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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

The article seems to imply at points that power and influence won't accrue much as a result of anonymous donations, which I think is wrong. You lose the public prestige, sure, but the powerful people behind the scenes know you donated, as with Media Lab, and that power and influence isn't much diminished. In fact it's the behind the scenes type of power that can be the most effective and, as we see with Epstein, most corrosive.

Anonymity may shield the recipient from reputational damage of associating with a bad actor, but doesn't take away all of the benefits to the donor.

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I saw another article like this about MIT recently. I have a really hard time taking the discussion as a whole seriously, because it kind of feels like bike-shedding as compared to "How are we going to grill some of the people who really, actually deserve it?"

On the list of priorities, reprimanding labs and schools for taking donations seems like it should not be coming first.

The response needn't be serialized. That is to say, multiple actions may be popped off the priority queue at once, without waiting for the others to finish.

See also: the reason we are talking about this at all when there are still hungry children in the world.

Hungry people are a growing and incredibly complex problem. Punishing even a single one of Epstein's clients seems much more manageable. And if we're going for impact-to-effort ratio queuing, this is likely a bit more of a gimme than world hunger.

The point is that society can address more than one problem (or more than one aspect of a problem) at once. The reasoning I responded to seemed to be following the tired cliche of dismissing any problem as not worthy of attention because children are still starving.

> The point is that society can address more than one problem

Can it? It often seems like nothing really ever get addressed fully, while there is a barrage of half baked debates.

I don't think violations should be ignored simply because more egregious ones exist. There's no reason both can't be pursued. For example you don't ignore muggings just because some people are commiting murder. In this case, Joi deliberately violated policy in accepting donations from Epstein. I agree the University shouldn't devote significant resources to policing donations that in all likelihood are legitimate in the vast majority of cases. But when something like this falls in their lap, there's no reason to ignore this just because other bad things happen, say a coach that might be taking million dollar bribes to get a student admitted.

I think that mentality is really easy to take advantage of. Essentially, anyone is allowed at any point to push something to the top your stack. If at any point your stack is topped with something they don't like, it's a simple matter of pushing more things.

I strongly urge anyone who cares about this Epstein case at all to not let the guards or schools take a higher position in the stack than the clients themselves.

Isn't that the exact opposite of what the article says? The article is pretty clear that anonymity did not reduce his power at all, precisely for the reason you described.

It did suggest it might work if the recipient was not aware of who the money was from, but makes it clear that was not the case here.

I was going to say! That's precisely what Lessig's article says, but what this article deftly rebuts.

Maybe the grandparent had both tabs opened and was commenting on Lessig's article, because he's right in relation to that, and we're all in agreement about the point of the Vox article.

The episode of Curb, where Ted Danson donates anonymously!! If you look in my comment history, I’ve made the same exact point.

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