Epstein is a genius, and I'm pretty sure he funded science he believed would enable him to better prosper by it's application. Since, from all appearances, his work was to use people's fears and lusts against them for fun and profit, the thrust of his grants make sense in that context. Dan's genius seems to have been less social, and the very broken rewards mechanism reflects that lesser grasp of neurolinguistics and society his competence in creating apps availed him.

Steem was inspired on a social level in many respects nonetheless, and despite the terrible concentration of stake, and the stake-weighting mechanism so denigrating social interactions, does demonstrate truly experimental tokenization and the superlative social progress potential by concatenating cryptocurrency and social media. I reckon that is the experiment underway, rather than manipulation of human minds. The latter is not Dan's specialty, and seems not to be undertaken, or even acknowledged, in various posts and comments from Stinc.

It's pretty hard to reconcile master manipulation of people and society with the actual history of Steem and the HFs implemented with such poor grasp of how folks would respond and what the consequences would be.

Still, I can see how you might get that impression from how useful such an experiment would be. Fakebook is that experiment IMHO, and I reckon Libra is their attempt to perfect Steem. Fortunately, I don't think they'll be able to nominally moderate stake-weighting to successfully potentiate the desired social control. The early indications seem to suggest that the distribution of stake nominal to supercede legacy society won't be a feature of Libra, and I don't think it could, because those driving Libra are legacy stakeholders.

Thanks!