81–90 of 122 posts
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No quite. He also hid the donation from MIT, as Epstein was blacklisted. That part alone should get him fired.
What? How does that prove my point wrong? If anything, it amplifies my point.
"This single event shows how corrupt this class of people I already disliked is!" is the definition of how prejudice works.
"This single event is additional information that I'm pointing out because it reinforces points I've made frequently in the past, while pointing out different events." That's the definition of empirical argumentation.
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I didn't hear about the evils of Jeffrey Epstein. In fact I didn't know the guy at all. But to disprove your point. If I go back one year with the wayback machine and look at his wikipedia the first sentence on his page mentions he is a registered sex offender[1]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180807122025/https://en.wikipe...
Back in 2008, Epstein was convicted of a single prostitution charge [1]. The word "trafficking" doesn't even appear in that story. It makes it sound like Epstein had a weak moment frankly. It was only after the Miami Herald story came out did we learn about the child trafficking that took place -- and then this year it became a huge national story. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/business/01epstein.html
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They were anonymous because the recipients hid the fact of their origin . There are receipts of their conversations about this.
Your comment is problematic for Ito, but non-responsive to the parent comment's argument. The thread is: bb88 proposes that Epstein's charitable giving to MIT was a way to reputation launder ("turn a sleazeball into a boyscout"). davrosthedalek disputed that claim, as the donations were anonymous. The reason for anonymity doesn't matter; the net effect is there is no plausible reputation laundering effect from anonym…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't hear about the evils of Jeffrey Epstein. In fact I didn't know the guy at all. But to disprove your point. If I go back one year with the wayback machine and look at his wikipedia the first sentence on his page mentions he is a registered sex offender[1]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180807122025/https://en.wikipe...
Back in 2008, Epstein was convicted of a single prostitution charge [1]. The word "trafficking" doesn't even appear in that story. It makes it sound like Epstein had a weak moment frankly. It was only after the Miami Herald story came out did we learn about the child trafficking that took place -- and then this year it became a huge national story. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/business/01epstein.html
Upthread you said:
> Most likely, you didn't know about the evils of Jeffrey Epstein until a Miami Herald reporter started to dig into the story, and then got picked up by national papers. Had that not have happened, most people to this day would still think he's probably an "A OK dude."
But I would heartily disagree with that.
Allegations of sexual assault of minors had been public from 2008 on, and Epstein settled literally dozens of civil suits from victims prior to the 2018 Herald piece. Allegations of trafficking were made in 2015 by Virginia Roberts.
(Also, honestly, isn't a single instance of knowing solicitation of a minor enough? Dude was known to be a creep since at least the 2008 conviction, despite the extremely favorable plea deal.)
All elites (political, financial, tech, medicine, etc) are morally bankrupt.
They're like regular people, but with power and money, both known corruptors, reduced empathy [1], and all the motivations to increase their reach. And they were probably quite psycho which helped them get at the elite level to begin with [2]...
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduce...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Secrets-How-Rich-Got/dp/031637...
If you take this to it's logical extreme, you only allow bad people to give money to bad causes; especially so because the folks making these determinations allow no room for neutral causes.
I really don't follow. What does Epsteins background have to do with the funding he was bringing to MIT? People aren't one dimensional. What Epstein did was disgusting, it has nothing to do with him funding some MIT research. MIT taking that funding is not in any way supporting what Epstein did.
Here is what Epstein's background had to do with it: there's good reason to think that much of his wealth came from blackmailing other people that he encountered or lured into the circles of organized sexual abuse, and that this fact was widely known. That's why Ito at the MIT media lab wrote to his colleagues that epstein's donations should be listed as 'anonymous' to minimize the scrutiny thereof. If you are having…
The previous crusade was about women in tech, basically tech people can do no right, they are tainted and will be subjected to non stop attacks, whatever the flavour of the week is, it will be attached to tech people. Lucky for us there is one place where we got some privacy and we can retaliate, the voting booth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This single event is additional information that I'm pointing out because it reinforces points I've made frequently in the past, while pointing out different events." That's the definition of empirical argumentation.
It's still missing a crucial ingredient: you have to demonstrate that your list of events is an unbiased sampling of all relevant events, as opposed to a cherry-picked list of useful events. For example, it would not be an "empirical argument" to convince everybody that a coin was unfair by publishing an article whenever it came up heads. An example isn't evidence, and a list of examples aren't evidence. Evidence is…
That's if you're writing a paper.
If you're making an empirical observation in the real world, the demands are much less rigorous, and if one can't tell what's going on without first demonstrating "that your list of events is an unbiased sampling of all relevant events" one is pretty much screwed...