After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

The real Epstein scandal: An AI philosopher whom Epstein funded was not ignorant about the racial gap in average IQ.

A headline in the Boston Globe news section:

Former MIT scientist funded by Epstein made racist and sexist claims in private emails

Joscha Bach, an AI researcher, worked at the MIT Media Lab from 2014 to 2016. He was hired in large part because of Epstein’s donations.

By Kate Selig, Globe Staff, November 21, 2025

Joscha Bach, a former MIT Media Lab researcher whose work there was funded by Jeffrey Epstein, questioned the intellectual development of Black children and women’s interest in math and science in emails to the disgraced financier in 2016, according to recently released documents from the US House Oversight Committee.

Noam Chomsky, Mrs. Chomsky, and Jeffrey Epstein

The email chain included a discussion of famed linguist Noam Chomsky’s views on the biological basis of language but then veered into generalizations on race and gender, while also querying Epstein about his “political incorrectness.”

The release of the files delivers another blow to MIT’s effort to move past the fallout from Epstein’s ties to its renowned Media Lab.

The Boston Globe evidently finds the AI philosopher’s actual statements on race, sex, and IQ so scandalous that it won’t dignify them by printing them in case subscribers might have aneurysms.

But the New York Times dares print Bach’s horrifying words:

Under Mr. [Joi] Ito, the Media Lab used money provided by Mr. Epstein to support the work of Joscha Bach, an A.I. researcher, according to a 2020 M.I.T. review.

Mr. Bach appeared in last week’s document dump, writing long and often technical emails to Mr. Epstein. In 2016, he wrote to Mr. Epstein that “black kids in the US have slower cognitive development,” and “You cannot learn what does not attract your attention. Women tend to find abstract systems, conflicts and mechanisms intrinsically boring.”

Both are true, of course. And Bach used them as datapoints in building his theory of human language acquisition that he sees as an alternative to Chomsky’s famous theory of language as a specific human instinct.

Which sounds interesting.

But that’s not the point. The point is that you aren’t supposed to know that these facts are facts. You aren’t supposed to be interesting, you are supposed to be ignorant of inconvenient facts.

But Dr. Bach dared to know.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Mr. Bach said in a statement on Friday that he continued to associate with Mr. Epstein after he served time because highly respected academics recommended him as a funding source for research. “They acknowledged his past crimes but assured me he was reformed,” he said. Researchers “far more senior and famous than me were accepting such funds, so as a young person just getting started, I took my cue from them on this.”

Mr. Bach said that “my current view” is “that race is not causal for differences in development, and race is not a determinant of IQ in children or adults.”

By “race,” we mean who your genetic ancestors were who provided you with your nature; and they are also usually the people who raised you and provided you with much of your nurture as well. So it’s hard to imagine how race couldn’t be somewhat causal since it correlates with both nature and nurture. But that’s not the kind of thing you are supposed to say these days to save your career.

I suspect that as it becomes clearer that the Epstein Files probably don’t include many smoking guns that will take down Trump, the media will switch to obsessing over Epstein’s political incorrectness, which, in my experience, had been pretty common among mathy Jewish guys around the turn of the Millennium.

I never had the slightest thing to do with Epstein, but I had heard his name before his first arrest in 2006 as a donor supporting interesting work in the human sciences by scientists whose book proposals were represented by literary agent John Brockman.

Back then, Darwin and genes were hot topics and there wasn’t as much worry about getting your career cancelled, so there was a lot of interest among bright people in discussing important questions. Heck, in a few months in 1999, I, an unknown marketing research executive who’d written a few interesting articles for National Review, managed to put together a spectacular roster for my email discussion group on human biodiversity (e.g., two members went on to win Nobels).

Brockman had similar but bigger ambitions to organize his roster of talent into the core salon of 21st intellectuals. So he founded the Edge Foundation, with Epstein chipping in the money to throw a lavish dinner annually in return for Epstein getting his picture taken with celebrity scientists.

Brockman would get his clients to submit essays on some annual question, some of which were very interesting. But, Epstein’s essays tended toward in-over-his-head conman gibberish.

It’s commonly believed that Epstein and his girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Soviet and Israeli spy/real life Bond villain Robert Maxwell (who tried in 1989 to cheat my boss out of One … Million … Dollars, was running a meticulous intelligence operation, every step of which was carefully plotted. But it’s hard to figure out what …

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