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>I think it's been and continues to be a net positive for the planet. Can you name something concrete that the place has actually done? From where I'm sitting,

>I think it's been and continues to be a net positive for the planet. Can you name something concrete that the place has actually done? From where I'm sitting, it has worked on a lot of trendy bullshit which never amounted to anything, but got curiously good press. For example, that ridiculously twee and obviously fraudulent claim to have built "personal food computers" is a recent nothingburger that comes to mind. https://www.businessinsider.com/mit-media-lab-personal-food-computers-dont-work-fake-staff-say-2019-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/mit-media-lab-personal-food-...

ghc 7y ago
I’ll admit that doppler radar, noise canceling headphones, RSA cryptography and GPS might all be “trendy”, but they’re only a few of the many, many inventions that came out of MIT, mostly bankrolled by military funding.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  None of these are achievements of MIT media labs. Please respond to what I wrote.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    You'll have to give Gumby the courtesy of responding to what he wrote, first. He is clearly talking about "the institute". In the sentence you quoted, "I think it's been and continues to be a net positive for the planet", the pronoun "it" refers to "the institute (i.e. the faculty and staff)" in the previous sentence, consistent with "The Institute doesn't deserve your love" in the parent posting and "I love the institute" in the grandparent posting. It's 100% unambiguous that "the institute" he's talking about is "MIT" (that's what the middle "I" stands for: "institute"), not Media Lab, which didn't even exist when he joined MIT in 1982.
buescher 7y ago
I am quite amused by MIT having to make some kind of apology for Jeffrey Epstein, but: the Rad Lab series, unless you count that as curiously good press.
gumby 7y ago
> Can you name something concrete that the place has actually done? F MIT graduates, faculty and staff have earned quite a few Nobel and Turing prizes; half a dozen graduates have walked on the moon; the lead professor in my Unified class left to become secretary of the Air Force; she was replaced by the former head of NASA. Almost every or every department has contributed in fundamental ways to its respective field. From Chemistry to Electronics to Mechanical Engineering to Electrical Engineering to Economics to Physics...I think the modern world would be unrecognizable without MIT.
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  None of these are achievements of MIT media labs. Everyone knows that MIT the school, as opposed to Negroponte's pedo-blackmailer funded wank fest, has historically done some important things. If you were originally saying MIT the school is a net positive for humanity, that's not what I am asking for clarification on at all.
  - gumby 7y ago
    Sorry, “the institute” is MIT slang for MIT. The media lab is called the media lab and indeed many people at the institute view it with scorn and/or envy. The document under discussion was about the institute. Several interesting things came out of the media lab including mindstorms OTOH. Not in proportion perhaps to the amount of press, but the media lab was not funded from government grants by and large. Media lab emphasized demos, true, but in some ways I admired it, as the rest of the institute (a part from Architecture, wher the ML sits) but you know, everywhere else was good at burying things or assuming the technical detail was all that mattered.
    - scottlocklin 7y ago
      Got it; sorry for the confusion. I ask because media labs often annoyed me with the twee "look at the future" stuff that never really panned out. The "food computer" thing mentioned above being a particularly ridiculous recent example. I think it mostly annoys present day me in that I was taken in by this in the early 90s, when I was an avid reader of Mondo2k, Wired and the other kinds of publications Negroponte used to shill in. If the best thing that came out of the place since it was founded back in 85 is ... lego extensions... well, maybe people should stop funding them. I mean, Seymour Papert was pretty cool for his day, but he's dead.

ghc 7y ago

I’ll admit that doppler radar, noise canceling headphones, RSA cryptography and GPS might all be “trendy”, but they’re only a few of the many, many inventions that came out of MIT, mostly bankrolled by military funding.

scottlocklin 7y ago
None of these are achievements of MIT media labs. Please respond to what I wrote.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  You'll have to give Gumby the courtesy of responding to what he wrote, first. He is clearly talking about "the institute". In the sentence you quoted, "I think it's been and continues to be a net positive for the planet", the pronoun "it" refers to "the institute (i.e. the faculty and staff)" in the previous sentence, consistent with "The Institute doesn't deserve your love" in the parent posting and "I love the institute" in the grandparent posting. It's 100% unambiguous that "the institute" he's talking about is "MIT" (that's what the middle "I" stands for: "institute"), not Media Lab, which didn't even exist when he joined MIT in 1982.

buescher 7y ago

I am quite amused by MIT having to make some kind of apology for Jeffrey Epstein, but: the Rad Lab series, unless you count that as curiously good press.

gumby 7y ago

> Can you name something concrete that the place has actually done? F MIT graduates, faculty and staff have earned quite a few Nobel and Turing prizes; half a dozen graduates have walked on the moon; the lead professor in my Unified class left to become secretary of the Air Force; she was replaced by the former head of NASA. Almost every or every department has contributed in fundamental ways to its respective field. From Chemistry to Electronics to Mechanical Engineering to Electrical Engineering to Economics to Physics...I think the modern world would be unrecognizable without MIT.

scottlocklin 7y ago
None of these are achievements of MIT media labs. Everyone knows that MIT the school, as opposed to Negroponte's pedo-blackmailer funded wank fest, has historically done some important things. If you were originally saying MIT the school is a net positive for humanity, that's not what I am asking for clarification on at all.
- gumby 7y ago
  Sorry, “the institute” is MIT slang for MIT. The media lab is called the media lab and indeed many people at the institute view it with scorn and/or envy. The document under discussion was about the institute. Several interesting things came out of the media lab including mindstorms OTOH. Not in proportion perhaps to the amount of press, but the media lab was not funded from government grants by and large. Media lab emphasized demos, true, but in some ways I admired it, as the rest of the institute (a part from Architecture, wher the ML sits) but you know, everywhere else was good at burying things or assuming the technical detail was all that mattered.
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    Got it; sorry for the confusion. I ask because media labs often annoyed me with the twee "look at the future" stuff that never really panned out. The "food computer" thing mentioned above being a particularly ridiculous recent example. I think it mostly annoys present day me in that I was taken in by this in the early 90s, when I was an avid reader of Mondo2k, Wired and the other kinds of publications Negroponte used to shill in. If the best thing that came out of the place since it was founded back in 85 is ... lego extensions... well, maybe people should stop funding them. I mean, Seymour Papert was pretty cool for his day, but he's dead.