Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race with His DNA | Hacker News Reader

Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race with His DNA

nytimes.com

17 pointsperardi11 comments

This is off topic for HN. Please don't submit articles like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is the Epstein affair in general considered off topic?

Not necessarily, but there needs to be an intellectually interesting angle to the story—something that gratifies intellectual curiosity, as the guidelines say: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. What Jeffrey Epstein "hoped to seed" does not count.

Celebrity gossip gratifies curiosity too, but that's different kind (you could call it social curiosity) than what we're looking for here.

I was hoping there would be a discussion on this.

I identify myself as a transhumanist. My transhumanist goals are : anti ageing, enhancing human intelligence, furthering robots and AI, utopia and to a certain extent genetic engineering of the human DNA.

While there are transhumanists of various stripes, characterisations like this give the other transhumanists a bad name..as it’s already considered fringe’y and weird.

I think what makes people weird in an undesirable sense is when they wish to set themselves apart from others. Creating a maternity home for the exclusive selection of women to produce your own children is disturbing.

As far as I can tell, Epstein was so rich he paid the foremost scientists to attend dinner so he can troll them. Or worse, he actually believed in what he says, but only his closest associates can vouch for him.

@ryacko, Epstein is undoubtedly..for the lack of a better term, a moron.

But men do it all the time with religious polygamy, affairs, rape..even sperm donation banks where they are willing to ‘seed’ random women who will pay for it.

It has nothing to do with whether he is rich or not. If one has 19 kids and is in a religion, he is a reality show star. If it’s in Utah, it’s a constitutionally protected right. If the same person is rich and wants 30 kids, transhumanism becomes a fringe movement.

Meanwhile..women all over the world..remain unamused.

The similarity to Lebensborn is uncanny, and reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove.

It all makes me think that the United States was defeated by the Nazis at some point.

No, it’s not. I don’t see the similarity.

Some rich and powerful guy wanting to plant his ‘seed’ in as many women as possible is a story as old as time.

Beckoning Nazis is really not helpful.

Eta: Jeffery Epstein identified himself as transhumanist and has been talking about ‘seeding human race with his DNA’ because of his alleged transhumanist beliefs acc to NYT.

I honestly don’t understand why I’d be downvoted for identifying as a transhumanist.

Sometimes downvoting because of a headline kind of defeats the purpose of discussion any topic. I wish people would read the article before flagging/downvoting/deleting threads.

I think discussion of transhumanism and what it means to different people..and how it would be accepted is a valid topic for discussion.

Although I don't know exactly what you mean by transhumanism, I'm sure that it's a topic that HN can discuss. But Jeffrey Epstein is surely one of the worst contexts to discuss it in. Is it likely that the discussion will focus on the fine points of transhumanism, or get sucked into the lurid details of the case? Surely the latter.

I don’t know how to frame it outside the Epstein case if the title is to be used. Perhaps the title can be amended.

@dang, if you read the NYT article, it has nothing to do with Epstein’s lurid activities but about how he conned some of the greatest minds in science to join him and lavishing money to universities and research projects to entirely poison the pond.

By association, he has assassinated the transhumanist movement. I think this is an important thing to discuss.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism : generic wiki entry on transhumanism

Everything from eugenics to AI/tech singularity can be said to have emerged from transhumanist ideas. It’s discouraging to see it constantly battered by the villains and being made more fringe’y/weird when most of the things we identify as longevity, robotics, ai, singularity, nanotechnology, cybernetics..all emerge from the need to ‘transcend the limits of the condition of humanity’..

Maybe amending the title would help?

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