A lot of "this Epstein stuff" is mass hysteria. I don't think it's worth engaging with at all for most people, but if you've already been sucked in, I recommend reading Michael Tracey for some balance and counterpoints to the sensationalism.
Can someone explain why this comment is so unpopular? Is the reasoning/evidence/character of Michael Tracey flawed? If so, I'd like to know!
I've looked into it as well, and his thesis - that the Epstein story is vastly exaggerated - seems entirely reasonable. E.g. the systemic "blackmail" thing that the OP here just takes for granted has pretty much nothing supporting it. Certainly Tracey's view seems enormously more directionally accurate than the "satanist cannibal cabal" stuff that gets promoted left and right.
In general, if you want to write a comment that disagrees with a public opinion having it be three lines with a link is not popular. For contrarian takes to be received well on LessWrong they usually need more effort.
Tracey is definitely not neutral political valence-wise, but I suspect that's not the main reason I'm getting downvoted. The OP said explicitly that they didn't want to talk about the evidence and that this piece is for people that "already know". So my comment is both off-topic and rude in multiple ways:
- changes the subject to something the OP explicitly flagged that they don't want to talk about here
- insinuates that the OP is a participant in the mass hysteria, with only a citation to a political operator as evidence
- doesn't invite further discussion ("I don't think it's worth engaging with at all...")
There's probably also a selection effect - the people who are likely to scroll to the bottom of this post and expand a negative-karma comment are likely to have strong feelings about the topic already, in a particular direction. And more neutral people are likely to vote based on the tone and process vibes or their pre-existing beliefs, rather than take the time to evaluate an argument that neither I or the OP are explicitly making. The OP reads as trying to do something meta and world-model-y, which vaguely looks like a virtue around here, whereas my comment pattern matches to lower-quality political punditry that the commentariat here generally doesn't like.
So the downvotes and disagreement (-5 / -24 at time of writing) don't really surprise me, but they are another reminder that LW votes are very much not truth-tracking in general.
1It's one thing to say "I know X is controversial, but I want to assume it and talk about the consequences." But saying that there "this article is for people who know X and not the ignorant" leaves it fair game to attack X.
I have a different complaint. Saying "Epstein stuff" and not being specific could create an alliance between people who believe contradictory things. This is a common pattern. For a crisp example, consider anti-carb as an alliance between people who think glucose is fine and fructose is poison with people who think the opposite.
A. You generally can’t keep the existence of a large organization that engages in clandestine activities secret.
Before I learned about this Epstein stuff, I thought this was a very strong heuristic. Now I don't.
I'm not intentionally trying to stay very up to date with Epstein stuff, but isn't it the case that there actually was quite a lot of whistleblowing (mostly from the victims and their families?), but their whistleblowing was somewhat silenced / didn't meet the standard of "legal evidence" or something? (In case it's unclear: genuine question.)
(This doesn't invalidate your point, but changes the specific formulation of what happened here, insofar as it is representative of real-world ~conspiracies.)
Also, a heuristic argument against conspiracy theories is only a heuristic argument against conspiracy theories, i.e., it's fallible, so the Epstein counter-example does not necessarily constitute strong evidence against the value/validity of this heuristic argument.
A thing that's salient to me at the moment is that lots of stupid memeplexes circulating in the water supply inoculate the population against their close (superficially similar), but more real(istic) neighbors, i.e., you get exposed to a bunch of obviously bonkers conspiracy theories, and as a result desensitize to "yet another 'conspiracy theory'", even if there's some reasonable evidence that there's something plausibly concerningly real about it.
1their whistleblowing was somewhat silenced / didn't meet the standard of "legal evidence" or something?
There were probably many people who realized that they don't have any legal evidence, and could be exposing themselves to a defamation lawsuit, so they didn't say anything.
When someone says "if many people were involved in conspiracy, someone would expose it", there is a huge difference between "exposing" a conspiracy in the sense that you report a crime and call the journals, and "exposing" it in the sense that you privately tell your friends that something bad happens somewhere and they should avoid it.
The key aspect of conspiracy theories is that it's quite hard to think well about them. They happen in antagonistic epistemic environments which makes it even harder to reason well about them then normal politics that can already be "mindkilling". This goes both for false positives and false negatives.
If you just look about claims about Epstein, this dynamic is true where there are plenty of people who are very willing to belief right now every possible false conspiracy claim about Epstein. In the Epstein story it's easy to have both false positives and false negatives.
I disagree that this is the key aspect of conspiracy theories. I actually think it's neither key nor a common aspect.
I'm going to pick some examples of conspiracy theory topics from this Wikipedia list.
Chemtrails; JFK assasination; freemasons; 9/11; fluoridation.
... these don't seem particularly hard to reason about. That said, people evidentially do get mind- killed about these things; but it seems to mostly be the same kind of thing that makes people get mind-killed about 'non conspiracy theory' political topics. And LOTS of people are mind-killed on political topics!
Re your point about antagonistic epistemic environments. So, if a given conspiracy theory is true, then it does take place in an antagonistic epistemic environments -- the conspirators are usually trying to misinform. But, antagonistic epistemic environments are actually very common! There are a few domains where we expect this not to be the case -- science/academia and rationality are two, although of course in practice these aren't entirely truth seeking environments. But for so many many things, there are multiple interested parties; that is, parties who want people think X instead of Y, and affect the epistemic environment in order to get people to think X instead of Y.
If you take the JFK assassination most people don't know that the last official government investigation came to the conclusion that there was probably a conspiracy to kill JFK (and that they don't know who exactly was involved). Yet, you have the media telling you that this is a conspiracy theory that nobody should take seriously. There's a reason why the information environment is structured in a way that most people don't know about the result of the last official government investigation.
You had the government arguing during COVID that releasing the JFK files would be so damaging to national security that they have to violate the law to postpone the release. This suggests either that they were simply lying or that there's something significant hidden. Reasoning about what the hidden thing happens to be isn't trivial. And the media of course just accepted that there's something in the files that would be so dangerous for national security to release that it warrants law breaking.
So, if a given conspiracy theory is true, then it does take place in an antagonistic epistemic environments -- the conspirators are usually trying to misinform.
It more complex than that. At the end of WWII, the US government managed to get information via the Venona project about the Soviets having many spies in US government departments. The US State Departments didn't really like their employees being persecuted for being possible Russian spies and that likely includes Department leadership that wasn't completely made up of spies. This dynamic grew to the McCarthy hearings.
There were clearly Russian spies back then, but McCarthy probably pointed at plenty of people who were innocent. It created a lot of social conflict. This is when the term 'conspiracy theory' first started it's rise in usage. It was to say that calling people Communists that conspire to bring down the United States is a conspiracy theory.
The result was to stop the McCarthy persecutions because of the social turmoil and distrust they caused and let the Russian spies get on with their business. This isn't because the Communists were so politically powerful but because the information environment of talking about conspiracy theories of people being loyal to Moscow destroys trust.
Shielding conspiracies by others is a classic moral maze behavior even by people who aren't directly co-conspirators.
Blackmail; that any given part of the world involving human coordination "runs on" blackmail. Powerful individuals/groups murdering out of self interest.
The justice system being secretly manipulated or controlled by powerful groups in situations relevant to them.
Just from the Caro biography of LBJ there are clear instances of these, or existence proofs. For the latter, here is Claude (edited by me for brevity/clarity; I attest that this reflects what's in the book).
Brown & Root had funneled enormous illegal contributions to Johnson disguised as bonuses to executives, inflated attorney fees, and reimbursed "personal" contributions from employees and their relatives. The investigation also reached back into earlier campaigns and Brown & Root's tax treatment of the Marshall Ford Dam contracts.
FDR's motives were a mix of personal political debt and broader strategic calculation. Johnson had become one of his most reliable congressional allies in an increasingly hostile Texas delegation, but more concretely, in 1940 Johnson had taken effective control of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and used his Texas oil and construction money connections (Brown & Root, Sid Richardson, etc.) to funnel funds to dozens of House Democrats in tight races — Caro argues this was decisive in preserving the Democratic House majority that year. FDR personally credited Johnson with saving the majority, and Johnson became, in effect, the President's man in the House. Beyond the personal debt, the investigation was politically dangerous in a wider sense: the same Brown & Root money that funded Johnson had been raised partly because the administration had steered the Marshall Ford Dam and Corpus Christi Naval Air Station contracts to the firm at Johnson's request, so a serious prosecution risked exposing the whole reciprocal arrangement. And Texas was a state FDR could not afford to alienate further in 1944. Johnson met with FDR personally in January 1944; shortly after, the criminal referral died. The specific channel was Treasury — Elmer Irey's Intelligence Unit was part of the Treasury Department, so the order effectively had to flow down through that chain. The criminal case was converted into a civil tax settlement: Brown & Root paid back taxes and penalties and the matter was closed. The investigating agents, who according to Caro believed they had an airtight criminal case implicating Johnson directly, were overruled from above without explanation.
There is a similar moment where serious investigations into his later financial misconduct are quietly closed after JFK is assassinated, maybe because of the general impression that it was important for the American public to be behind the new president.
As a general matter, look backwards in history and find how much political maneuvering/conspiracies/collusions existed then, in so blatant a form that a record exists until this day. I figure this is the default reference figure for how much of that happens today (arguably it's worse, for various cultural/technological reasons, as politics in general gets more Molochian over time).
Here also is a summary of the stealing of the 1947 Senate election, which are further examples of "powerful individuals/groups [being willing to murder] out of self interest" and "the justice system being secretly manipulated or controlled by powerful groups".
(again edited by me for brevity/clarity; I attest that this reflects what's in the book)
six days after the election, with Stevenson leading by a few hundred votes, Jim Wells County "amended" its returns from Precinct 13 in the town of Alice. Two hundred additional votes were suddenly added for Johnson, all in alphabetical order, all in the same handwriting and same ink, all apparently signed by people who in many cases were dead or had not voted that day. This shifted the statewide total and gave Johnson his 87-vote margin. The operation was run by George Parr, the "Duke of Duval," the South Texas political boss whose machine controlled the heavily Mexican-American counties along the border through a combination of patronage, intimidation, and direct vote manufacture — boxes in Parr country routinely reported 95%+ for whichever candidate Parr had decided on, with turnout figures that exceeded the adult population.
Stevenson made an initial trip to Alice on his own, with his lawyer Kellis Dibrell and one or two others and was turned away from the bank by Parr's pistoleros, who were standing armed in front of the building. He returned a second time with the legendary former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. Hamer walked up to them alone, told them to step aside, and they did. He and Stevenson got inside and were allowed to look at the list briefly, but were not allowed to copy it or take it. By the time any formal legal process could compel production of the list, it had disappeared; the ballots themselves were later burned.
The legal mechanism by which the result was upheld then ran on two tracks. First, the state Democratic Executive Committee had to certify the winner of the primary, and it did so for Johnson by a single vote (29-28) after intense pressure and at least one delegate switching under circumstances Caro describes as suspicious. Second, Stevenson went to federal court and got a temporary injunction from District Judge T. Whitfield Davidson blocking Johnson's name from the November ballot pending investigation of the fraud — Davidson had begun taking testimony and the evidence was emerging quickly. Johnson's lawyers, rather than fighting the fraud question on the merits, appealed directly to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, riding circuit for the Fifth Circuit, on the narrow jurisdictional argument that federal courts had no business intervening in a state party primary — this was internal party machinery, a state matter. Black bought the argument and stayed Davidson's injunction on September 29, 1948.
With the stay in place, Johnson's name went on the November ballot, he won the general election easily (Texas being a one-party state at that point), and once he was a sitting U.S. Senator the question became moot — the Senate is the judge of its own members' elections, and no Senate of that era was going to unseat one of its own over a Texas primary dispute.
The ballot box from Precinct 13 was, as I mentioned, eventually destroyed; Luis Salas, the election judge who had signed off on the fraudulent returns, finally confessed publicly in 1977 that the votes had been fabricated on Parr's orders at Johnson's request.
(Meta: it seems somehow tasteless to post such long largely LLM-generated passages. I'm not sure what the proper etiquette on this should be, but I did look it over and found most of the content essential and useful.)
Have you guys heard about this Epstein stuff? Shit's pretty crazy.
Note: I'm not going to provide a summary of the situation or talk about evidence; this piece is for people that already know these things. I'm going to avoid specifics about what Epstein and co did, and instead will use vague terms like "Epstein stuff". This is a short post about how I've updated my world model.
Particular things that I find very surprising: that so many people basically knew what was going on and didn't say anything; that so many people were involved themselves in incriminating heinous acts; that the Epstein stuff and associated conspiracy to hide/protect it spanned not only lots of people but lots of time (~20 years!); that they got away with it for so long.
Conspiracy
Scott Alexander writes:
He offers a number of heuristics regarding the plausibility of conspiracy theories, including:
Before I learned about this Epstein stuff, I thought this was a very strong heuristic. Now I don't.
Things I think are much more prevalent/likely than I did before