Sounds like you’re depressed.
lc
The XBOW PR is a quintessential example of what I’m talking about. Suffice it to mention that:
XBOW topped the HackerOne ‘leaderboard’ that measures upvotes, not money earned on the platform.
XBOW almost entirely submitted bugs for the free, non-paid bug bounties! A primary reason they were able to find these bugs was because they weren’t actually competing with anyone!
Two years after the post was written! Although, still, good on Lukas.
None of those factoids are much evidence of anything, but I suppose I should be more specific: Epstein’s intelligence work (if he conducted any) probably had nothing to do with the lenient sentence Epstein received in 2008, which is what the OP claims.
A few years later, I basically no longer endorse a large section of this post, and I think it should have gotten a much more critical reception than it did.
The key things you need to understand about the Epstein case are:
Epstein almost certainly never trafficked any underage victims to associates, and almost none of his victims have ever claimed this. Pretty much all of the salacious coverage about this case stems from Virginia Guiffre’s accusations, and in the case of Alan Dershowitz these were so effectively refuted that she ended up withdrawing and then recanting one of the only two civil suits she actually brought.
Epstein killed himself, probably without the assistance of coconspirators (who as I mentioned earlier don’t exist, at least in the case of his sex crimes).
I was probably wrong and overexcited about possible “intelligence connections”. People have since casted doubt about the “belonged to intelligence” quote from Acosta by pointing out the fact that only once source, the Daily Wire, has ever reported it. I also did not know this at the time, but for his part Acosta himself denied that this reporting was accurate to OPR in their followup investigations in 2020. And there would be no reason for D.A. Acosta to lie about this—on the contrary, he would have screamed about it at the top of his lungs to everyone who accused him of misconduct, if Epstein being a cooperator was actually something that factored into it.
I think some part of me knew that the “Epstein’s intelligence connections got him out of his first conviction” was a ridiculous thing to believe at the time, but wanted to make the post more interesting and so put it in anyways. I apologize for letting my excitement get the better of me that way.
I still endorse everything in the addendum; Epstein having coordinated with or manipulated correctional staff, on his own, to give himself the opportunity to commit suicide is the most plausible theory I’ve heard for the suspicious circumstances surrounding his death. And of course don’t take the organizational chart literally is good advice.
The Groypers remain a fringe group of internet trolls without any real influence
I really disagree, I think they’re already starting to become very hard to ignore. Candace Owens gave Nick Fuentes a two hour interview literally just last week.
I guess in a spherical cow sense you could believe this without being antisemitic. But the evidence that Epstein ever trafficked any of his victims to friends in the first place is very weak. Additionally, if Epstein worked in an intelligence service, the natural party to that would be American intelligence services, who would actually be able to intercede on his behalf with prosecutors legally. And it’s unimpeachable that a large proportion of the public interest in this hypothesis has been the result of activism by explicitly antisemitic people like Nick Fuentes and Ian Carroll. So yes, I am inclined to believe that Tucker Carlson’s boosting of the theory, while maybe not being antisemitic in isolation, is indicative of a broader trend toward antisemitism on the right. It would not have happened five years ago.
But like, even if this doesn’t count, it’s obviously not just this one tweet, there’s a whole slew of content Tucker’s put out in the last six months that is clearly coming from this corner of the internet—even if he’s not being strategic about it himself.
This polling by Blue Rose research is much less noisy, I think:
Answer: No.
Maybe AGI will happen in 2029 or 2031 instead of 2027 and society will be less prepared, rather than more, because politically loads of people will be dunking on us for writing AI 2027, and so they’ll e.g. say “OK so now we are finally automating AI R&D, but don’t worry it’s not going to be superintelligent anytime soon, that’s what those discredited doomers think. AI is a normal technology.”
Frankly—this is what is going to happen, and your worry is completely deserved. The decision to name your scenario after a “modal” prediction you didn’t think would happen with even >50% probability was an absurd communication failure.
There is a very clear winning card for the next Democratic presidential candidate, if they have the chutzpah for it and are running against someone involved in Trump’s administration. All the nominee has to do, is publicly and repeatedly accuse Trump (and his associates) of covering up for Jeffrey Epstein. If J.D. Vance is the guy on the other debate stand, you just state plainly that J.D. Vance was part of the group suppressed the Epstein client list on behalf of Donald Trump, and that if the public wants to drain the swamp of child rapists, they gotta suck it up and vote Dem.
Of course, a move like that’ll put you in an awkward position when you do finally get elected. Because the actual reason the FBI hasn’t released a “client list”, is probably because it doesn’t exist, probably because Epstein never trafficked any of his victims to famous associates. After all, with the notable exception of Virginia Guiffre[1], none of his victims have ever even claimed that this happened. The idea that all of Epstein’s associates are bound together in some blackmail ring is basically a shared fiction conjured up from bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence that are either dubiously sourced or have more realistic interpretations.
The mythology of the Epstein case, though, has grown to such an extent that the public will never believe this.
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Who basically lost all credibility in my eyes during & after her Alan Dershowitz lawsuit.
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10-20 new users a day
What??? How many posts do people make on this site a day that don’t get seen?
O the things I would write, were I better at writing.
Four million a year seems like a lot of money to spend on what is essentially a good capabilities benchmark. I would rather give that to like, LessWrong, and if I had the time to do some research I could probably find 10 people willing to create benchmarks for alignment that I think would be even more positively impactful than a lesswrong donation (like https://scale.com/leaderboard/mask or https://scale.com/leaderboard/fortress)
This is a top-tier LessWrong post (at least the portions I’ve read, that detail facts-on-the-ground). It is clear, lucid, information dense, and successfully approaches a touchy subject matter-of-factly
without pushing an agenda[1].I figure that a lot of people will feel exasperated at seeing it because they’ve already heard a lot of the cliffnotes before, but in order for people to know about the thing Everyone Knows, someone at some point generally has to write it down without innuendo.
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Edit: nvm, there’s a little bit of an agenda in the middle.
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I think most people understood what you meant by this but perhaps you could make it explicit, as it’s an interesting clarification.
Getting bruce schneier as an endorsement is sick
Old internet arguments about religion and politics felt real. Yeah, the “debates” were often excuses to have a pissing competition, but a lot of people took the question of “who was right” seriously. And if you actually didn’t care, you were at least motivated to pretend you did to the audience.
Nowadays people don’t even seem to pretend to care about the underlying content. If someone seems like they’re being too earnest, others just reply with a picture of their face. It’s sad.
Much like how all crashes involving self-driving cars get widely publicized, regardless of rarity, for a while people will probably overhype instances of AIs destroying production databases or mismanaging accounting, even after those catastrophies become less common than human mistakes.