9 ms·
Leadership Transition Announced for MIT Media Lab
- trdtaylor1 7y ago"... whose goal is to stop taking hidden donations from child sex traffickers and murderous princes for reputation building" nope, wait, didn't see that in the press release, taps still open boys.
- IOT_Apprentice 7y agoThe grants must flow.
- azinman2 7y agoThat was in the previous announcements by MIT, their hiring of an independent law firm to investigate what happened and all previous potential grants, and upcoming changes to how donations work. This is about leadership transition, not everything to date. Don’t over sensationalize.
- clebio 7y agoContext (icymi): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20901572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20901572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20891907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20891907
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoAmusing/sad how the announcement doesn't mention Joi Ito at all, even with a perfunctory "thanks for your service". Apparently taking a donation from an unperson is enough to make you an unperson as well these days.
- acdha 7y agoYou mean breaking institutional policy and covering it up doesn’t get you a gold watch and a laudatory press release?
- throwaway2048 7y agoBreaking policy, covering it up, and getting paid six digit amounts of money for it. But no, this is obviously some kind of witch hunt. /s Edit: six digit
- ta0987 7y agoTriple digit? Like, a hundred dollars?
- DonHopkins 7y agoEpstein paid Ito seven digits for his own personal investment fund, more than twice what he gave Media Lab.
- nonce42 7y agoSerious question: what does it mean that Epstein paid $1.2 million into Ito's personal investment fund? Is that an investment fund that Ito ran? Or did Ito get the money personally? I did some web searches a couple of days ago but couldn't find an explanation of this strange wording.
- DonHopkins 7y agoIt means Ito's investment fund was his main gig, and Media Lab was only a side hustle.
- i_am_nomad 7y agoThe Media Lab does present a yearly Disobedience Prize, so...
- elliekelly 7y agoUnrelated to MIT/Ito, your comment got me wondering whether there are any MBA-type case studies on how to foster a culture with the "right" amount of disobedience? Some amount of rules/processes are necessary but (in my little corner of the world at least) the most important skill is being able to gauge the risk/reward of bending or breaking them. I wonder if "disobedience" is a learned skill and whether we should be putting in more effort to teach it.
- AndrewBissell 7y agoFirst they came for the associates of child rapists, and I did not speak up because I did not associate with people who rape children.
- geofft 7y agoWhat service is there to thank Joi for? What did he do in his time at the Media Lab? This isn't about unpersons, this is about honesty.
- vl 7y agoAnd amusingly commenting about it downvotes you to hell, lol.
- bbanyc 7y agoI'm a Media Lab alum, sort of. There may be a master's degree with my name on it, but as I see it I basically flunked out. So I used to look back on it with bittersweet feelings of what I wasn't good enough to achieve. Now, though, after seeing what was really going on there... 30+ years of rigged demos, high-profile failures like OLPC, and maybe one or two useful inventions among the years of pointless impractical stuff that "looks cool", all funded by the largess of child molesters. Forget about a "leadership transition", the lab is unsalvageable. Burn it to the ground and salt the earth. Now, what to do with the two-year gap on my resume...
- corndoge 7y agoWhy a gap? If you did good work there and weren't aware of any wrongdoing what reason is there to strike it from your resume?
- bbanyc 7y agoI did lousy work there.
- geofft 7y agoYou did honest work there, which is more than can be said for many people with the Media Lab on their résumé. Don't measure the caliber of your work by the standards of scammers.
- bbanyc 7y agoIt was lousy by my standards. But I'd rather not discuss myself any further, this thread isn't about me.
- hnaccy 7y agoWhere can I read on the rigged demos?
- bbanyc 7y ago
- ilamont 7y agoThe first three names on that list are respected researchers and group heads who have been deeply involved in the day-to-day research of the lab, which includes mentoring/working with students and doctoral candidates, and dealing with lab sponsors.
- tempsy 7y agoIt’s actually a bit surprising as someone working in tech in SF how little I ever hear about the Media Lab. It just doesn’t seem like it’s something tech people here ever talk about, which maybe says something in of itself.
- milquetoastaf 7y agoThat is because very little tech comes out of there.
- smelendez 7y agoI'm curious: how much do you hear about MIT research in general? University research in general?
- paggle 7y agoDo you work for a startup? Startups generally don't employ a lot of university-research tech. The people who are reading current academic papers and incorporating them into the company's products are more likely to work at big companies than small ones.
- cosmic_quanta 7y agoThat statement surprises me. I have no experience of tech startup or big enterprise, and I would have expected large organizations to be more conservative. Granted, there may be a more research-oriented department in large orgs, but the boat is harder to sway.
- Konnstann 7y agoFrom what I've heard, it takes a lot of work to translate something out of academia into a business-viable product, and working in an academic setting I can see why. The code that I write is designed to work, but not necessarily to be performant or robust. Small team sizes and specific goals don't make for something easily transferable.
- ocschwar 7y agoJust shut the place down. The grants won't be coming in any more. Let's not pretend otherwise.
- bobosha 7y agoMIT CSAIL alum here, the Media lab wasn't exactly a bastion of fundamental, more known for whizz-bang demos and media interviews etc. I remember reading somewhere they were "all icing no cake" or the "MIT marketing agency". I hope this crisis refocuses it on breakthrough research,where its talent and resources could be very well spent.
- akhilcacharya 7y agoI agree, I hope more resources are spent at lower tier public institutions that also do important research.
- mhalle 7y agoSome of that was typical inter-departmental rivalry, even jealousy. The Media Lab had the big parties, the popular press attention, the visits by pop stars and celebs. And it had its audacious claims and characters. But mostly it had the money pouring in from sources untapped by other departments that functioned in the post-WWII MIT model of government funding. Personally, I'm grateful for full funding as a graduate students and the highest stipends on campus. But that's because the LCS and AI labs were doing different stuff from the Media Lab. They weren't comparable. Computation and networked devices were a tool towards something larger at the Media Lab. Yes, there were demos didn't work, or couldn't work. In Spatial Imaging, we couldn't fake physics, so we were somewhat immune. But with years of retrospect I look back fondly on some of those crazy "unworkable" ideas and see successful modern versions of them. Broadening one's vision is supposed to be part of academia; the Media Lab just approached it in a non-hardcore science MIT way. I also think the Media Lab changed CSAIL (when LCS and AI merged) much more than vice versa. Start with the Geary-designed building but look at the type of research and approach to funding. There's plenty of research at CSAIL that would have fit right at home at the ML in its old days, precisely because it is aimed at technology closer to end users and aligned with corporate sponsors and interests. Maybe that's because the world has changed; it's hard to interpret cause and effect. But the Media Lab was clearly a part of that. Disclaimer: left in 1997, not part of current controversy.
- klimenok1991 7y agoI've heard about this lab. They really have great merit!
- edmoffo 7y agoAnd why it matters to us? I'm not being sarcastic, I'm really interested. What will this event affect?