research in Epstein's case would be if Harvard started publishing studies showing pedophilia was just a lifestyle choice and shouldn't be criminalized.
There were two purposes to the funding: to drive research, and to build Epstein's influence. There are two questions: which of those was the primary purpose? And, even if you reach the conclusion that building Epstein's influence was the secondary purpose, does that matter?
It matters about the title referring to distorting research - obviously the money distorted people, not the research, the research that was done with Epstein's money did not become any less valuable, some of the people who drove that research became less ethical where interactions that were not scientific research in nature were concerned.
The research has some value, and was paid for at some cost, and if the cost outstrips the value, that is relevant. I think it's easy to conclude that it did.
>In 2007, with the support of luminaries like Steven Pinker and Alan Dershowitz, Epstein managed to finagle from Alex Acosta a non-prosecution agreement
He didn't finagle shit, his CIA handler finagled it for him. And that person will never face any consequences.
I’m familiar with what he is referring to. It’s the least charitable interpretation, and one that disregards Pinker’s explanation and greatly overstates his role. Something you’d only sneak in a comment if you’re eager to throw shade at someone you don’t know but who you constructed an oppressor narrative for anyway.
From what I gather from the article linked above, he privately gave his expert opinion as a linguist regarding a passage of legal text. To make the claim that he "absolutely assisted", you'd have to presume it wasn't something he'd do for anyone else, that he expected it to be used (apparently he claimed otherwise?), and that it actually helped, despite seeming completely off-the-wall. Did I miss anything?
And even so, any one of us can hire an expert witness to make a statement like that. Especially big-shot professors. They aren't cheap I bet, but they surely don't cost 6 million bucks per line.
to claim he absolutely assisted, you actually just need to presume that he did something that helped. You can argue with those other points to try to argue about whether or to what extent it was a bad thing to do, but those arguments, even if valid, do not change the bare fact that he did in fact assist to some extent in Epstein's legal defense as a favour to his friend who was representing Epstein.
Though Pinker himself has said he regrets having provided that aid, so I don't think he himself fully agrees with you if you want to argue against it being something he should not have done.
The problem people have with Epstein's "support for science" is that he spent his life collecting influential people, and, in at least once notorious instance but likely many others, deploying the influence of those people to his ends, which included the trafficking of minors for rape. One reasonably asks, "was Epstein actually trying to fund science at Harvard? Or was brokering donations for programs he could brag about having a hand in getting off the ground just an easy way to create social bonds with the world's most influential people?" One then looks at what Pinker did for Epstein in 2007 and, probably, quickly finds the answer to that question.
This was also the problem with the MIT Media Lab's policy of denying named donations for Epstein while allowing him to broker donations behind the scenes. They were getting money from powerful people, because of Epstein's work. But MIT and the Media Lab's management missed what Epstein was getting out of the deal.