Imagine being such a creepy dumbass that even Steven Pinker has to tell you to rein it in. That’s an accomplishment right there.

At one session at Harvard, Mr. Epstein criticized efforts to reduce starvation and provide health care to the poor because doing so increased the risk of overpopulation, said Mr. Pinker, who was there. Mr. Pinker said he had rebutted the argument, citing research showing that high rates of infant mortality simply caused people to have more children. Mr. Epstein seemed annoyed, and a Harvard colleague later told Mr. Pinker that he had been “voted off the island” and was no longer welcome at Mr. Epstein’s gatherings.

congrats, Professor; you’re not the weirdest or worst person you know, and you got yourself kicked out of the right club for the right reason

Then there was Mr. Epstein’s interest in eugenics.

hooboy

This is a little outside our wheelhouse, but Epstein’s brand of weird transhumanism and eugenics has a definitely similarity to the weird transhumanism and eugenics that rationalists are into. There’s also some cryogenics, another LessWrong interest:

One adherent of transhumanism said that he and Mr. Epstein discussed the financier’s interest in cryogenics, an unproven science in which people’s bodies are frozen to be brought back to life in the future. Mr. Epstein told this person that he wanted his head and penis to be frozen.

Very juicy, thanks. Pasted here because paywall.

The lure for some of the scientists was Mr. Epstein’s money. He dangled financing for their pet projects. Some of the scientists said that the prospect of financing blinded them to the seriousness of his sexual transgressions, and even led them to give credence to some of Mr. Epstein’s half-baked scientific musings.

Mr. Epstein had once hypothesized that atoms behaved like investors in a marketplace.

Mr. Epstein was willing to finance research that others viewed as bizarre. He told one scientist that he was bankrolling efforts to identify a mysterious particle that might trigger the feeling that someone is watching you.

At one session at Harvard, Mr. Epstein criticized efforts to reduce starvation and provide health care to the poor because doing so increased the risk of overpopulation, said Mr. Pinker, who was there. Mr. Pinker said he had rebutted the argument, citing research showing that high rates of infant mortality simply caused people to have more children. Mr. Epstein seemed annoyed, and a Harvard colleague later told Mr. Pinker that he had been “voted off the island” and was no longer welcome at Mr. Epstein’s gatherings.

Mr. Epstein’s goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe.

Mr. Epstein had based his idea for a baby ranch on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates who wanted to strengthen the human gene pool. (Only one Nobel Prize winner has acknowledged contributing sperm to it. The repository discontinued operations in 1999.)

Mr. Epstein appears to have gained entree into the scientific community through John Brockman, a literary agent whose best-selling science writers include Richard Dawkins, Daniel Goleman and Jared Diamond. Mr. Brockman did not respond to requests for comment.

For two decades, Mr. Brockman presided over a series of salons that matched his scientist-authors with potential benefactors.

Also at the Indian Summer dinner, according to an account on the website of Mr. Brockman’s Edge Foundation, were the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Jeff Bezos, who was accompanied by his mother.

“All the good-looking women were sitting with the physicists’ table,”

This guy is basically a real life cartoon villain. It’s astonishing.

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from this article you could find bunch of rationalists

Recent rundowns of Epstein’s science funding, his science fandom, and his science friends show the extent of this division. Almost every science scholar whom he’s said to have courted or supported is a man: Lawrence Krauss, Marvin Minsky, and Roger Schank; also Gregory Benford, George Church, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, David Gross, Stephen Hawking, Danny Hillis, Gerard ’t Hooft, Stephen Kosslyn, Jaron Lanier, Seth Lloyd, Martin Nowak, Oliver Sacks, Lee Smolin, Robert Trivers, Frank Wilczek, and more. Truly, the list of men goes on and on. (Among the only women I can find in this group is Harvard’s Anne Harrington, who took a grant from Epstein around 1998.) Lanier told the New York Times that when well-credentialed women did show up at Epstein’s genius gatherings, he wondered if it might be so they could be screened as potential breeding partners. It was one of these women, he said, who described Epstein’s 20-at-a-time breeding project in New Mexico. Lanier could not recall her name (and did not mention Harrington).

and also

ver time, Epstein would build a network for procuring brilliant men. Chief among his fixers was the superagent, John Brockman. (Brockman declined to comment for this story.) When Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker flew out to a TED conference on Epstein’s private jet in 2002, their agent Brockman was on board as well. (Pinker’s scanty ties to Epstein have been singled out in recent weeks; he says he only boarded Epstein’s jet because of Brockman.) Roger Schank says it was Brockman who introduced him to Epstein, too. “Everybody goes through John Brockman,” he told me.