As someone who's been following the Epstein case for some time and having seen different communities deal with it, I think in the case of Gates a lot of people really looked up to him and refuse to believe that he would do this. There are even comments in this thread about it not being Gates' style.

When you look at the whole Epstein story, the people and the patterns, it's pretty clear that Gates was in a very questionable relationship with Epstein. The MIT donations, the senior Gates employee being the executor of Epstein's will, Gates' denials of knowing Epstein before the NYT article hit and his failure to address his flights with Epstein and meetings at his houses, Gates' email to staff about meeting with Epstein and a "beautiful Swedish woman and her 15 year old daughter, late into the night"...

With Gates in particular a lot of people seem willfully ignorant or have a strong desire not to dig deeper. It was a the same with Matt Gronenig. Prince Andrew, Dershkowitz, Wexner... I think every assumes the worst there but a lot of people are struggling to digest their actual heroes turning out to be much less than they thought.

I agree but what makes it so hard to swallow is that phrase, "be much less than they thought", should really be "be much more than they thought".

I mean, your heroes sometimes turn out to be all that and so many more, horrible things. It's hard to fathom that people can contain good and bad qualities, and after the fact push them aside among "bad people". But if you do this, you won't learn anything, or be watchful of your remaining heroes.

Next time you idolize someone, remember that. They may be more things and those things may not all be pretty.

> I agree but what makes it so hard to swallow is that phrase, "be much less than they thought", should really be "be much more than they thought"

The English Language strikes again. Apologies for wandering off-topic, but to (hopefully) clarify:

You're thinking of less / more in the quantitative sense, suggesting some people have _more_ traits, some of which are unpleasant.

I think GP was using less in the qualitative sense - "a lesser person for lacking moral fiber", if you will.

Both are valid, but contextual ambiguity interferes with interpretation.

Agreed. I just grabbed a hook in the text to latch onto a mindset I think is prevalent. (Closely related to "us vs them", the in-group and the out-group, etc.)

If you see people expressing an opinion that’s useful for the rich and powerful, it’s appealing to imagine that the people expressing that opinion are shills. But I think saying such out loud lowers the quality of discourse. If we go around accusing one people we disagree with of being shills, we aren’t learning or participating in an exchange of ideas, which is the point of a discussion forum like this.

There’s a perfectly sound explanation for those posts that seem “shillish”: sincerely held beliefs that are different from yours. I think fanboyism and ideology motivate a lot more people to argue on the internet than money. If you want proof of this, look at all the teeming masses arguing for all sorts of causes that the rich and powerful don’t care about.

I don't believe that everyone who says this kind of thing is being paid to do so. What I think instead is that this kind of thing is invented by someone who is paid to make up these kind of misdirecting and memetic statements and that they then disseminate these kinds of messages on mediums like reddit where they know that they will propagate.

Another example of these kinds of statements would be "Elon Musk is like a real life Tony Stark." Do I think that every Elon fanboy is paid to say this online? No, of course not. Do I think that Elon Musk like many celebrities has a public image crafted by a PR firm and that this kind of jingo-istic soundbite probably originated from that firm? Absolutely.

There's a middle ground between shills and honest sincerely held beliefs: that of the useful idiot [1]. Those are people who have been manipulated by real shills to sincerely advocate for the shill's ideas. Real shills usually don't have the resources get the results they want on their own, so their goal is to create useful idiots to magnify their efforts.

It's not necessarily relevant to this case, and I agree that calling those people out as such lowers the quality of discourse, but I think it's something important to keep in mind.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

I think it’s interesting to look at the patterns of historical usage mentioned in the wiki. The phrase always originates with an accusation by party A that party B calls party C useful idiots, but there’s never any evidence backing up the accusation against party B. To me it just seems like a condescending way of dismissing party C - essentially an argument meant to invalidate popular support for party B. It’s not necessarily wrong, but I think without evidence it’s essentially a tactic for party A to deal with the cognitive dissonance arising from their distaste for party B combined with party C’s support for party B.

Now I’m getting in the weeds and questioning the motivations of party A. I suspect this might make party A feel the way party C does when people call them “useful idiots”. And perhaps it demonstrates how this line of questioning is an endless rabbit hole.

> The phrase always originates with an accusation by party A that party B calls party C useful idiots, but there’s never any evidence backing up the accusation against party B.

I think the criteria "that party B calls party C" is actually pretty irrelevant to the concept's usefulness.

> essentially an argument meant to invalidate popular support for party B

In most of the cases where I'd use the term "useful idiot" the "party B" doesn't have much popular support, but is rather engaging in manipulation, disinformation, dishonest propaganda, etc. The realization isn't useful as a dismissal, but rather as a reminder that you need to confront both the idiot's sincere belief along with their ignorance of it's goals, implications, and beneficiaries.

It's shown up in every single HN thread about Gates's ties to Epstein.

Have to say I'm particularly impressed with Reid Hoffman's PR outfit though. By all accounts he was a major Silicon Valley nexus connecting Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and others, yet he managed to stay almost completely out of the headlines and even still hosts a show on NPR about the startup scene.