Degrees of separation
By 
Andrew Gelman has an amusing-disturbing post on calculating an Erdos-Bacon-Epstein number, which is the kind quasi-autistic rabbit hole that I enjoy going down, though your mileage may vary. I have an Epstein number of two, since I’ve exchanged emails with at least two people in the Epstein birthday book — the Dersh, natch, and Gelman’s namesake Murray Gell-Man, who I was trying to get to be on a panel about science and law back in the day. I’ve never acted in a movie, although I’ve been in a couple of documentaries, which per Gelman doesn’t count for the purposes of a Bacon number, and I don’t have an Erdos number, although Gelman’s discussion of Dershowitz seems to imply that you can have Erdos number by proxy in some way, even if you haven’t co-authored something with somebody who co-authored something with somebody etc. who co-authored with Erdos.
The only think I actually know about Erdos besides all the stories of how he spent his life couch-surfing/co-authoring is that he couldn’t understand the correct answer to the Monty Hall problem, which just goes to show that it takes all kinds. I recently read the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, which has an autistic protagonist who at one point draws an extremely simple diagram, reproduced in the book itself, that, it seems to me, explicates the Monty Hall problem with perfect clarity in pictures rather than numbers (There are only three possible base cases. In two of them you win by switching, so you should switch). But again peoples’ minds work very differently. In The Triumph of Stupidity (forthcoming, hopefully) I note that I’ve written opinion pieces for national publications in less than half an hour, but could no more assemble a piece of Ikea furniture than I could build a linear accelerator out of dryer lint, so there you have it. [It occurred to me recently that one possible explanation for the Monty Hall conundrum is some sort of endowment effect: People hate giving up something that they think of as “theirs,” even when it’s irrational to think that way].
Gelman raises a serious point in the midst of all this:
Why do all this? Why did I spend two precious hours of my time on earth tracking down these links and writing all this? Or, maybe more to the point, why did you read all this. (I’m conditioning here on whatever subset of our blog audience has who’ve read this far down on the post.)
The quick answer is that connections can be interesting. You can learn all sorts of unexpected things from this sort of quasi-stochastic search.
Another answer is that seeing these connections of various elite and not-so-elite people gives us some sense of the social world. It’s a core sample of part of American society.
The other interesting thing about the Epstein files is the content. Not the crude sexism: people will say all sorts of things in private, so this sort of thing is hardly shocking. If a cookbook writer / retired technology executive thought it was cute to talk about sex with one of his rich friends, so be it. The part that was more stunning to me was all these luminaries who seemed so impressed by Epstein. In addition to the aforementioned pioneers of statistics and computer science, you’ve got ultra-successful businessmen such as Gates, artists such as Andres “Piss Christ” Serrano, leading physicists (sorry, no Bacon number here; according to IMDB the closest she came was an uncredited role on a TV show, and I think that only movies count), etc.
I get it that lots of politicians got caught in a net: if you’re a politician, you pretty much can’t avoid getting close to lots of distasteful people. I’m not saying that it’s cool that Trump, Clinton, Richardson, Bannon, Thiel, etc. were friendly with Epstein, but it’s also not so clear what the alternative would be. If you’re in politics, you only have a limited number of times you can piss off powerful and well-connected people. But in academia and in business, you can do what you want most of the time. The idea that these people were choosing to hang out with Jeff, going to the trouble to wish him happy birthday . . . it’s just weird. Again, I think Epstein must have had a real ability to talk with lots of different people, making people as different as Bannon, Chomsky, Minsky, and Summers to all think he agreed with them. And that’s kind of interesting.
That is interesting. And it strikes me that in this regard what’s interesting about Epstein is exactly the same thing that’s interesting about Donald Trump, to wit, how is it that so many people find these extraordinarily grotesque and obviously (one would think) not very bright sociopaths so incredibly charismatic? I get that money and power are inherently somewhat charismatic in our increasingly depraved society, but there are lots of rich and powerful people, and the vast majority of them don’t have the mysterious capacity to hypnotize even brilliant cynical sophisticates in the way that Trump and Epstein each cast their spells over so many people in their orbits.
Look at the photo at the head of this post: how does he do that? I’ve speculated that to some significant degree charisma is something the audience decides to imbue onto its putative source, rather than the other way around. People are entranced by Trump because they’re looking for someone with his characteristics to entrance them, in the way people in Germany in the 1930s were looking for this weird ugly loser who shrieked absurd rhetoric to entrance them, apparently. Maybe the key here is that someone like Trump produces a strong reaction, whether that reaction is rapturous devotion or total revulsion. At least he’s not boring, which is apparently the only sin that still exists here in Postman-Baudrillard Land.