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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Context matters. Otherwise we’re just being clowns.

I mean being a known fraudster, requesting money from Epstein, and asking about some girl he met through Epstein is context too which is not a good look.

He may be innocent, but he certainly has a large stain and stink about him.

This. Significant portions of the Epstein files are random noise. Though even for a popularish author it'd be strange to be in enough 1990-2018 news snippets to reach that many EF hits. In any case "is in the Epstein files" should in general be replaced with "is in the Epstein files, including this email to/from them I found"

The most interesting section from the large paragraph on Wikipedia: “One of the documents is an image of an email from Ariely to Epstein, in which he requests the name and email of a "redhead" that Epstein had previously introduced to him”

That still doesn't mean anything. Sure we know Epstein did evil, but not everything he did was evil. One should assume at least a few people he interacted with had no reason to suspect his evil actions.

I guess that's why the same passage says Ariely maintained the relationship long after the Epstein's pedophile convictions. Not definitive either, but pretty suggestive.

Go read the article instead of nitpicking people doing the citations for you.

If you ask a known pedophile for funding and introductions while accepting favors, you can rightly be accused of bad judgment - at best.

Go read it yourself. There isn't enough information to draw concussions. Everything is consistent with contact with a major funder who you can't cut off just because of evil in a part of life you knew nothing about.

You can read the article with a bias and ignore his counter claims. However that is drawing a conclusion not warranted.

Now perhaps someone has read the letters and seen other evidence and can draw conclusions. However at this point I can't say who knew what.

Both people are of course evil, but they may or may not have an evil in common.

Asking THE sex trafficker pimp extraordinaire about the contact data of a “redhead”… I guess you CAN read this whole interaction as benevolent if you squint hard enough to the point that the nature of this guy’s transactions with people becomes invisible

I have a policy of "innocent until proven guilty". (even proven guilty doesn't mean guilty, but by that time so much evidence has been examined that odds are high enough to finally say guilty). All too often somebody pushes only evidence that supports their bias without full care for the full truth.

I agree it looks pretty bad, but I have not seen all the evidence and thus I must hold out the possibility he is innocent until someone does take the time to examine it all. That doesn't mean I think he is innocent, just that I'm carefully withholding judgement because I know I do not have all the facts. It also doesn't mean I'm against investigation of the facts - I just want the investigation done properly, and all discussions like this do not contribute to a proper investigation.

That’s fair. I just fear the justice system or whatever it should be to decide what the “truth” is might not be up to the task or not that interested in truth anymore. Like for example there’s this one person that everybody in the world knows who bragged about doing despicable things and there’s dozens of women who for years have been accusing him of doing similarly despicable or worse things to them, but it doesn’t matter because he’s innocent until proven guilty… So at some point I just allow myself to draw my own conclusions

Context matters and the more context you have the worse it looks.

> The messages revealed that his friendship with Epstein lasted for nine years, including well after Epstein was initially charged with soliciting sex from a minor.[52] Ariely also suggested that Epstein use learnings from his research to help rehabilitate his public image

what's clownish is defending anybody who would associate with a billionaire pedophile sex trafficker

anybody in the files who helped him rehab his image should rightly be consigned to the dustbin of history

>what's clownish is defending anybody who would associate with a billionaire pedophile sex trafficker

>anybody in the files who helped him rehab his image should rightly be consigned to the dustbin of history

It's possible to denounce someone, but still push back on false claims. Otherwise you're just condoning misinformation just because it aligns with your beliefs . eg.

"Did you know Donald Trump literally eats babies?"

"Wtf are you talking about? There's no evidence of that."

"Wow, I can't believe you're defending a convicted felon, sex offender, and authoritarian! Anyone who's trying to rehab his image should be consigned to the dustbin of history."

sure, that's a great principle but is it applicable here? Ariely is noted having sent an email asking Epstein about 'that redhead' (along with hundreds of others and his work rehabbing the image of someone with a known pedophilia sex trafficking indictment)

if you assess the original claim against the facts, is it as ludicrously out-of-step as someone claiming that Trump found A Modest Proposal persuasive?

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