> adding: “perhaps you will know Jeffrey and his background and situation."
This is the most-interesting bit. The introducer put this up front. Maybe it's Nigerian-prince scame logic? Or maybe there really is that much sympathy for pedophiles in Silicon Valley [1].
IMHO it's more like a disclaimer, if you hide it people will sooner or later still find out either if they do research (it was public), or randomly later. That then creates a situation of a "breach of trust" that "they where tricked to work with a evil person" etc.
So given that it anyway comes out sooner or later it's better to be upfront about it as that can create a feeling of trust. It can create misconceptions like "if he where unserious he would have hidden that he works for Epstein" etc.
At the same time it acts as filter, people with a upstanding moral compass will directly say no and you don't wast time on trying to recruit them.
Lastly for people which some but not robust morals iff you can convince them to work with you and they start having doubts you now have the argument that "you told them upfront about the issue and they where okay with it, and bailing not would make them look like a very unreliable business partner affecting their carrier beyond this situation". To be clear I'm not saying that this is "true", but that this argument presented carefully in the right way at the right time can be effective to manipulate people _even if not true_.
>Scott Aaronson was born on May 21st, 1981. He will be 30 in 2011. The conference could follow a theme of: “hurry to think together with Scott Aaronson while he is still in his 20s and not yet a pitiful over-the-hill geezer in his 30s.” This offers another nice opportunity for celebration.
may be somebody would train a model on the Epstein and his associates emails/etc. which would allow to research the workings of the such psychopaths' minds
Excerpt from one of the related emails (written by JE):
"great proposal„ however, it needs to be more around deception alice -bob. communication. virus
hacking, battle between defense and infiltration.. computation is already looked at in various
fields. camoflauge , mimickry, signal processing, and its non random nature, misinformation. ( the
anti- truth - but right answer for the moment ).. computation does not involve defending against
interception, a key area for biological systems, if a predator breaks the code, it usually can
accumulate its preys free energy at a discount . self deception, ( necessary to prevent accidental
disclosure of inate algorithms. WE need more hackers , also interested in biological hacking ,
security, etc."
Damn! I once worked with a guy that was exactly like this. Not just writing but his style of speech irl was like that, incoherent loosely bound ideas around one topic. Ironically, the harder he tried to appear smart the more idiotic were the things that spewed out of his mouth.
We were working with GPUs, trying to find ways to optimize GPU code, he called the team for an informal meeting and told us dead serious, "Why can't you just like, ..., remove the GPUs from the server, then crack them open, turn them outside out and put them back in to see if they perform better". :O
I don't know if this has a name, I just thought the guy had schizophrenia. So glad I moved on from that place.
Sounds like he was confused but genuinely interested in cryptology, which contradicts the cynical narrative about him only donating for social reasons.
Well, it's a prompt to his assistant. It's more short-hand communication than anything else. My self-notes often look like that. They're just phrases to bring to mind some ideas rather than others or direct towards something.
Someone[3] mentioned how he sounded in an interview and I went and found his conversation with Steve Bannon. My daughter just went back to sleep and I'm not one for listening to stuff anyway so I sent it through Voxtral and put it through a visualizer[1] so I could read it and I can see why someone might want to listen to him.
He name-drops famous people a lot, definitely farms those connections and so on, but the things he mentions do reveal a systems-level comprehension of many concepts and how they affect each other. And he does it by describing these things in a simple way that must have been easy for them to understand. Personally, I think it obscures a lot of the detail but it has the flavour of the insight porn genre that was once popular.
A few of the examples are that he describes the subprime crisis as originating in Clinton-era home-ownership reform that pressured government lenders to essentially back many subprime mortgages (expanded during the Bush-era). Then he talks about mark-to-market accounting and how that accelerated (maybe even was one of the causes) of the 2008 crisis. That is sort of true, which is why new rules allow for some kinds of assets to be valued differently[2].
Anyway, unlike others here I don't think he's incoherent or stupid or whatever. The crimes he was convicted and about to be convicted for are pretty horrific but I think people are treating him like some kind of moron when I don't think that's accurate. I'm not saying this to praise the guy or defend him. I just don't think it's true.
Word salads can be very intimidating if the words are extremely technical and the person behind them carries a lot of clout. It's a bit of a trick that some people are very good at.
Bill Gates was known for making PMs and tech lead type people scared, often literally so, by going deep into technical details.
Elon Musk sometimes also talks a lot of details, to the point of actual rocket engineers working for him being impressed. At the same time, it is sometimes painfully obvious that he hasn't got the basics even remotely correct.
I'm not saying that Epstein was like that, but the fact that these three people used to hang out isn't surprising, they're likely to be socially compatible.
> "Why can't you just like, ..., remove the GPUs from the server, then crack them open, turn them outside out and put them back in to see if they perform better"
I don' know what "turn them outside out" but it sounds like they are suggesting removing and replacing the heatsink. Funnily enough, replacing thermal paste can improve temperatures [1].
Not to go full pizzagate conspiracy theorist, but, Epstein is just the most out in the open and famous tip of the proverbial iceberg. These people didn't stop being nonces because some of them got caught.
> If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.
The actual lesson is not "listen to your mom", but "character matters". It doesn't matter how much someone agrees with you, how smart they are, how rich they are, how many great ideas they have etc etc. A rotten character will eventually rot everything around it. Techines/nerds/geeks get so enamoured with ideas they tend to not even see the kind of people ideas come from.
As a European, I find it very funny to see how nobody in the US is willing to address the elephant in the room called Mossad. This looks more likely an israeli operation which sourced girls from russia and likely had the FSB as a customer/scratch my back I scratch yours/collab thing. I mean, most US politicians and the president seem to be on an "israel first" agenda.
While I understand that once one attains those short of connections, certain intelligence agencies will reach out offering lucrative opportunities for your co-operation.
Disgusting nature aside, I can't help but be amazed as to how someone can be so well connected. What sort of skills did Epstein have that managed to have so many people on speed dial?
How do you get in a position to correspond with presidents, royals, celebrities and getting them all hooked on you?
Being omniconnected was his job, if you think he was being managed, and his business, to the extent he was freelancing and trading on his own account.
How do you become omniconnected? You offer people a good time. How do you have repeat customers? You offer them a too good time. Why the disgusting acts? Because mere sex isn't scandalous enough.
Sometimes you do it because you've been commissioned to do it to a specific person. Sometimes you do it on spec because you think you can sell it. There is no one goal or ideology or theme to it other than it's gotta be nasty enough to blackmail a target.
A few years ago there was some news articles about “group chats that rule the world”, and for some reason people didn’t take it seriously enough. Closer to the top, it feels like it’s “everyone knows everyone” game. Playing against those groups just leads to a perma-loss, so you’re incentivized to partake.
He was a talented con artist. While I don't have the link offhand, I recall reading an in-depth article the New York Times published on Epstein's rise. He gained connections first by exaggerating his own credentials, and later by exaggerating the depth and nature of his other connections. He was very good at convincing people that he was someone they needed to know.
Depends upon how tight knit is the family, yes, it seems strange for me as well. Members in some families are unusually friendly. My family won't even trust me hosting them an Immich library.
I don't know for sure, but from his CV, I'd guess I am similar in age to the author. He described remembering the venue (possibly separately to it being the meeting's venue) but not the meeting itself. I would have similar selective memories of business events from 10-15 years ago, amongst years of many meetings and opportunities. Sometimes I have a strong memory of one aspect, but no recollection at all of another. And I can identify with finding that email phrasing (about someone's "situation") being something that might prompt me to send it to people close to me as a sort of "look what happened to me today" thing.
I do agree with this. If you followed this approach consistently, you would need back pressure against individual and company wealth growth.
This could be quite good for competition, but would probably hurt sectors a lot that have high fixed costs/barriers of entry and need to compete with (foreign) unlimited-size companies.
I do think that this could fix or at least vastly improve some really difficult problems: The whole judiciary is IMO blatantly unjust right now, because higher wealth can basically buy you better outcomes, democratic representation is flawed because wealth/donations buy you access to politicians (or allows you to enter politics yourself) and even national public opinion on anything is essentially for sale to a degree via profit-driven media.
Such wealth-gap limiting could be possibly achieved by progressive taxation that rises logarithmically with revenue for companies and individual wealth (giving a strong incentive to split up wealth, and no leeway via declaring zero profits): Think 1% of revenue under 1M, 2% under 10M, ...
I'm very curious how a nation that made strong efforts in that direction would fare.
Isn't it the opposite? If someone can change "democracy, taxation and anti-monopoly regulation" across the country, they have substantially more power than Elon Musk.
Not all corruption is obvious though. Sometimes you think you are doing the right thing, "just need to bend the rules slightly over here". It is all for a "good cause". I feel like I am as much worried about people who are the righteous wrong, as much as people who are just out there trying to grift to make a buck.
Taxation is the mechanism that moves power from the people to the government, and increasingly politicians and their specific interests.
Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power?
Every government goon doing authoritarian dirty work collects a paycheck and wouldn't do their job without it.
Taxation is the system where innocent people are forced to pay enormous amounts of money to the rich, powerful, corrupt. The whole basis for the Babylon system is taxation. Epstein and associates are able to thrive thanks to taxation. It has always been from the poor to the rich, never the other way around. Why do you think kings invented taxation in the first place?
I would add strong and fast consumer protection biased to big companies. Also, the elephant in the room: a modern, and not impossble expensive, legal system.
Billionaires should be taxed away from existence. This much wealth and power is hugely detrimental to society. It's not even good for themselves, with how miserable and wretched they look and behave.
There was a big long article in the Atlantic recently called "what happened to Pam Bondi?" The answer is obviously corruption, and you probably don't need to read a big long article to see it.
Yep. It corrupts those people and makes them disconnected. Then they go on to do worse things. The only fix is to change tax policy to not allow billionaires. Redistribute wealth above some amount. One billion seems fine as a starting point.
Sortition may be what you're looking for: "sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e. by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample". No one can amass power because it's short term and random.
We can see that the two-party democracy in the United States has been one of the primary power tools of the 1%. They buy politicians from both parties and then sit back and laugh on their yachts while everyone else goes red in the face, outraged, arguing, and distracted. We are indeed the suckers yet again, but maybe, just maybe this time will be different?
Limited terms are anti-democratic. They were instituted for the U.S. presidency after FDR won 4 terms and scared the rich into making sure that if that ever happened again, it would be more limited in scope.
The most surprising name in the Epstein files is Rebecca Watson also known as Skepchick on YouTube. She has been a thorn in their side for years and years.
I think it's obvious Epstein was engineered as a "control theory lever" over a global financial/political system, that despite the best wargaming/simulation, could never be perfectly predicted. The system was simply too complex. So, real politik, and Machiavellian necessity required elements of control to be injected into this system to provide definiteness where ambiguity dared reign.
Ne pas comprende? That means that the blackmail was used to ensure definiteness of otherwise variable elements. If we were in Ancient Greece, it wouldn't be pedophilia (then, a "good") it would have been "chthonic excess"- or "ideological heresy"- based blackmail. The architects of this twistedness merely used the tools available that leveraged the age we live in.
So, that bacchic excess (beyond such needed for blackmail)? Human nature in secret succumbed to unchecked desires, itself a predictable outcome. The OG plan was not "evil" per se (ensure predictability of unpredictable system), it was pragmatic, but the implementation, necessarily became evil and the evil was normalized and justified by the "importance" of the plan to the stability of the playmakers.
Since it's ultimately about morals, maybe it is time to reread CS Lewis' "The Inner Ring" from 1944[0,1]. It's about the same kind of choices but in situations which are much harder to extricate oneself from than just a random sleazeball messaging you out of the blue.
This is what makes so much of the Epstein files damning. They are correspondents that happen after 2008 when he was publicly convicted of prostitution.
The fact that Scott here was able to find that information and cut ties shows how corrupt every powerful person that didn't do that was. Sorry billionaires and politicians, you don't come out looking clean being friendly to the known pedophile pimp.
76 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 68.4 ms ] threadThis is the most-interesting bit. The introducer put this up front. Maybe it's Nigerian-prince scame logic? Or maybe there really is that much sympathy for pedophiles in Silicon Valley [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/business/epstein-investme...
So given that it anyway comes out sooner or later it's better to be upfront about it as that can create a feeling of trust. It can create misconceptions like "if he where unserious he would have hidden that he works for Epstein" etc.
At the same time it acts as filter, people with a upstanding moral compass will directly say no and you don't wast time on trying to recruit them.
Lastly for people which some but not robust morals iff you can convince them to work with you and they start having doubts you now have the argument that "you told them upfront about the issue and they where okay with it, and bailing not would make them look like a very unreliable business partner affecting their carrier beyond this situation". To be clear I'm not saying that this is "true", but that this argument presented carefully in the right way at the right time can be effective to manipulate people _even if not true_.
may be somebody would train a model on the Epstein and his associates emails/etc. which would allow to research the workings of the such psychopaths' minds
"great proposal„ however, it needs to be more around deception alice -bob. communication. virus hacking, battle between defense and infiltration.. computation is already looked at in various fields. camoflauge , mimickry, signal processing, and its non random nature, misinformation. ( the anti- truth - but right answer for the moment ).. computation does not involve defending against interception, a key area for biological systems, if a predator breaks the code, it usually can accumulate its preys free energy at a discount . self deception, ( necessary to prevent accidental disclosure of inate algorithms. WE need more hackers , also interested in biological hacking , security, etc."
Damn! I once worked with a guy that was exactly like this. Not just writing but his style of speech irl was like that, incoherent loosely bound ideas around one topic. Ironically, the harder he tried to appear smart the more idiotic were the things that spewed out of his mouth.
We were working with GPUs, trying to find ways to optimize GPU code, he called the team for an informal meeting and told us dead serious, "Why can't you just like, ..., remove the GPUs from the server, then crack them open, turn them outside out and put them back in to see if they perform better". :O
I don't know if this has a name, I just thought the guy had schizophrenia. So glad I moved on from that place.
* He has money
* People want a share of his money
* He has enough people to tell him stuff to make his bullshit seem to have some connection with reality
* Anybody who argues with his stupid bullshit is no longer welcome and gets no chance to get a share of his money
Someone[3] mentioned how he sounded in an interview and I went and found his conversation with Steve Bannon. My daughter just went back to sleep and I'm not one for listening to stuff anyway so I sent it through Voxtral and put it through a visualizer[1] so I could read it and I can see why someone might want to listen to him.
He name-drops famous people a lot, definitely farms those connections and so on, but the things he mentions do reveal a systems-level comprehension of many concepts and how they affect each other. And he does it by describing these things in a simple way that must have been easy for them to understand. Personally, I think it obscures a lot of the detail but it has the flavour of the insight porn genre that was once popular.
A few of the examples are that he describes the subprime crisis as originating in Clinton-era home-ownership reform that pressured government lenders to essentially back many subprime mortgages (expanded during the Bush-era). Then he talks about mark-to-market accounting and how that accelerated (maybe even was one of the causes) of the 2008 crisis. That is sort of true, which is why new rules allow for some kinds of assets to be valued differently[2].
Anyway, unlike others here I don't think he's incoherent or stupid or whatever. The crimes he was convicted and about to be convicted for are pretty horrific but I think people are treating him like some kind of moron when I don't think that's accurate. I'm not saying this to praise the guy or defend him. I just don't think it's true.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpWEc-LMT10
1: https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/voxtral-viewer/?t=jeffrey-epste...
2: https://viewpoint.pwc.com/dt/us/en/pwc/accounting_guides/loa...
3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911540
Bill Gates was known for making PMs and tech lead type people scared, often literally so, by going deep into technical details.
Elon Musk sometimes also talks a lot of details, to the point of actual rocket engineers working for him being impressed. At the same time, it is sometimes painfully obvious that he hasn't got the basics even remotely correct.
I'm not saying that Epstein was like that, but the fact that these three people used to hang out isn't surprising, they're likely to be socially compatible.
I don' know what "turn them outside out" but it sounds like they are suggesting removing and replacing the heatsink. Funnily enough, replacing thermal paste can improve temperatures [1].
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/finally-replaced-gpu-thermal-...
Doubt it would have changed anything for Bill. There's a pattern there and this is just a piece of that pattern.
Peter Says: You think Bill Gates or Larry Summers would have listened to your Mom’s advice?
Scott Says: Peter #1: If she was their mom, maybe they would!
I get the sense that Bill does care about money, and so does Larry Summers, so Mom's advice probably wouldn't have done much there.
The actual lesson is not "listen to your mom", but "character matters". It doesn't matter how much someone agrees with you, how smart they are, how rich they are, how many great ideas they have etc etc. A rotten character will eventually rot everything around it. Techines/nerds/geeks get so enamoured with ideas they tend to not even see the kind of people ideas come from.
Bill Gates's mother was self-dealing up nepo baby business contracts while Scott's Mom was warning him away from bad people.
- Where did he get his money from?
- Who's interests are served by this whole dodgy setup?
- The Trump connection.
- The Trump Russia connection.
Maybe I imagine but it all seems aligned.
Must be russia.
Disgusting nature aside, I can't help but be amazed as to how someone can be so well connected. What sort of skills did Epstein have that managed to have so many people on speed dial?
How do you get in a position to correspond with presidents, royals, celebrities and getting them all hooked on you?
Amazing indeed.
There are after all multiple people being "given" girlfriends or contacts for social networking, shown in the Epstein files.
Most obvious example is of course Donald Trump with Melania.
How do you become omniconnected? You offer people a good time. How do you have repeat customers? You offer them a too good time. Why the disgusting acts? Because mere sex isn't scandalous enough.
Sometimes you do it because you've been commissioned to do it to a specific person. Sometimes you do it on spec because you think you can sell it. There is no one goal or ideology or theme to it other than it's gotta be nasty enough to blackmail a target.
This is/was one of such groups.
Alternative link: https://archive.is/Q8Idm
A very strange action to take for someone who claims to have no recollection of the meeting.
Democracy (limited terms), taxation and anti-monopoly regulation are examples that show a path to cure the disease.
Nobody should be trusted with too much power for too long.
This could be quite good for competition, but would probably hurt sectors a lot that have high fixed costs/barriers of entry and need to compete with (foreign) unlimited-size companies.
I do think that this could fix or at least vastly improve some really difficult problems: The whole judiciary is IMO blatantly unjust right now, because higher wealth can basically buy you better outcomes, democratic representation is flawed because wealth/donations buy you access to politicians (or allows you to enter politics yourself) and even national public opinion on anything is essentially for sale to a degree via profit-driven media.
Such wealth-gap limiting could be possibly achieved by progressive taxation that rises logarithmically with revenue for companies and individual wealth (giving a strong incentive to split up wealth, and no leeway via declaring zero profits): Think 1% of revenue under 1M, 2% under 10M, ...
I'm very curious how a nation that made strong efforts in that direction would fare.
Is it? Here's another version I like even more that unsettles democracy dogmatics: power attracts the corrupt.
Not all corruption is obvious though. Sometimes you think you are doing the right thing, "just need to bend the rules slightly over here". It is all for a "good cause". I feel like I am as much worried about people who are the righteous wrong, as much as people who are just out there trying to grift to make a buck.
Taxation is the system where innocent people are forced to pay enormous amounts of money to the rich, powerful, corrupt. The whole basis for the Babylon system is taxation. Epstein and associates are able to thrive thanks to taxation. It has always been from the poor to the rich, never the other way around. Why do you think kings invented taxation in the first place?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/pam-bondi-trump...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Hey. Fuck them. At least most of us are not greedy corrupt fucks. Or died in prison as a consequence of our own sins.
Ne pas comprende? That means that the blackmail was used to ensure definiteness of otherwise variable elements. If we were in Ancient Greece, it wouldn't be pedophilia (then, a "good") it would have been "chthonic excess"- or "ideological heresy"- based blackmail. The architects of this twistedness merely used the tools available that leveraged the age we live in.
So, that bacchic excess (beyond such needed for blackmail)? Human nature in secret succumbed to unchecked desires, itself a predictable outcome. The OG plan was not "evil" per se (ensure predictability of unpredictable system), it was pragmatic, but the implementation, necessarily became evil and the evil was normalized and justified by the "importance" of the plan to the stability of the playmakers.
The banality of evil, eh?
Is Scott referring to this Charles Harper, of the Templeton Foundation, dedicated to the science of theology?
http://capabilities.templeton.org/2006/interview/c_harper.ht...
[0] Link: https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
[1] HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38696764
Well it looks like Bill Gates had his wife for advice, and apparently his not following it played a part in ending his marriage.
The fact that Scott here was able to find that information and cut ties shows how corrupt every powerful person that didn't do that was. Sorry billionaires and politicians, you don't come out looking clean being friendly to the known pedophile pimp.
Good lunch spot for a nudnik
A different Jeffrey, mind.
Not sure how he's meant to come back from this.