originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important
Posted on r/HPMOR roughly one day ago
full transcript:
Epstein asked to call during a fundraiser. My notes say that I tried to explain AI alignment principles and difficulty to him (presumably in the same way I always would) and that he did not seem to be getting it very much. Others at MIRI say (I do not remember myself / have not myself checked the records) that Epstein then offered MIRI $300K; which made it worth MIRI's while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy, and ask if there was a reasonable path to accepting his donations causing harm; and the upshot was that MIRI decided not to take donations from him. I think/recall that it did not seem worthwhile to do a whole diligence thing about this Epstein guy before we knew whether he was offering significant funding in the first place, and then he did, and then MIRI people looked further, and then (I am told) MIRI turned him down.
Epstein threw money at quite a lot of scientists and I expect a majority of them did not have a clue. It's not standard practice among nonprofits to run diligence on donors, and in fact I don't think it should be. Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation, and this kind of scrutiny is more efficiently centralized by having professional law enforcement do it than by distributing it across thousands of nonprofits.
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.
This reply has not been approved by MIRI / carefully fact-checked, it is just off the top of my own head.
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:
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.