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Source: Hacker News

The Correspondence

The bulk of the material involves Epstein trying to arrange a meeting with me and Seth Lloyd back in 2010, via an intermediary named Charles Harper, about funding a research project on “Cryptography in Nature.”

Searching my inbox, I found that Charles Harper did contact me in May 2010. I met him at S&S Deli in Cambridge (plausible, although I have no recollection of the conversation beyond the deli). Harper then sent a detailed follow‑up email about his proposed “Cryptography in Nature” project, naming Jeffrey Epstein as the funder and adding:

“perhaps you will know Jeffrey and his background and situation.”

I forwarded that email to my parents, brother, and then‑fiancée Dana. My brother later shared a news article about Epstein’s prostitution conviction, and my mother warned me:

“be careful not to get sucked up in the slime‑machine going on here! Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least.”

Later that summer Harper tried again to arrange a meeting between me and Epstein, but I followed my mother’s advice and largely ignored the request. No meeting ever occurred, and I completely forgot about the whole episode until last night.

The Proposed Conference

Among the Epstein Files is a November 2010 letter from Charles Harper to Epstein proposing a conference on the same “Cryptography in Nature” topic. The letter includes a comment about me:

“Scott Aaronson was born on May 21st, 1981. He will be 30 in 2011. The conference could follow a theme of: ‘hurry to think together with Scott Aaronson while he is still in his 20s and not yet a pitiful over‑the‑hill geezer in his 30s.’ This offers another nice opportunity for celebration.”

I see no indication that such a conference ever took place, and I was never invited.

Reactions

On Facebook, friends joked that “it tracks that someone into teenage girls might think Scott Aaronson was a hot property in his nubile 20s, who would get old and boring in his 30s,” and that perhaps Epstein was less sexist than commonly assumed. I replied that I wished the proposition that I’d gradually become slower and more senile through the 2010s and 2020s were entirely false.

The best comment I received was that I’ve been incredibly lucky to have an astute family. If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had a mother like mine for advice, they might have avoided a lot of grief.