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Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

I think you are more naive than you think. Think for a second.

The most egregious example of this is the Sackler family's ( Purdue Pharma/Opioids) massive donations to the arts/museums. They should not receive the glory and praise for their generosity to the arts for triggering the deaths of so many Americans in the pursuit of drug profits.

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I think the naive approach is to think that things are black and white, absolutely good or absolutely bad, and so on by mere association. Scientifically useful results from scientists that are awful humans are still useful results on their own. A donation to a University (assuming no strings attached) doesn't make the University wrong by association, despite a donator who's an awful entity. Governments collect taxes from good and bad people and no one blinks an eye thinking the governments should lift their nose and walk away from money coming from criminals.

It does when you know the donor is awful and you conceal the origin of the donation.

How so? I think concealing the origin is the right thing especially if you know the person is awful and you don't want to reward them with reputation points.

Bottom line, I think a donation, an idea, a contribution is useful even if it comes from an awful source, but the problem lies in whether you reward/enable the source's awfulness. I think that's the argument to make, as opposed to just focusing on whether the source of funds was a morally acceptable person.

The right thing to do is not taking the money. There are plenty of other places you can get money from. The recipient may not get formal 'reputation points' but you are overlooking informal social networks in which such things are widely known but not talked about. If you have a bad reputation, financial inducements to silence people can be just as valuable if not more so as positive public remarks are to a person of ordinarily decent reputation.

As I said on another thread, if you really want to donate anonymously to a good cause, you just call a lawyer and pay a small fee to have them to submit it on your behalf.

Of course rich people donate to charities to prop up their own reputation. That is how charitable causes get money.

If we said this must be prevented because the donor is not a truly ethical selfless person, there would be much less money going to good causes. And who would be the judge of which of us is good enough to be allowed to donate to charities?

Hiding the origin of money in case like Epstein is clearly wrong. It prevents the bright people to make informed choices - based on their moral standards, not yours - where to work at. There are plenty of scientists who don’t want their work to be funded by that kind of money.

Why not? They did both. We should recognize them for both. Why do you feel the need to portray them in such a one dimensional way?

You'd like to recognize a rapist for their charitable givings?

edit: This was a poor comment. I shouldn't have phrased my point in such a crass way when I do not actually believe rowanG077 thinks what I wrote above. Sorry for my tone, rowanG077. It wasn't helpful to the conversation.

Depends on what you mean by recognize. I certainly don't think we should hide it. I also don't think we should "forget" the person is a rapist.

But the main point I am making is that we shouldn't stop the rapist from making charitable givings. Nor should we punish institutions for taking that money.

Many people believe the charitable givings were what gave Epstein his credibility, allowing him to continue what he was doing. Accepting the donations was enabling Epstein.

Is there actual proof of the government knowing about Epsteins actions and looking the other way because of his donations? I find that really hard to believe...

I do not know about the U.S. government, but at M.I.T. he had been already been banned from charitable giving, so Joichi was having to lie about the source of the money.

Yes and that is indeed a problem. Joichi was willfully going behind M.I.T.s back to get those donations. And that should be a reason to fire Joichi.

However that is completely separate from believing that blacklist to be valid. I don't think such a blacklist should exist at all. But it's not the call of the researcher itself to bypass it.

That has nothing to do with your original point which said that his donations allowed him to work as a sex trafficker.

Where is the line? If you stole something at 16 does that mean you're to be shunned from society forever? Is the line rape? Is it murder? Sexual assault? Being a nazi? Being a conservative? Being a liberal? Associating with someone in the shunned group?

And what aren't we allowed to do with these people? Accept their money? Talk to them? Have dinner with them? Be in the same room as them? Same building? Be friends with friends of theirs?

You can begin to talk about rehabilitating abhorrent people only after they've demonstrated some contrition for their actions and growth towards being better. By all accounts, Epstein showed none of that.

The comment I responded to did not mention Epstein in any way or form.

This is an article about Epstein, in a thread about Epstein, with a side-diversion to the Sackler family. In that context, bradly's question:

> You'd like to recognize a rapist for their charitable givings?

Is clearly referencing Epstein and returning the thread to discussion of Epstein instead of the Sackler family.

How am I equipped to know if someone has been rehabilitated? Do you also want evildoers to be contrite and fund a PR campaign so you are aware of and approve their acts of contrition?

I struggle with this because I think I want someone I can never have. I require an omniscient AGI just to figure out if people are sorry or not.

I’m not sure how many museums you have to found to make up for opioid deaths or child sex trafficking. Fortunately, I don’t think I’ll ever be qualified or required to make these kinds of decisions.

You are neglecting base rates, IMO. The base rate of wealthy people contributing to charitable causes is very high. There is no reason to think that their charitable donations had anything to do with their opioid manufacturing or any sort of guilt about that. I'm sure they internalized all that stuff in a way that made them blameless anyway.

How did Epstein benefit from making anonymous donations? It seems like there's something about this that we still don't understand.

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