As far as I can tell all of Pinker's disgusted comments distancing himself from Epstein appeared only after the (second) child prostitution thing, so tbh I'm not 100% on them
I’m writing to set the record straight. Here is what I know:
Steve Pinker has shared his experiences of Jeffrey Epstein on Jerry Coyne’s *Why Evolution Is True* ([https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/07/12/tarring-steve-pinker-and-others-with-jeffrey-epstein/](https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2019/07/12/tarring-steve-pinker-and-others-with-jeffrey-epstein/) ). He never socialized with Epstein or visited any of his properties, but found himself in the same place as him on a number of occasions because of people they knew in common.
As he says in the post on *Why Evolution Is True,* Pinker was invited to fly to TED on Epstein’s plane in 2002 by his literary agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson, together with Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and other TED speakers. This was years before Epstein’s sex crimes came to light, and an ordinary gathering of academics on their way to TED.
Pinker: "Epstein was really crazy and I never once, not once, thought it would be cool to fuck a bunch of women and live forever. I'm a scientist, for Pete's sake!"
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.
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.
>Mr. Epstein told this person that he wanted his head and penis to be frozen
If you have a limited power supply and thousands of years to plan for, it makes a lot of sense to stuff one into the other
Well yeah, the transhumanism foundation Epstein donated to had a chairman who's salery Epstein bank rolled ($100,000 to Ben Goertzel). Goertzel was also the "[Director of Research of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute).](https://humanityplus.org/humanity-global-leadership/)"
>“I have no desire to talk about Epstein right now,” Mr. Goertzel said in an email to The New York Times. “The stuff I’m reading about him in the papers is pretty disturbing and goes way beyond what I thought his misdoings and kinks were. Yecch.”
omg, sounds so guilty
> what I thought his misdoings and kinks were. Yecch.
While I appreciate the honesty of an off-the-cuff press statement, this guy needs a lawyer yesterday.
Right?? This is Epstein’s second serial child molestation case — I don’t understand how anyone could have been fine with the first one but draw the line at the second one. It’s kind of like what happened with R. Kelly.
I wonder how many other transhumanist 'luminaries' will get caught up in this? Those circles have some unwholesome links to a whole lot of different types.
It's not really a weird combination at all. Julian Huxley coined the term transhumanism in his [essay](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002216786800800107?journalCode=jhpa) of the same name. Huxley was also a proponent of eugenics, though he played a key role in debunking the classical race concept, making his brand of eugenics less noxious than that of his spiritual successors half a century later.
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 is definitely among the least of his crimes, but the Brockman connection makes me wonder how much bad pop science Epstein was directly responsible for funding.
**William Shockley**
William Bradford Shockley Jr. (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American physicist and inventor. Shockley was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for "their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect".
***
^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^]
^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
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.
Imagine being such a creepy dumbass that even Steven Pinker has to tell you to rein it in. That’s an accomplishment right there.
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
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:
Very juicy, thanks. Pasted here because paywall.
This guy is basically a real life cartoon villain. It’s astonishing.
[deleted]
from this article you could find bunch of rationalists
and also