Guilt by proximity is a failure mode, not a form of vigilance
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Jeffrey Epstein funded science, extensively and publicly. He gave to the Santa Fe Institute, to Harvard's evolutionary dynamics program, and to individual researchers. He convened gatherings that a long list of prominent scientists attended.
Jonathan Hare knows a considerable number of those people personally — through the Santa Fe Institute, through the complexity community, through twenty years in the same rooms. What follows is his read on what they were doing there. It is testimony from someone with standing, and it is not, and cannot be, a statement about what happened in rooms he was not in.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Research funding is scarce, competitive, and humiliating to chase. A man offering money with few conditions, in a warm place, alongside other people whose work you admire, is an extremely ordinary thing for a scientist to say yes to.
Epstein also understood something about that community that most donors do not: prominent scientists are celebrities to a particular kind of wealthy person — technology founders, Wall Street quantitative traders — and access to them is worth a great deal. The scientists were, in that arrangement, partly the attraction. Hare's read is that most of them were there for funding, for the conversation, and for the sunshine, in roughly that order.
None of that requires anyone to have been naive. It requires only that a plausible donor was taking meetings.
He was not at those gatherings. He cannot say what happened at any of them, and this record does not claim otherwise.
Some individuals have faced specific, documented questions about their conduct that are not outrage-signaling and should not be dismissed as such. Those are separate matters, they belong to the individuals concerned, and nothing here speaks to them.
An earlier and stronger version of this argument — that everyone present was certainly there only for science — was drafted and is not published. It asserted knowledge Hare does not have. A record whose entire value is that it does not overstate cannot make an exception for the people its author happens to like.
Not that anyone asks questions. That a whole category of people has been assigned a verdict on the basis of an attendance list.
Reputation assigned by proximity rather than conduct is the same failure this record documents at close range elsewhere. Martin Siegel, offered a shorter sentence for every name he produced, named everyone he had traded with — and in risk arbitrage that was everyone. Robert Freeman's career ended on a list.
The mechanism is identical and so is the error. A list of people who were near a thing is not evidence about any of them, and treating it as evidence is not vigilance. It is the cheapest available substitute for finding out.
Millions of people are trafficked every year. The systems that permit it are largely intact, largely boring, and offer nobody an opportunity to be publicly appalled about a famous person.
Hare's position is that the appetite for adjudicating a closed case — the principals dead or imprisoned, the facts not going to improve — is the modern opiate in Marx's precise sense: something that feels like moral seriousness while costing nothing and changing nothing.
The architectural alternative → is a substrate where reputation is computed from what a graph verifiably contains rather than from who a person was photographed beside, where nobody has to judge a stranger, and where the genuinely excluded conduct is not prohibited but structurally unavailable.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Absolute privacy and real accountability at once — without anyone watching
Open →the identical failure, documentedGoldman's head of risk arbitrage — and the analysis that showed the trades did not fit the accusation
Open →the caseOne party, several calls, a Santa Fe trip that never happened
Open →among the institutions fundedThe coffee break room
Open →the standard this page is held toDictated, unresearched, and rough on purpose — which is the evidence
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
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