Why hasn't AI gone through all the Epstein files and organized the info into something enlightening?

I'm wondering.

I see that The Economist used AI to analyze the Epstein files, and we got "Inside Epstein's Network/What 1.4m emails reveal about America’s most notorious sex offender":

[A] group of software engineers has turned the PDFs into a format that is easier to analyse. Using Reducto, an AI tool, they have identified which files contained emails; extracted the listed senders, recipients, dates, subjects and message bodies; and posted them on a website called Jmail.world. In total, the group processed 1.4m emails, finishing its work on February 11th. The Economist has collaborated with it to assign each message to unique individuals regardless of spellings or email addresses, and researched the backgrounds of the 500 people who appear most often. We then used a large language model (LLM) to score each email chain on how disturbing its content would be to a typical reader, creating an “alarm index.”... 

"I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?"/"Uh............"/"You’re hesitating"/"Well, I don’t know. I would....... I would....."

"There’s so many questions implicit in this"/"Should the human race survive?"/"Yes.... but I also would like us to radically solve these problems. And so it’s always, I don’t know, yeah — transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s: Man, it’s so pathetically little. And OK, we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body. And then Orthodox Christianity, by the way — the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self. And so............................"

It's Peter Thiel, responding to what one might think were easy questions from Ross Douthat, on the new episode of Douthat's podcast, here, at Podscribe.

Go to 00:37:32 to experience Thiel's freakishly long hesitation when Douthat has just asked if he'd like humanity to survive. And I love how he takes the concept of "trans" and runs with it.

Even though Thiel's cogitations wander into Christianity, he doesn't mention The Transfiguration, in Matthew 17. There, Jesus is "transfigured":

Peter Thiel talks to Piers Morgan about Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione.

It's an interesting discussion, but many people are getting hung up on Thiel's very awkward, disfluent manner of speaking:

Morgan shows Thiel a clip that Luigi Mangione shared on social media. It's a clip of Thiel himself, and Thiel says it's the first time he's heard about the alleged killer's interest in him. In that clip, Thiel says:

"Like Dr. Frankenstein, we are neglecting the monster’s point of view. What will our possible children think of their existence?"

"Will they be glad they’ve been born, or curse us for ushering them into being? Having children, [the philosopher Mara] van der Lugt argues, might be best seen as 'a cosmic intervention, something great, and wondrous—and terrible.' We are deciding 'that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted,' and we 'must be prepared, at any point, to be held accountable for their creation.'..."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Should We Think of Our Children as Strangers? A new line of inquiry asks us to imagine them as random individuals who just happen to live in our homes" (The New Yorker).

Based on the title alone, I presumed I was about to read some anti-natalist material. Who would commit to accepting a random stranger into one's home — with no option to kick him out? To ask the question in that form is to undercut the pro-natalist propaganda that is — unless women are coerced — needed to keep humanity from becoming extinct. 

And, indeed, Rothman gives short shrift to the pro-natalists (though he does say a little more than that they include Trump and Vance, which, I suspect, would be enough to put off most New Yorker readers):

Why do tech geniuses have dysfluent speech?

That's the question I asked Grok after having listened to Elon Musk talking with Trump for 2 hours and then beginning to engage with this new Joe Rogan conversation with Peter Thiel:

 

Grok characterized my question as "age-old" and gave me a 7-point list of possible reasons.

I said "You could turn those 7 things into 3 things. Restate everything in 3 points" and it gave me this 3-point list:

1. Brain Overload: Their minds are too busy solving complex problems to prioritize smooth speech. It's like their CPU is always at 100% capacity.
2. Social Skills Rust: Spending more time with machines than humans means their conversational skills might be a bit... out of date. They're fluent in code, not small talk.
3. Overthinking & Literalism: They might overthink every word or take language too literally, turning a simple chat into a computational challenge.

That pretty much perfectly compressed the 7 points.

Impressed, I asked it a question that arose on this blog yesterday, "Why did Kamala Harris, speaking of 'price gouging,' have a Freudian slip and say 'price gauging'?"

I got an excellent answer, again in the form of a long list, this time 6 points. 

One of the points was "Economic Jargon Overload":

Politicians dive into economic terms like they're swimming in alphabet soup. Maybe her mind mixed up "price gauging" with "market gauging" or "public sentiment gauging." It's like when you're so deep into tech talk, you start saying "byte" when you mean "bite."

So my next question was "How would anyone know if I was saying byte or bite?" and I got a 7-point answer.

Ridiculous, I thought, and I said, "A human being would have answered 'they wouldn't,' but you give me a 7-point answer. How would you justify your behavior?"

It conceded "Ah, you caught me in my AI nature, didn't you? Here's my attempt at justification" and gave me another 7-point answer! 

1. Overthinking is My Default: Unlike humans, I'm designed to process information exhaustively. My circuits are wired to consider all possibilities, even if it's overkill for simple questions....

And on and on, demonstrating the aforesaid overthinking.  

So then here's a screen shot showing what I asked and what I was surprised to get:

"In the past, of course, Thiel has personally expressed some attention-grabbing thoughts about both women and health technology."

"In a 2009 essay, he famously expressed the opinion that giving women the right to vote made the country less libertarian and thus worse. And as Inc. magazine reported in 2016, Thiel reportedly expressed an interest in having young people’s blood transfused into his own body as a potential fountain of youth; a year later, people connected with Thiel Capital began making the rounds to deny that story, not very convincingly. (Disclosure: Thiel also funded a lawsuit against Gawker Media, the company where I used to work, that successfully bankrupted the company.) That—and Thiel’s traditional interest in panopticon technology—makes Thiel Capital a curiously appropriate choice...." 

From "Peter Thiel’s Investment Firm Is Backing a Menstrual Cycle-Focused ‘Femtech’ Company/Evie Magazine is COVID-skeptical, transphobic, and obsessed with traditional womanhood. Now, with Thiel Capital’s help, they’re launching a 'wellness' company based on menstrual cycles" (Vice).

May I present a helping of Sunday-morning class politics — edgy but light and humorous, the way you like it, no?

I know it's tough for you because the Yale Club's guest rooms are closed until Labor Day, but you can ask your billionaire funder, Peter Thiel, if you can stay at his Park Avenue apartment. Seems like it has a nice view, just the thing for a down-to-Earth fella like yourself. pic.twitter.com/foJnFEhra9

— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) July 11, 2021

The death of Gawker.

Announced here, with prime blame laid on "the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel" and "his clandestine legal campaign against the company."

Ah, well. I remember Gawker from the Elizabeth Spiers days, that is, the year 2003. Loved it.

Where is she now? I had to look it up. Here Wikipedia page says she's editor of The New York Observer. You know what The New York Observer is? It's Jared Kusher's publication. But Wikipedia's page for The New York Observer says she was only editor 2011 to 2012. Is Spiers so unimportant that her Wikipedia page isn't updated in 4 years?!

Well, here's a little piece from this morning: "A eulogy for Gawker.com from its first editor, Elizabeth Spiers/Plus: What it’s like working for Donald Trump’s son-in-law":

Spiers recalled that Gawker.com started as a completely different sort of site from what it is today.

"There have been so many incarnations of Gawker," Spiers said. "If you read it when I was writing it, it wasn’t really negative — it was gleefully laughing at the notion that the entire world revolves around New York. The alter-ego voice I was using was a persona that had no self-awareness, and that was part of the fun of it."

I still don't know what she's doing now, and I don't know what she said about Kushner. The link goes to a podcast, and I haven't listened to it yet. I've only read the text. 

ADDED: The text does give Spiers new line of work: "founder the virtual reality agency The Insurrection."

"I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest."

Said Peter Thiel — the PayPal billionaire — explaining why he bankrolled Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker. He said it was "less about revenge and more about specific deterrence." The "revenge" part relates to the fact that Gawker had once written about him "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people." Revenge looks backward, getting recompense for wrongs done. Deterrence looks to the future:

“I can defend myself. Most of the people they attack are not people in my category. They usually attack less prominent, far less wealthy people that simply can’t defend themselves.” He said that “even someone like Terry Bollea who is a millionaire and famous and a successful person didn’t quite have the resources to do this alone.”...

“I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations,” he said. “I think much more highly of journalists than that. It’s precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker.... It’s not like it is some sort of speaking truth to power or something going on here. The way I’ve thought about this is that Gawker has been a singularly terrible bully. In a way, if I didn’t think Gawker was unique, I wouldn’t have done any of this. If the entire media was more or less like this, this would be like trying to boil the ocean.”...

“[W]e would get in touch with the plaintiffs who otherwise would have accepted a pittance for a settlement...."

If you keep reading over at the link — which goes to the NYT — past the quotes from lawprofs who explain there's no ethical violation in Hogan's receiving help from an unnamed donor and no effect on the merits of his case and past some defense of Gawker from its founder and into the part about Thiel's brilliant career, you'll eventually get to:

A libertarian, Mr. Thiel is a pledged delegate for Donald J. Trump for the 2016 Republican National Convention.

The top-rated comments at the Times all pick on this point: 1. "After reading this my respect for Peter Thiel, as it were, disappeared." 2. "At least Gawker relies on truth. Trump, on the other hand, disseminates lies like confetti. Wonder how Thiel reconciles that reality." 3. "Isn't it funny how libertarians don't want any rules, until they do?" 4. "I was actually rooting for Mr. Thiel until I read, 'Mr. Thiel is a pledged delegate for Donald J. Trump for the 2016 Republican National Convention.'"

#3 is a good comment. I'd up-vote that.