One issue w/sci fi is that sci fi takes place in the future and/or has advanced technology then it is more likely to look dated than a typical sitcom where the sets are offices and living rooms.
When he was alive a lot of people said Epstein was really smart.
But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.
I used to know someone wealthy whose continued wealth relied on working with local and state governments. This person's public correspondence in lawsuits and with local government officials was purposefully littered with spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization errors. When I asked them about it, their response was that it was on purpose so that they seemed less smart and thus less threatening, with the hope that they would get more favorable rulings and contracts by not seeming like "one of the big entities."
I'm not asking you to believe me on this, but sharing it more as an anecdote of: something on the surface is sometimes not the reality of what's underneath.
In addition, it broadcasts that the sender is too busy with all their important work to spend time refining and proofreading, that you're getting their raw, unfiltered thoughts directly from them, not through an assistant, and that their time is more valuable than yours so the burden is on you to parse their stream of consciousness jumble for precious nuggets of their exclusive wisdom. The semiotics make sense, plus it's just easier and faster.
The same with medical doctors. Funnily once in financial subreddit someone claiming to be a doctor from maybe Croatia asked for financial or early retirement advice, but the post was a word salad with misspellings and errors. Commenters immediately reacted that their writing is as illegible as probably their handwriting is, by the way the person reacted one can see that's really a doctor.
Some people have superiority complex and reeky pile of irate thoughts in their heads, and you're very lucky if nothing in your life depends on these kind of people.
I remember being told that many of the spelling/grammar mistakes in (English) menus for ethnic restaurants were deliberate to make the (English native speaking) customers feel superior.
(Also not saying I believe this at all, just relating an anecdote).
> But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.
I'd more focus on the ideas being expressed being incoherent. Spelling is surface level, but that word salad made no sense.
> But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.
I kinda assumed that was (at least partly) a "flex," basically doing something dumb to show you're such hot stuff you can get away with it. It's like Sam Altman writing in lowercase all the time.
I've found that problem solving intelligence and language skills are not that strongly correlated. He clearly had some kind of skill to keep his operation running, even before you consider the more cynical explanations in the other replies.
He was an asset being managed by intelligence service officers, this is the only explanation.
A failing math teacher at a New York prep school leading to a job at Bear Stearns and then as a wealth manager for billionaires... let's say it doesn't add up unless there were other reasons than his own ambitions and organization skills.
It only doesn't add up if you are viewing him like Warren Buffet in terms of finance. Obviously, his audited track record of returns is nowhere to be found.
It very much all adds up if you view Epstein as a financial genius in terms of financial crimes.
This idea he was some intelligence created stooge is just absurd. I would suspect he was an intelligence asset exactly because of his ability to launder money and commit financial crimes. His wealth came from taking a cut. The size of his wealth was a reflection of the amount of financial crimes committed. That level of financial crime is how you get a sweetheart deal to keep those crimes in the shadows.
Also the kind of thing that would get you suicided. This podcast/social media narrative that he was a created intelligence asset to blackmail the rich and powerful is probably misdirection to not focus on the actual financial crimes. The cover up has been executed to perfection considering the misdirection narratives have taken on a life of their own and we know basically nothing about the financial crimes he commited.
With the girls, the rich and powerful, the financial fraud...
Wouldn't immoral foreign intelligence be doing a terrible job if they weren't doing everything they could to become involved in Epstein's world?
Why wouldn't Russia or Mossad be involved? It's almost a cartoon caricature of what a spy agency does. If it was in a movie it wouldn't be believable it's so on the nose.
I think they engineered it from the start, a Jay Gatsby kind of situation – find the right young man and engineer him to be the center of a situation to attract everybody and use the access to who comes to their advantage.
Even if it wasn't from the start idk how incompetent foreign intelligence would have to be to not be involved.
Yes I agree. His conversations online were completely inane. With women he’d quickly resort to insults or asking for nude pictures. I don’t see a shred of intelligence in any email. Additionally no mention of any current affair or political story, which most intelligent people have an interest in. Steven pinker the Harvard professor thought him an idiot and because he called him out he was banished from the island. I think he worked for Russia. Taking girls, photographing them with numerous men and sending the info to Russia. That’s another thing, there’s no talk of doing deals in his correspondence so I believe he had one major source of income, Russia.
There's no actual good evidence for being a Mossad operative and the agenda of trying desperately to link him to Mossad so strongly is such a transparent agenda it's almost funny.
I listened to the two hour interview that was posted. It sounds nothing like this. He was extremely well spoken. How carefully he spoke is what stood out most in the interview to me.
I think that ... given one specific topic, few people understand it while the vast majority is completely oblivious to its workings.
So they then hear someone who speaks like that, with a fast cadence and Andrew Tate's "Confidence" TM, and are inclined to think "yeah, the guy looks like he knows what he's talking about".
But for people who have minimal knowledge about the thing, it's evident that said person is just stupid.
It's literally a marketing funnel for corruption. Having Smart People™ at your "parties" adds a layer of legitimacy and social proof you wouldn't get if you were Bubba from Nowhere Town.
Some people will be attracted by the menu, some people won't realise what's happening until they see the video they're starring in.
It's seemed to me that he was a habitual/obsessive networker. Someone up-thread described it as an urge to collect smart/impressive people, with the advantage being as you described. I suspect if you took away his horrible other interests, he'd still have been extremely sociable. Maybe aspects of blackmail/control are near-inevitable at the conjunction of criminal behaviour and power?
Sociable if you’re dumb like prince Andrew. Steven pinker the Harvard professor thought him an idiot. Said he was inane and a fraud who could only respond with stupid adolescent comments. Maybe somd like that sort of person and think they are fun. No doubt lots do, the guy down the pub who’s a laugh. Appeals to similarly dumb folk.
I like using “astute businessman” as a backhanded compliment sometimes.
Usually meaning the revenues and results are there .. although everything about their personal or professional ethos disgusts me.
Eh. From time to time you’ll have that one brilliant but grossly tangential asset on a team who leaves you wondering if they’re manic or cracked out from the weekend.
Who’s in infrastructure and hasn’t sent a few sleep-deprived and cringey status updates out at 6am :D
Okay okay okay fine, it’s an internet comment section I don’t have to be PC. I think this one’s coke.
Agree. Steven pinker the Harvard professor said Epstein was not an intellectual and incredibly stupid. He couldn’t have a conversation either him and Epstein spoke like a teenager.
> full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors
I can spell correctly in a few different languages without having to think about it. I suspect you can, too. I can do a lot of math in my head that Jeffery Epstein probably couldn't have done with a calculator. I'm not a billionaire, though, and I never will be. The kind of smart - "street smart", it's sometimes called - that makes you that kind of rich is a different kind of smart that shows up as being a competent writer. Make no mistake, though, it wasn't stupidity or incompetence that got him where he was.
I can’t stand people putting a man on a pedestal just because they are ‘rich’. Lots and lots of men pimp others to do the work, mafia style. You don’t need to be clever to do that, just nasty and in his case very dirty.
An email is an email. I used to talk to contacts like that all the time and they did too. These are quick interchanges with folk.
The grammar police as well as PC became a thing and now everyone is expected to construct paragraphs of text without any grammatical errors otherwise you're mobbed and lynched.
Just because you're expecting full pronunciation doesn't mean others do. I'd rather write with laziness and short hand than having to punctuate a whole paragraph and bore the person to death like this paragraph.
Their companies are all doing well (although I think the jury is out on OpenAI). So did they fail? Graham seems to measure a person's success by the success of their company.
> 10. 10th prompt: Ugh, everytime I fix one thing, something else breaks
Maybe that is the time to start making changes by hand. I think this dream of humans never ever writing any more code might be too far and unnecessary.
Very few people on HN will have been alive when there was a county of London. It ceased to exist in the 1960s.
The UK does not require this layer of subdivision to exist, so it's not that there's a different county or set of counties covering the same area now but rather there is no county. This is a contrast to say the US system where AIUI there must be a county and in some cases that county doesn't really matter (e.g. New York County in New York City aka Manhattan) but it has to exist anyway.
City status is very different here, the Monarch (ie now Charlie) gets to decide what is or is not a city, but because that's arbitrary it also has very few consequences, it's a cosmetic basically, you can write "City" on some signs if you like, but if you feel like a small town you still feel like a small town, and if you already feel like a bustling city then having the word doesn't make a real difference.
And the US the a sovereign state made up of 50 states. They used to be called that because they were independent countries
There are other offenders, but the US and UK together are probably the main reason English no longer has concise but unambiguous way to refer to sovereign states
> They used to be called that because they were independent countries
The latter part is true of exactly one US state (Hawaii), but otherwise false. They are called that because they are political bodies capable of international relations. The 13 founding states were British colonies; Florida, New Mexico and Texas were famously Mexican and/or Spanish colonies, and the western half of the continental states were French colonies (though largely unexplored by France, so only nominally held).
I believe GP is technically correct in several ways. The first 13 states were mostly independent and sovereign under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 until 1789, when the US Constitution superseded it and established a much more significant central government.
Texas was an independent republic from 1836 until US annexation at the end of 1845. Although Mexico did not recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas, numerous other countries did.
California is more of an edge-case. It was arguably an independent republic for a few weeks in 1846. And a similar story with Florida: the Republic of West Florida existed for a couple months in 1810. But both of these cases were basically small uprisings that weren't broadly recognized by other countries.
For even further confusion "London" actually contains two cities: London and Westminster. London was a walled city but Westminster was not. So "London" was we know it today is more like Westminster than London.
A cathedral is neither necessary nor sufficient for city status. City status in the UK is given by the monarch and that's all there is to it. Cambridge is a city without a cathedral and Bury St Edmunds is a town with a cathedral.
New York is an obvious example of two entities of the same name, with the “City of” version being a small part of the larger version. It’s just on a much bigger scale.
Eh. If you live in Schaumburg and someone from England asks where you live, you'd probably just say Chicago.
The Windy City does have a kind of "get out" in that people refer to the larger metro area as "Chicagoland" whereas London is still just London thirty miles out from the financial district.
About 7 or 8 years ago I worked at a startup which got money from Softbank / Masayoshi Son. Our founder and our CTO went to meet him in LA IIRC to pitch.
They came back telling us he was basically asleep during the pitch meeting which was scheduled for only 10 minutes anyway.
Our business/product really had no chance of succeeding at this point and most knew it. We got some money from Softbank anyway - forgot how much. Our management was basically laughing about how easy it was to get funding from Softbank.
I jumped ship a year later or so and that was good timing.
This is one of my arguments that startups are mostly about luck - because smart people who are highly incentivised to pick wimmers, with all the data they need to pick winners, all the people and compute they need to pick winners, can't pick winners.
Mayoshi Son isn't playing the VC game like most traditional VC funds. He's operating on a massive scale and his LPs are sovereign wealth funds, who can have other geo-political priorities than pure profit.
Some people don't know that the usual VC game is often still be profitable for the VC even if their fund isn't profitable. VCs are investing the money of their LPs (Limited Partners), who are usually very large institutional investors with billions under management (think state pension funds, Harvard endowment). Most of the LP's funds are invested in a diversified blend of safer, lower-return vehicles but they take up to 5% and invest it in high-risk, high-return things like venture capital and hedge funds. But they spread it across a dozen or more firms with different strategies.
So each VC is playing a portfolio bets and their LPs are playing a portfolio of porfolios. The LPs just need one of their 12+ VC funds to be a lead investor on a unicorn win. This math usually works out in their favor (there's now >50 years of data). VC funds charge their LPs a yearly management fee of a few percent of the invested capital - whether the fund makes money or not. Over the 10 year life of a fund, this adds up and covers the VCs overhead and very generous salaries - usually >$500K at larger firms. In the VC's view, $500K/yr isn't getting long-term "rich" but it'll pay for a pretty lux life. Even with the VC taking out fees, the LP's math still works thanks to only needing one VC firm to win and if one or two more of their VC funds just return 2x or 3x. It maths up even better.
When your personal worst-case downside is $500K/yr minimum with substantial upside, it's not a bad gig. However, these VC types are generally top-of-class Ivy League grads, who are clearly very sharp and ultra high-potential - the type who'd expect $500K earning opptys on Wall Street, consulting, investment banking, etc.
I think this model and portfolio investment strategy is the result of the fact that VCs can't pick winners, though. They are forced to take this "high-risk, high-reward" position in the portfolio because they can't predict the result of any of their investments, even over a whole fund's worth of investments.
Imagine a world where startup success had nothing (or very little) to do with luck, where you could plug a bunch of standard metrics into a complex algorithm (probably a spreadsheet) and it would spit out an utterly reliable set of statistics on likely return. Something that an actuary could come up with, as they do for insurance/assurance.
In this world, VC isn't high-risk, high-reward. There would be categories of VC fund, some would be lower-risk, lower-reward, others higher risk, and yet others that would be low-risk, high-reward (but priced accordingly).
The fact that we don't have this, and all VC is high-risk, high-reward (and often no reward at all, even across an entire fund), is testament to the fact that we can't pick winners. And the reason we can't pick winners is that startup success is very non-deterministic, i.e. mostly down to luck.
Lottery winners do not tell the world they are smarter than the rest of us, or go on podcasts, write op-eds or start websites telling the rest of us how the world should be run.
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