This. Significant portions of the Epstein files are random noise. Though even for a popularish author it'd be strange to be in enough 1990-2018 news snippets to reach that many EF hits. In any case "is in the Epstein files" should in general be replaced with "is in the Epstein files, including this email to/from them I found"
The most interesting section from the large paragraph on Wikipedia: “One of the documents is an image of an email from Ariely to Epstein, in which he requests the name and email of a "redhead" that Epstein had previously introduced to him”
That still doesn't mean anything. Sure we know Epstein did evil, but not everything he did was evil. One should assume at least a few people he interacted with had no reason to suspect his evil actions.
I guess that's why the same passage says Ariely maintained the relationship long after the Epstein's pedophile convictions. Not definitive either, but pretty suggestive.
Go read it yourself. There isn't enough information to draw concussions. Everything is consistent with contact with a major funder who you can't cut off just because of evil in a part of life you knew nothing about.
You can read the article with a bias and ignore his counter claims. However that is drawing a conclusion not warranted.
Now perhaps someone has read the letters and seen other evidence and can draw conclusions. However at this point I can't say who knew what.
Both people are of course evil, but they may or may not have an evil in common.
Asking THE sex trafficker pimp extraordinaire about the contact data of a “redhead”… I guess you CAN read this whole interaction as benevolent if you squint hard enough to the point that the nature of this guy’s transactions with people becomes invisible
I have a policy of "innocent until proven guilty". (even proven guilty doesn't mean guilty, but by that time so much evidence has been examined that odds are high enough to finally say guilty). All too often somebody pushes only evidence that supports their bias without full care for the full truth.
I agree it looks pretty bad, but I have not seen all the evidence and thus I must hold out the possibility he is innocent until someone does take the time to examine it all. That doesn't mean I think he is innocent, just that I'm carefully withholding judgement because I know I do not have all the facts. It also doesn't mean I'm against investigation of the facts - I just want the investigation done properly, and all discussions like this do not contribute to a proper investigation.
That’s fair. I just fear the justice system or whatever it should be to decide what the “truth” is might not be up to the task or not that interested in truth anymore. Like for example there’s this one person that everybody in the world knows who bragged about doing despicable things and there’s dozens of women who for years have been accusing him of doing similarly despicable or worse things to them, but it doesn’t matter because he’s innocent until proven guilty… So at some point I just allow myself to draw my own conclusions
Demographic collapse is a major issue unless agi automates away completely the need for human intellect, drive, and labor on complex tasks. If x% of your population are consumers without producing then that's a net drain on the economy sustained by the 1-x% of the population that is producing. All automation does is lessen the impact of the smaller labor pool
There are uses for AI running on the platform, you can see this in Ukraine right now where many kamikaze drones use AI for terminal guidance if the connection to the operator breaks after a target has been selected. How intensive that workload is and how it needs to be however I can't say.
I hear this explanation a lot but I think it's a convenient fiction. Lawmakers, at least in the US, don't seem to write their own legal texts very often. Sometimes they don't even read them [1]! Congress has no problem producing monstrously complicated laws, in any case.
I think it's likely that politicians and their funding sources have found ways to profit off of these discontinuities. The infamous Medicare "donut hole" [2] was arguably a "benefit discontinuity" of the sort mentioned by the author and pharmaceutical companies profited off of it (more than a hypothetical Medicare structure without a donut hole, not relative to the spending cap that replaced it—which profits them even more).
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