This is Jessica. As literary agent and Epstein comrade John Brockman tells us, “Only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody else.” I was curious what serious thoughts we’ve been gifted by the men who appear in the Epstein files.
On mind and humanity
First, some gems from Marc Hauser, first discovered by Andrew:
The proposal that our humaniqueness, and these four properties in particular, finds almost no parallels in any other animal…
And
Nature provides … a bewildering and seemingly unbounded variety of animal forms, from the microscopic (such as insects) to the macroscopic (such as dinosaurs), and from the pointy and spherical (blowfish) to the smooth and cylindrical (snakes).
Yes, it’s profound. But let’s not forget:
Promiscuous interfaces. Humans have unique creative capacities and problem-solving abilities, which stem from the capacity to combine representations promiscuously from different domains of knowledge.
And
the human brain was transformed from a system with a high degree of modularity with few interfaces to a system of modules with numerous promiscuous and combinatorially creative interfaces
Someone has a favorite word! Promiscuous appears seven times in the seven page paper, even more than humaniqueness.
On honesty
Dan Ariely tells us:
people behave dishonestly enough to profit but honestly enough to delude themselves of their own integrity
which tracks with claiming to want the redhead’s number because “she seemed very smart.”
Also:
A little bit of dishonesty gives a taste of profit without spoiling a positive self-view.
Of course in Ariely’s case, a whole lot of dishonesty also fails to spoil the positive self-view.
On how to live
Richard Branson not only delivers maxims, he lives them.
It’s so much better, where possible, to try and forgive offenders and give them a second chance, just like my mother and father did so often with me as a child
And:
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges
like overcoming severe reputational damage.
He’s also been known to wish:
“If only we had the power to see ourselves in the same way that others see us.” Of all the mantras one might adopt in life, this is surely one of the better ones
I wonder if he still thinks this? But whatever, with so much pluck he’ll probably be ok! After all,
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a ride!”
On statistics and research
Branson may like a challenge, but not if it involves data:
I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics.
But Summers has no such fear:
if my reading of the data is right—it’s something people can argue about—that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then … those are probably different in their standard deviations as well
And then there’s Roger Schank:
Not long ago, to prepare for a conference, I read Darwin. Doing this reaffirmed my belief in not reading
Thanks guys! Words to live by.
The number of posts on the Epstein files in this blog feels super out of place. What gives?
Ariely is a bit of a punching bag around these parts (as is Marc Hauser), and the Epstein files are topical. Combined with the generally cringey nature of the emails, it’s an irresistible opportunity for mockery.
Also, sometimes things just become a “thing” and perpetuate themselves. Jamaican beef patties are mentioned highly disproportionately, and I’m not sure why.
Believe it or not, there are no rules on these things.
Except for the rule against regurgitating LLM regurgitations.
Las:
We write a lot here about junk science, perhaps because studying these edge cases can be helpful in understanding the process of good science.
Then the question is: What sorts of junk science are worth looking into? There’s an endless “long tail” of bad science–just go on Vixra!–but mostly that’s not the stuff we hear about. We hear about the junk science that comes out of Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Ohio State, etc., the junk science that’s promoted by the Association for Psychological Science, the National Academy of Sciences, and NPR, the junk science that goes on Ted talks and is featured by science podcasters like Freakonomics and Sean Carroll . . . and Epstein is part of that nexus.
As with the other institutions discussed above, Epstein didn’t exclusively promote junk science. Real scientists were in his orbit too. And that’s an important part of the story, that the real and junk scientists are mixed together, and that the real scientists often run cover for the junk scientists. So I do think this is worth covering.
To put it another way, yes, I could imagine a different version of this blog where we only wrote about good research, where instead of posting one more takedown of some Nudge crap, we wrote about some legitimately exciting new work being done somewhere. Such a blog could be valuable. It would just be less social-sciency than this blog. Recall our title, “Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.” Part of “social science” is the study of science itself, including the politics of science and the sociology of science.
Sometimes in these posts I’ve discussed why we write about such topics. For example here:
And here:
And here:
And here:
Here’s my summary:
One of the fatuous things written by former academic and media star Marc Hauser appeared on a website under the heading, The Reality Club.
I guess the question is: which reality do we care about? The scientific reality of measurement and data, or the social reality that a Harvard professor can get caught falsifying data and still be presented as an authority on science and philosophy. Ultimately, both realities matter. But let’s not confuse them. Let’s not confuse social power with scientific evidence. Remember Lysenko.
Also check out this 2018 email from literary agent John Brockman for a take on money, power, and intellectual influence.
Thank you!
Just like the example of Richard Branson, I find that not a lot of men are fond of the tedious work of tabulating data. Executives seem to enjoy making snap judgements without worrying much about the cost of wrong decisions. I guess it’s a kind of masculine intuition. Does gut instinct turn out to perform satisfactorily? It works great, according to instincts!
The job is to act rather than think. You don’t want the executive tabulating data. I was actually thinking about this quote from Akira the other day:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/quotes/?item=qt6813242
I think this llm tech is going to shift many resources away from theorizing to creating/doing. The cost of prototyping and trying things has just dropped enormously.
I’ve been comparing a number of AI tools for doing complex data analysis. One striking feature is that they all seem designed to output summaries (powerpoint slides, dashboards, etc.) quickly – selling these as ready for action rather than “theorizing” (to use your term). While I am increasingly impressed by what these tools can do – if used properly – the trend I find disturbing. They can be used to explore data quality and raise questions about the relevance of the data to decisions, but this requires considerable effort by the user to overcome the built in tendencies of these tools to feed executives “actionable” insights.
I would call it a flood towards mediocrity (or worse). The job of acting will be based on mediocre or incorrect analysis. I think we want the job to be acting on good information, not just acting. You say “you don’t want the executive tabulating data,” nor do I. But I do want the executive questioning data. If not the executive, then certainly they need staff who ask the right questions and communicate these to the executive before they act. If the staff can reconcile all the issues, then it is the executive that becomes unnecessary – why should they get paid solely to act?
Get a cheap laptop and put linux + Claude code cli on it.
It sounds like youre using the equivalent of a SPSS for Windows trial version rather than the R/Python/Julia on linux needed to customize your analysis.
Fwiw, everyone I know who uses genAI for data analysis dictates what they want it to do fairly explicitly (me included). For those that just want to input data and get out answers, I guess the relevant question is what they would be doing if they didn’t have access to genAI. Do they even know how the data they’re analyzing was collected? If not, I suspect that any way they go about trying to analyze it won’t yield much insight. On the other hand, when you know how/why data was collected, most likely you have thoughts on what should be done with it that can guide your use of genAI.
I don’t understand Anon’s comment at all (seems to be happening a lot), but I concur with Jessica’s. I am finding AI helpful with data analysis (both time saving and, somewhat surprisingly, insightful) but only when I understand the data and carefully guide what the AI is doing. That doesn’t mean that I need to do the analysis myself, and doesn’t even mean I need to understand how to do all the analysis myself (although I need to know some things). But the idea that I can feed the AI a data set and it can provide meaningful insights without guidance strikes me as wrong – at best, I can get a mediocre analysis, at worst it will just be wrong. So, my initial comment was that if executives need to “act” and they use AI in the way many of these AI providers suggest, then the executives might as well be replaced by AI. The real work is in understanding the data, understanding the problem(s), and finding useful ways to connect the two. If the executive doesn’t do those things, then why are they needed?
@Dale
I will send you the money for this through Andrew if you want. Afiact, you are trying to use generic implementations. You will never understand what I am talking about until you take those steps.
@Jessica
I don’t know what genAI refers to. I would guess its better to talk about specific models and “harnesseses”.
Roger Schank (whoever he is) would apparently like to have been Dr Johnson.
Excellent post! Sure these are cherry-picked quotes, but I think they provide good evidence on the issue of whether wealth is mostly luck or skill. With these profound insights, I’ll go with luck (perhaps worse- deception and bad intent rather than luck). I believe there have been several posts in the past concerning whether “bad” people can do “good” research. I can’t remember how those turned out, but I lean towards the negative conclusion. But I’d say it is an empirical observation rather than a causal mechanism.
Jessica:
You forgot some really deep insights such as from Don Rubin, who wrote that Donald Trump “must be as dumb about this stuff as a tampon laced with arsenic,” and Marvin Minsky, who described Jeffrey Epstein as having the second-quickest intellect he’d ever met.
To be fair, though, I think that just about everybody says stupid things in emails.
What makes people like Hauser, Ariely, and Summers special is the aggressively stupid things they say in public, along with the efforts of various people and institutions in academia and the media to present them as heroes.
I don’t know in what mood to read this post but here is where I discovered that Schank is also on ze Files, Schade!
Roger was Epstein’s next door neighbor in Florida. But didn’t figure out how evil Epstein was, even after the conviction.
Roger was one of the advocates of “scruffy” AI (AI as cognitive psychology) back in the day (late 70s through 1980s), but had some ideas about education, and went off and did that for a while (starting in the late 1980s). He was a good advisor to grad students who made even the slightest attempt at listening to what he was saying (I would say that, of course: he passed me on what I wrote on his quals). But he did not put up with students who appeared to be not listening. Back in the day.
As I understand it, Minsky broke off all contact with Epstein after the conviction. So there were some folks who figured it out. Roger didn’t.
Jessica: All the men you decided to quote, other than Branson, are Jewish. Please think before you post.
Andrew: Adding Rubin and Minsky hardly helps!
Blue Square.
D,
I had no idea that John Brockman and Marc Hauser were Jewish! That’s ok, everyone has a right to their own religion. And I don’t see why this implies in any way that Jessica didn’t think before she posted.
For whatever reason, I think of religious belief and religious affiliation as different from scientific beliefs and affiliations. If a physicist believes that Moses parted the Red Sea or a biologist believes that Jesus rose from the dead or a historian believes that Joseph Smith found those golden plates, I wouldn’t put that in the same category as these scientists promoting non-religiously-associated pseudoscientific theories such as astrology, ESP, or election denial.
@Andrew (or anyone else who wants to chime in)
How do you dichotomise between ‘religious beliefs’ and ‘non-religiously-associated pseudoscientific theories’? I am asking because the way they are defined determines how we deal with them.
I can see that beyond their extremely different origins, they also differ in terms of falsifiability.
ESP, faith healing and remote viewing can be falsified. Put them in an RCT and see the results for yourself. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are of historic origin, often based on oral tradition and hundreds (if not thousands) of years old.
In my experience, debating religious beliefs often devolves into an unending cycle of reinterpretation, where facts are shifted to fit a narrative. Ultimately, the outcome of these debates tends to be determined by the rhetorical skill of the debater rather than the objective strength of the evidence.
Raphael:
I don’t have a clear division here. Mormonism used to be consider a cult but now it is a mainstream religion so the norm is to take its supernatural beliefs and put them in a privileged “religious” category, just as we do with Jewish, Christian, and other longstanding religions. Other beliefs don’t get that deference. So I can mock professional atheist Michael Shermer’s idiotic belief in a haunted radio, but it wouldn’t make sense to mock some scientist for believing in some equally silly religious story. It’s a different thing somehow. Somewhere in between accepted religions and Michael Shermer are more recent religions or cults such as Scientology and the Moonies, which are working to get the political and economic clout to get the deference that is accorded to religions.
Regarding your poing: Sure, lots of religious beliefs apply to past events, but the issue is not people accepting an oral tradition, the issue is fundamentalists who literally claim the truth of various events that are pretty much impossible by any rational standard.
Also, I don’t think ESP can ever be falsified. No matter how many failed experiments have occurred in the past, people can, and will, keep coming up with new possible theories and designing new experiments.
This is further anecdotal evidence for a hypothesis of mine: https://peterdorman.substack.com/p/why-so-many-jewish-economists?r=b8ew It’s not that people like me are going back and forth between some theoretical academic field and the Talmud, but that there’s a deep cultural bias in Jewish life, to pry apart the hidden pattern.
The other half of this in the Epstein case is provided by Ahmed here: https://bylinetimes.com/2025/12/05/how-epstein-channelled-race-science-and-climate-culling-into-silicon-valleys-ai-elite/ There really was an overlapping conceptual consensus among core Epstein-connected people. It grew out of various strands of computation, software engineering and math. I assume the people involved were very skilled in their specialties but pikers (and bigots) in extrapolating to social theory. Epstein, to a large extent, *was* Edge, and that’s a huge part of the story.
Peter:
Interesting. I’ll have to see if there are any Jews in my social circle. If I can find any, I can ask them what they think of your theory.
Lol!
Peter:
Jews seem overrepresented in many “intellectual” occupations because they were in the right place at the right time during the Industrial Revolution and became rich. Then the successful descendants came here and stayed successful. It’s basically luck and selection effects, nothing else.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/stephen-steinberg-chua-rubenfeld-triple-package/
If you want examples of “unsuccessful” Jews, try e.g. Kiryas Joel, slightly north of NYC, where 40% of the residents live below the poverty line and where 91% of people speak Yiddish at home…or perhaps Borough Park, in Brooklyn, where some Jews live under what is basically a Jewish version of Shariah law.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/outcast-3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryas_Joel%2C_New_York
I don’t have numbers, but this strikes me as empirically dubious. Look through the bios of prominent Jewish intellectuals in the 20th c., and lots of them came from very humble backgrounds. Again, the subject of my speculating is not academic or intellectual success per se, but a certain style of it that is centered on puzzle-solving.
BTW, the though first occurred to me when reading Ricardo’s bizarre essay on the invariant standard of value. It’s so different from what his contemporaries were writing. It has little if any practical value, just “here’s a puzzle and let’s see if we can figure it out’.
Peter:
That friendly racist James Watson thought that Jews were good at symbol manipulation but not at 3-dimensional rotation, which I guess fit his image of ugly-ass medieval rabbinical scholars arguing with the Talmud while the manly Teutonic knights were engaging in cavalry battles. On the other hand, it was his Jewish crystallographer colleague Rosalind Franklin who figured out the 3-dimensional structure of DNA. But there’s an exception to every rule.
More seriously, I’ve come to think that there are different sorts of visualization talents. I can easily visualize three-dimensional rotations; indeed, I draw graphs in the air in my teaching, as sometimes it almost seems like cheating to write them on the blackboard (sorry, Jim!) but I can’t visualize faces at all–I just hold them in my mind as collections of attributes. I could’ve become a crystallographer but not a police sketch artist.
Also there was the ping-pong player in that movie–he must have been good at three-dimensional visualization, no?
I wonder how Rosalind Franklin was at visualizing faces.
I know I have a blog post on this but I can’t find it . . . maybe it’s scheduled for a future month and hasn’t appeared yet.
Peter:
“Look through the bios of prominent Jewish intellectuals in the 20th c., and lots of them came from very humble backgrounds.”
I misremembered the article slightly, Jews were not “rich” as a result of the industrial revolution but due to being at the right place at the right time, they did have industrial/craft experience and the literacy that came with it, giving them a head start and allowing them to give opportunities to their children and grandchildren.
In the early 1900s racists thought Jews were intellectually inferior, by the way. Nobody would have stated this meme of “culturally caused success in puzzle solving”. This is, again, the “right place at the right time to rise” part.
A well known “study” from this time states the following:
“The intelligence of the average ‘third class’ immigrant [at Ellis Island] is low, perhaps of moron grade”. It also states that 87 per cent of Russians, 83 per cent of Jews and 79 per cent of Italians are “feeble-minded.”
Citation: Goddard, Henry H. (1917) “Mental Tests and the Immigrant”, The Journal of Delinquency 2 (5), 243–77.
By the way, nothing you’re really saying is unique to Jews and it’s just vague and unfalsifiable, like all theories that explain purported features of groups by “culture”. Since the 1965 reversal of the 1924 immigration laws essentially banning Asian immigration, there has been an explosion of Chinese-American and Indian-American intellectuals, and in 20-30 years they may have as much of a “puzzle-solving” reputation in certain minds as Jews. Is that “culture” for you too? (The real reason is the same: selective immigration and luck.)
Yeah, just to be clear, I’m not thinking about genetics or anything like that. Rather, my hunch is that some type of perplexity can be transmitted intergenerationally in (Ashkenazi?) Jewish households, and this leads to a greater inclination to engage in puzzle-solving. Like, questions are asked without confident answers. I know it was that way with me, but of course that could be a lone exception. Still, the pattern is out there, as I tried to indicate. Economists yes, but also chess players, physicists, mathematicians, and the theorist wing of various other disciplines. But sometimes I step back and the whole idea seems preposterous.
Visualization: 3 dimensional is so different from 2! My 2 dimensional visualization is probably way above average and was a big help in my chess-playing days. I was a pretty strong blindfold player. But I struggle with the simplest 3-D representations. I can’t rotate worth a damn. Weird huh?
D Kane, are you really suggesting that people who post here need to familiarize ourselves with the religions of the people we are posting about, and that if we find some sort of imbalance we should address it by… what, exactly? Find some people of other religions to criticize in order to balance things out?
And what if I find myself praising the work of several Jews, is that bad too? Do I have to work a praiseworthy Muslim into the discussion? No no, let’s not be ridiculous, surely a gentile will do.
Please let us know. I wouldn’t want someone to say “blue square” to me, why, that would be awful.
What Phil said. Also, I’d never heard of Blue Square so I googled it, and . . . I don’t plan to be taking moral advice from Robert Kraft, thank you!
I feel a lot better having to both google Blue Square and coming to the same conclusion as Andrew. I was lost there for a bit.
> D Kane, are you really suggesting that people who post here need to familiarize ourselves with the religions of the people we are posting about, and that if we find some sort of imbalance we should address it by… what, exactly?
Imagine that Jessica provide an accurate list of a bunch of murderers. Nothing wrong with that. Now, imagine that, on closer investigation, all the murderers happened to be Jewish. Again, everything in the list is true, but it is weird/interesting/notable if a list about X (Epstein buddies, murderers, whatever) happens to be dominated by group Y (Jews, blog readers, whatever). Why might this be?
1) Animus. I don’t believe for a second that this is why Jessica (and Andrew) list almost all Jews when discussing friends of Epstein.
2) Overlap. I guess it could be that the vast majority of men who were friends of Epstein are Jewish, so any list will be dominated by Jews. (I have not studied the corpus of Epstein correspondents to have a view on this.)
3) Weird sampling. It could be that friends of Epstein include a reasonable mix of Jews and non-Jews but that the procedure by which Jessica/Andrew made their list happens, for non-animus related reasons, to over sample Jews. Perhaps the Jews in Epstein circle were much more likely than the non-Jews to be academics, and therefore more likely to be noticed by Jessica/Andrew.
Right, it’s not animus. So what’s your beef?
Daddy Kane is mad woke
D Kane has a history of making interesting comments on this blog related to race, group differences, etc.
Imagine that Jessica provide an accurate list of a bunch of murderers. Nothing wrong with that. Now, imagine that, on closer investigation, all the murderers happened to be men. Again, everything in the list is true, but it is weird/interesting/notable if a list about X (Epstein buddies, murderers, whatever) happens to be dominated by group Y (men, white men, wealthy whit men, wealthy white white men that D Kane writes comments on blogs to support, whatever). Why might this be?
I’m just asking a question.
Joshua:
Please think before you post.
#StopAntiMenHate
;)
Apparently Branson wrote: Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a ride!”
I am not sure that I completely agree. But if you look at his bio on Wikipedia, you will see that he appears to have followed that advice!
Doh! I found it on a Branson quotes aggregator, but yeah, same site attributes to Hunter S Thompson
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9100607-life-should-not-be-a-journey-to-the-grave-with
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/47188-life-should-not-be-a-journey-to-the-grave-with
Uh oh, hope Branson wasn’t plagiarising Thompson!
“Honestly* yours,
Dan Ariely”
A novelist who wrote that would be mocked for heavy-handedness, but the Honesty Borat literally hit up JE with the asterisk
G:
In his emails to me, Ariely closed with, “Irrationally yours,” which I guess is more accurate than “Honestly”!