
On Joi and MIT - tempsy
https://medium.com/@lessig/on-joi-and-mit-3cb422fe5ae7
======
simplicio
I dunno. Lessig's description of the case seems overly generous to Joi. For
starters, he claims Joi's private defense to him was that he'd heavily
researched Epstein's behavior and made a personal call that he was reformed
and should be given a second chance. That might be a decent defense if Joi had
actually made it publically, but its basically the opposite of what Joi said
in his attempt at an apology, where he basically claimed to be in the dark
regarding Epstein's behavior.

Secondly, he makes it sound like Joi wanted to keep Epstein's contributions
secret to keep Epstein from getting any benefit from them. But almost all the
reporting on the issue make it pretty clear that Epstein used the donations,
and his relationship with Joi, to publically associate himself with the lab,
visit the researchers there, present himself to Gates and others as an
unofficial go-between, etc. The relationship went far beyond Epstein cutting a
check and no one knowing about it.

Thirdly, Lessig's defense is largely based on the claim that Farrow's
reporting is factually incorrect, and that MIT told him to take the $, and
thus Joi was making a moral compromise in service of his employer. We'll have
to wait and see if he or Farrow is correct here, but Farrow's article was
obviously drawing on internal MIT docs, so I'd be pretty surprised if that was
the case.

Finally, Lessig skips over the fact that Joi took on the order of a million
dollars from Epstein for his personal projects. This makes the claim that Joi
was just doing what MIT told him to do pretty weak. It also bypasses what I
thought was the most damning implication of the Farrow article, which was that
Epstein basically bribed Joi to help him get around MIT's prohibition on
taking his money.

~~~
smacktoward
But see, he _knows_ Joi. And naturally, nobody he knows would be the type of
person to do something as terrible as enable a notorious abuser of children
for profit!

This is the deep rot at the heart of the American elite system: once you're in
the club, it's effectively impossible for anything you do to get you kicked
out of it. You become anointed as the Right Sort of Person, and everybody
accepts that when the Right Sort of Person does something terrible, it's not
because they're actually _not_ the Right Sort of Person. It's just an
oversight, an oopsie, an opportunity for Learning and Growth. You're operating
among friends, and standards among friends are more forgiving than they are
among the public at large.

(Even worse, not only are _you_ anointed as the Right Sort of Person, but your
children automatically are as well. And they have even less justification for
being treated that way than you did.)

Which is why a lot of people are misunderstanding the root problem in the
Epstein case. It's not that Epstein corrupted everything and everyone he
touched, it's that an Epstein _could only exist_ in an environment where
everything was corrupt already. Epstein was the symptom, not the disease.

~~~
scroblart
Exactly

------
tptacek
Lessig needs to stop digging.

Ronan Farrow has Joi Ito inviting Epstein to the Media Lab, in person, and
Epstein arriving with two escorts in tow so young that Lab staff had to debate
among themselves whether to interview to rescue them from Epstein. Has your
boss ever put you in a position like that? Ito did, in order to retain favor
with Epstein. That this was going to happen was so predictable that Ito worked
to keep Ethan Zuckerman out of the building the day Epstein arrived, because
Zuckerman had already been on Ito's case about Epstein.

Worse still, Farrow has Epstein brokering donations from billionaires like
Bill Gates. Lessig retcons Ito's actions into accepting anonymous donations
from a "class 3" donor; at least Ito wasn't accepting public donations from
"class 4" donors like the Koch Brothers. But Epstein is, in Farrow's telling,
literally functioning as an agent for Ito and the Lab. Anonymous? He's got the
highest possible profile the Lab can offer with precisely the set of people
whose influence he hopes to buy.

Presumably, that level of influence peddling is what enabled Epstein to obtain
a 1-year work-release sentence in Florida years earlier. In this telling,
Epstein isn't "laundering" anything. He's purchasing the influence he hopes to
bank to shield himself from further scrutiny. He's enlisting the Lab to
protect him. And the Lab complies, _for a pittance_ †, for a tellingly low
amount of money, so low, in retrospect and context you have to wonder if the
directorate of the Lab gave a shit at all.

† _apparently, and maybe double check because i could be wrong, less than the
amount ito_ also _collected from epstein for his own private venture fund._

~~~
darawk
> Ronan Farrow has Joi Ito inviting Epstein to the Media Lab, in person, and
> Epstein arriving with two escorts in tow so young that Lab staff had to
> debate among themselves whether to interview to rescue them from Epstein.

AFAIK there was no reason cited for their trafficking suspicion. It is not
known whether the women with him at the time appeared to anyone to be
underage.

~~~
tptacek
You made this point on a previous thread, at length, in repeated back-and-
forth with other commenters. I also doubt the escorts were "trafficked" in the
lurid sense we generally mean by the word, or that they needed or would have
been receptive to a rescue. That is not at all the point I'm making, and you
know that.

Your rebuttal is even less relevant to this thread, which simply contends that
there was no meaningful anonymity about Epstein's donations; in fact, there
was _infamy_ over them.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20906541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20906541)

~~~
darawk
> You made this point on a previous thread, at length, in repeated back-and-
> forth with other commenters. I also doubt the escorts were "trafficked" in
> the lurid sense we generally mean by the word, or that they needed or would
> have been receptive to a rescue. That is not at all the point I'm making,
> and you know that.

You were absolutely making that point. You literally said:

> Ronan Farrow has Joi Ito inviting Epstein to the Media Lab, in person, and
> Epstein arriving with two escorts in tow so young that Lab staff had to
> debate among themselves whether to interview to rescue them from Epstein.

I don't know how much more clear your intent could be.

------
dredmorbius
Matthew D. Green actually managed to pre-debunk / refute Lessig's grossly
flawed and immoral argument:

[https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/11707895922635161...](https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1170789592263516161)

------
nullc
I'm kind of surprised to see the Koch's invoked as true evil that upstanding
people accept money from rather than, say, Saudi royalty. There are many
examples of direct murders that universities, corporations, and governments
glibly partner with... But maybe I'm not up-to-date on the Koch's.

The details and the timeline of the donor disqualification in the New Yorker
article sounded odd to me-- in particular, that it juxtaposed conjecture and
unsupported claims with emails to make it sound like the request for anonymity
was a workaround for MIT policy yet it didn't actually introduce any factual
support for that conclusion.

In particular, when was he disqualified (e.g. before or after things being
discussed) and how was this communicated in the institution? These were
obvious and surprising omissions in the article. For Joi's sake I hope
Lessig's belief on this point is based on more than just the writing smelling
suspicious. Regardless, the absence of clarity on details like this is why
investigations are superior to lynch mobs.

~~~
matthewbauer
Considering the Kochs a level below Epstein is pretty disgusting. I don't
think anyone in the Koch family or Koch industries has ever been accused of
breaking any criminal laws - although their factories regularly break civil
laws. This so called lawyer is intentionally blurring that line. This is
definitely a new low for Lessig. We should expect more from influential
lawyers.

~~~
tzs
If Epstein had limited himself to taking advantage of young girls who had
reached the age of consent, so that his relationships were not breaking any
laws, would you no longer have a problem with Epstein?

Whether or not what someone does breaks the law often his almost nothing to do
with the morality of that action or whether or not that action causes harm.

That section of the article was more about the taint upon money donated from
various types of donors than about the donors themselves. The distinction it
is drawing is between people who do bad things but do not derive their money
from those bad things (such as Epstein) and people that do bad things and
those bad things is the source of the money they are donating (Koch). It's not
saying that donors of the former type are necessarily less immoral or evil
than donors of the latter type--just that taking their money is not benefiting
directly from their immorality or evil.

------
nikofeyn
i stopped reading when he classifies epstein as a "type 3" person. i think
it's quite bold, especially without any evidence whatsoever, to claim that
epstein's money came from non-criminal activities. and this is coming from a
"top" law expert. epstein's previously upcoming trial would have sorted
through some of this, but it isn't clear at all that his money wasn't funded
directly by his own criminal activities or indirectly by others' criminal
activities. in fact, it's one of the biggest open questions: where did epstein
get his money from?

also, his type 1 examples are laughable. tom hanks makes movies. taylor swift
makes music, and vindictive music at that. what is it about those professions
that is "doing good"? they aren't about doing bad, but they're just jobs.

the people really doing good in this world don't make any money at all.

all this epstein stuff and the avalanches caused by his actions and
associations is just giving us a peek into how the world really works: a bunch
of people who don't know what they're doing who think they do are running
things in complete, total self and those like their self interest. nobody
really cares about anyone else, and people prop up their decisions in the
context of institutions with an inability to step outside and ask "what am i
really doing here"?

~~~
darawk
> i stopped reading when he classifies epstein as a "type 3" person. i think
> it's quite bold, especially without any evidence whatsoever, to claim that
> epstein's money came from non-criminal activities. and this is coming from a
> "top" law expert. epstein's previously upcoming trial would have sorted
> through some of this, but it isn't clear at all that his money wasn't funded
> directly by his own criminal activities or indirectly by others' criminal
> activities. in fact, it's one of the biggest open questions: where did
> epstein get his money from?

He addresses the questions around this directly...

> It may be that we’ll discover that Epstein got rich by blackmailing people
> whom he had encouraged or enabled to commit abuse. I doubt it, but it’s
> possible.

> also, his type 1 examples are laughable. tom hanks makes movies. taylor
> swift makes music, and vindictive music at that. what is it about those
> professions that is "doing good"? they aren't about doing bad, but they're
> just jobs.

They're not doing a whole lot of good, they're just not doing anything
particularly bad. He's not holding them up as examples of perfect people, just
examples of people with no toxic publicly known behaviors that an institution
like MIT might want to avoid.

~~~
nikofeyn
>> He addresses the questions around this directly...

> It may be that we’ll discover that Epstein got rich by blackmailing people
> whom he had encouraged or enabled to commit abuse. I doubt it, but it’s
> possible.

providing a loose supposition and then immediately dismissing it is not
addressing something directly. i am not an expert on the epstein situation,
but from what i understand, lessig’s supposition is a rather naive one. it
seems it is much more likely that epstein was making money from the services
he provided and even more likely that he was bankrolled by some other entity
or entities.

the fact that lessig, as a supposed law expert, is just grasping at straws
with unrealistic guesses to recover his and his friend’s position is really
depressing.

------
rukuu001
Lessig has mis-categorised Epstein as type 3 when he really should be type 4.

He not only personally offended with minors, but amplified that offense by
supplying them to others.

This was certainly done for either direct profit, or for buying or paying off
favors.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
I'm sure you can't have _too_ many qualms when raising money, but MIT is no
cash-strapped institution. It has a sixteen billion dollar endowment!

------
jonathanyc
This amounts to “sometimes the ends justify the means, also, oops, mea culpa!”
My respect for Lessig diminished significantly after reading this.

~~~
natalyarostova
Is your respect for people correlated with how much you agree with them? If
so, are you able to have deep respect for people you disagree with? What if
you're wrong?

~~~
fatbird
I lost some respect for Lessig on reading it, and it has nothing to do with
disagreeing with him. It's that his essay presents itself as a tortured
apologia for his support of Ito, but is an implausible, badly-reasoned
rationalization. His arguments are terrible. He's supposed to be brilliant,
and then shovels twaddle like this on a topic on which he could be an
authoritative voice.

He fails to note that Ito's apology was incredibly selective and self-serving
and was basically a lie of omission in furtherance of the longtime covering up
of the conspiracy to take Epstein's money.

He accepts as self-evident that Epstein's money was not morally tainted itself
by dismissing the most implausible explanation for it (i.e., blackmail).

He ignores Ito's personally profiting from facilitating Epstein by also taking
Epstein's money for his own ventures.

Lessig tells a story of a "sweet soul" taking dirty money at the institution's
direction and failing to consider the possible future damage of the revelation
of same, and then castigates the rest of us because now when someone commits a
comparably innocent error, they'll have no motive to confess, apologize and
repair. Everything we've seen so far screams that this is a dark, corrupt,
wide-ranging affair full of venal people using each other for mutual benefit,
and what we get from Lessig is a puff piece on par with Ito's apology.

------
wangii
Intelligence, wealthy, and righteousness: pick 2. Any counter example?

