brendan halpin

Part one is here. Part two is here.

At this point, I suppose it’s worth asking why I continue to write about this. I should start by saying that I really had no resentment of Danny Hillis from my time as his employee. One of the things his company did that probably led to their downfall was to hire overqualified people for low-level jobs. Which was how I found employment during the Bush The Elder recession. I rarely interacted with Hillis—he played the part of the absent-minded professor who didn’t own any professional clothing and would slouch around the joint in old t-shirts. Even then I recognized this as a flex— “I’m so important I don’t have to dress as nicely as the people who answer my phone”—but while there were some horrible people at Thinking Machines, I never thought of Hillis as one of them.

So I’m not motivated by long-simmering resentment. I am of course motivated by anger at Epstein’s crimes and the fact that he and his associates seem to have committed atrocities with utter impunity for so long. But, as I’ve said, I don’t believe Hillis participated in the crimes.

He just didn’t care about them.

And this, ultimately, is what motivates me. That a guy who has built an entire life around being a Professional Smart Guy has such an obvious void where his conscience should be. I believe that Hillis’ disregard for what most of us consider centerpieces of morality—that children should be protected, not exploited, that people with power have a responsibility to look out for the less powerful, not prey on them—calls into question pretty much everything he’s ever done or said.

Not that Hillis’ life’s work should necessarily be thrown out, but it should be re-examined with the knowledge that his moral reasoning is deficient, if not absent.

Which can’t happen unless Hillis’ association with Epstein is widely known. If you were thinking about inviting Hillis to speak at your event, his association with Epstein won’t come up immediately unless you search the two names together.

Ultimately, I’m a guy with a blog that has extremely limited reach, and so there’s only so much I can do. About 600 people have read my first post. About 150 have read the second. At this rate I’ll be lucky to get 37 views on this one.

Fortunately, though, people with far greater reach than me have an opportunity here to correct the historical record. Hillis has been written about (and interviewed) for years in exclusively complimentary ways. I’m not saying the journalists invovled should have known better—there was no way for them to have access to Hillis’ emails, and he only started consorting with Epstein around 2010, as far as the emails I’ve found suggest.

Still, now that we know, I think if you wrote a puff piece about Hillis or hosted an interview with him that helped build his reputation, you now have an opportunity to correct the historical record.

So here are some people I’ve found who wrote very nice articles on Danny Hillis in the past or hosted them on their platform. I’d like to encourage any and all of them to add to our collective knowledge about this man in the light of new information.

Podcasters:

Tim Ferriss

Steve Mersky

Kevin Scott

Suze Kundu

Youtube:

Web of Stories

The Anyas Crypto

Norman Foster Foundation

Ross School

And of course, TED

Print, web, and broacast journalists (listed by where they worked when the article came out because I do not have time to chase down journalist job changes!):

Chris Jones, Esquire.

Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe.

Po Bronson, Wired.

Steve Mirsky, Scientific American.

Steve Inskeep, Morning Edition.

Cara Maines, NBC.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Robert Matthews, New Scientist.