8 ms·

This is well known in academia and exist outside of Media Lab as well. For example, I asked a professor (not associated with the Media Lab) about using hype to

This is well known in academia and exist outside of Media Lab as well. For example, I asked a professor (not associated with the Media Lab) about using hype to get grants. He said: "It's just like the stock market right, money goes here, it goes there, it's all story telling. I have to tell stories too because if I don't, then other people will tell this story and get the money. But I think I can use it better than other people." This is a very "well-respected" Ivy League professor in applied machine learning. As for the Media Lab, they're really selling the image of technological progress. And Corporate entities find value in this exact image because they're just reselling it to their shareholders, many of whom are dumb money. But the image is required to attract idealistic and clueless grad students who'll sacrifice their lives and sanity to make demos. I know several people who graduated from the Media Lab with masters/doctorates, and they are all of this exact mold: taken captive by pipe dreams and their own delusions of what this stuff could do, while their advisors are churning through students and packaging new narratives.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
The parallels to SV, VCs, and the startup ecosystem are striking.
- xiaolingxiao 7y ago
  Yeah I think overt exploitation is what happens when you have a situation where there is very thin or no layer of management between the most savvy players of the game ( professors, founders or VCs ) and fresh meat ( engineers or grad students ). They're both situations where the predators walk freely amongst the prey and take as they please. Also SV was an extension of academic-military-industrial complex, and they both engage in high risk projects that don't necessarily pan out.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - CalChris 7y ago
    You should group founders with the engineers and grad students rather than with the VCs. We have to figure out a market opportunity and a product to fit it, seed that ourselves, eat ramen, pitch it, recruit for it and then make it and sell it. We do all that for well below market rate wages for a chance a big return. Moreover, founders get common stock, same as engineers. VCs get a management fee and a carry. They also invest some money into the fund. Their management fee de-risks them entirely. You can't group VCs and founders on one side and engineers on the other. It just doesn't make sense.
    - xiaolingxiao 7y ago
      Ok yeah fair. Some founders are better situated than others, but in general yeah most get the raw end of the deal.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      It depends on the founders. Arguably the most financially successful founders are marketing-led, not technology-led. And some are perfectly happy to set up low-to-zero prospect companies, raise millions through networking and confidence, spend the millions with a good chunk going on their own salary/expenses, apologise to everyone in a punchy yet apparently humble post-mortem when the idea fails, and then do it all again. In reality startup land is a scammer's paradise on all sides. Some people knowingly run a con, some are delusional, some are sincere but unlucky and/or lacking the skills/contacts/presentation to make a good idea work. All of the above can get funding, especially in boom times. So there's surprisingly little pressure to build an ethical, product-focussed, engineer-friendly, stable business with lasting potential, and plenty of reward for not doing so. It shouldn't be a surprise if there are people who take the bait - on any of the possible sides.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  In a capitalist system, the easiest things to raise money for are monuments to the wisdom of capitalists.
kanzure 7y ago
> I have to tell stories too because if I don't.... Sounds like reputation afforded to academia (professors) might be inappropriate. Besides, science shouldn't be judged by reputation but by fact and result. The idea of evaluating the quality of an idea by one's social standing is sort of odd... for someone who should be preaching science.
- apsanz 7y ago
  This is pretty idealistic. Humans use reputation to judge everything. Even if we could bend human nature in this one area, how would it work? Who is really in a position to judge cutting edge research? Only other good researchers can really understand and judge someone's research. How do you tell who the good researchers are without reputation? How do you know how much each person is contributing to each insight? You quickly see that the same group of people need to judge each other and then you are at the whim of social dynamics and bias of the group.
- bildung 7y ago
  This is what you get when you introduce market mechanisms into research institutions. If the researchers have to solicit external sources of finance, they effectively become (part time) sales people. As the financial sources are by definition external, the people behind them have no clue about the actual research. So what can the researchers do to close the sale, if the actual science won't work? They necessarily have to tell stories.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    > So what can the researchers do to close the sale, if the actual science won't work? Maybe the problem is that the science won't work and they're trying to spin it otherwise.
    - maccam94 7y ago
      Sometimes you have to spend resources before you can reach a conclusion, which is is a risk. People are always looking for low risk/high reward investments, and when they're unable to evaluate an investment for themselves they incentivize optimistic proposals.
jancsika 7y ago
Just to add another data point: I asked an Ivy League professor about hype and they said the exact opposite of your Ivy League professor. Anyway, that's certainly the hype part that your anecdote refers to. Now how about the hokum? Did your Ivy League professor draw a computer on a cardboard box and put a kid inside there? Or did they use it for a bona fide machine learning research project? I think those are fair questions as there's at least one story of a Media Lab project that misrepresented its technology and did not really perform the tasks which it claimed to have performed.
- xiaolingxiao 7y ago
  Hmm it's a bit more subtle than that. There are all kinds of ways to misrepresent progress, the simplest way is to pick bogus metrics. For example, all of machine-learning based dialog system work uses metrics that were designed for machine translation ( basically n-gram overlaps ), this is an example of a metric that you can improve on but is meaningless. So the resulting system is very much the dog-and-pony show variety. Or people who use simulations to train and test ML systems, and say the metrics get better but do not address the sim2real gap. > I asked an Ivy League professor about hype and they said the exact opposite of your Ivy League professor The context matters, I have heard the opposite response as well, from a professor I was working for, while he was doing just that: packaging narratives w/o regard to how well the methods actually work. The honest take came at a wine-and-cheese party from a professor I was not working for. There is a real conflict of interest here, and if people stand to gain by withholding information, they will do Just that.
- dkonofalski 7y ago
  Just curious but what's the exact opposite of those statements? That he hasn't had to convince anyone of their work in order to get money? Or that it isn't based on that but on results? As someone that doesn't live in that world, I have no idea what the "exact opposite" of that really is.
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    For research funding, the sweet spot is the flashiest idea that seems extremely likely to work. It’s hard to get grants to try something really out there, especially from the NIH or NSF; DARPA is a bit more adventurous. Pilot data helps with this, but those experiments cost money too, so one approach is to make the project sound almost, but not quite, obvious in light of existing work. At the same time, it’s also really hard to get funding to confirm something that everybody “knows”, even when the underlying data is actually not very convincing. These experiments need some hype.
EthanHeilman 7y ago
I see nothing wrong with professors communicating the value of what they are building as effectively as possible. If you believe a problem is an important problem to solve then you should work hard to convince other people it is important. >As for the Media Lab, they're really selling the image of technological progress. Disclaimer: I've worked with researchers at the DCI group in the media lab on hash function cryptanalysis. The media lab is made up of a large number of research teams doing very different stuff. It is unfair to just say "the media lab does X or operates like X". Look at the research from the DCI group at the media on zero knowledge proofs systems [0], hash-based accumulators [1], or work on Ring Signatures [2]. [0]: zk-sharks combining succinct verification and public-coin setup https://dci.mit.edu/zksharks https://dci.mit.edu/zksharks [1]: utreexo: a dynamic accumulator for bitcoin state https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/611.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/611.pdf [2]: It wasn't me! Repudiability and (Un)claimability of Ring Signatures https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/135.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/135.pdf
- xiaolingxiao 7y ago
  > I see nothing wrong with professors communicating the value of what they are building as effectively as possible. Oh for sure, the grad student get value out of it because there's someone established advocating their work. For people w/ no reputation and marketing know-how, being cross-selled like this is of value, in fact it's one of the primary value add of the PI. > The media lab is made up of a large number of research teams doing very different stuff. Yeah fair, wish I knew more about cryptography so I can comment. In general, I don't think narratives are "bad" per-se, or they are strictly less valuable than rigorous mathematically proven technical work. For example every nation has a shared myth/narrative right, and US's myth of freedom of thought and social equality encourage lots of people to try hard, which I think of as a good thing in general.
- appleflaxen 7y ago
  > The media lab is made up of a large number of research teams doing very different stuff. It is unfair to just say "the media lab does X or operates like X". Look at the research from the DCI group at the media on zero knowledge proofs systems [0], hash-based accumulators [1], or work on Ring Signatures [2]. I have no dog in the fight, but I feel like if any entity is branding itself as a discrete entity, then you take the lumps of the branding just as you take the brand recognition. If you're "part of the MIT Media lab", then this affects your reputation in the eyes of the public.
zaroth 7y ago
> I know several people who graduated from the Media Lab with masters/doctorates, and they are all of this exact mold: taken captive by pipe dreams and their own delusions of what this stuff could do, while their advisors are churning through students and packaging new narratives. I have a pretty hard time with the theory that Doctoral MIT graduates are an exploited underclass. Doctoral students everywhere are overworked and underpaid. Same as almost everyone, really. But the Doctoral students do get to walk away with, and heavily monetize that credential at the end of it. And if they are doing work on aspirational “pipe dreams” pursuing a dream of the future that doesn’t pan out? Rather than what, punting on the dream and getting back to the hard work of CRUD apps and monetizing clicks?
- mattkrause 7y ago
  > Doctoral students...heavily monetize that credential at the end of it. Ha! If only! To continue doing research, the usual next step is a postdoc (~$50k/yr). Industry positions pay better, but outside of ML, there aren't tons of them and biotech (for example, which the media lab does) salaries aren't crazy high. I'd bet that anyone with a PhD could have made more money with a masters degree and a switch to industry.
  - jvilk 7y ago
    > I'd bet that anyone with a PhD could have made more money with a masters degree and a switch to industry. This is common knowledge for those pursuing CS PhDs. You don't do it for the money. If you only care about money, a master's degree is what you want.
    - exdsq 7y ago
      A lot of jobs I have seen recently say a PhD is highly desirable while a Masters is essential. Obviously I don't suggest people start doing a PhD for the money, however I'm surprised to think that you can't out-earn your alternative self with a Masters seeing as the difference in study time is 2 years but you'd be entering industry as an 'expert'. Especially if you target your PhD at something like computational finance, autonomous vehicles, etc.
api 7y ago
A cousin of this is what one researcher in the field of evolutionary machine learning called "dullwashing" to me in a conversation about academic funding. If he wants to do some really interesting somewhat outside-the-box work, he often has to find some way to make it look incredibly dull and inside-the-box and incremental in order to convince some funding bureaucrat to fund it. Most money is dumb and flows in a herd-like manner into things that look superficially like things that have been successful in the past. This includes stock market money, government money, and yes even VC money. You often have to trick the world into funding genuinely interesting or productive work. Without a bit of marketing money will just chase the latest bubble or fad. It's like you have to save money from itself. If truly creative and productive people don't lay on the marketing, money will instead flow to charlatans who do... see also WeWork, Juicero, etc.
- panic 7y ago
  > Most money is dumb and flows in a herd-like manner into things that look superficially like things that have been successful in the past. This includes stock market money, government money, and yes even VC money. You often have to trick the world into funding genuinely interesting or productive work. The last few decades of US economic policy has been based on the idea that private investment is more effective than taxing and redistributing money. But as it turns out, it's not just the government that's dumb -- all large investors behave in this dumb, herd-like way. And at least governments are more comfortable spending money without expecting a return.
  - api 7y ago
    Yeah the supposed genius of private markets has been massively oversold. I really think the power of capitalism lies not in some magical ability of markets to make good decisions but in the freedom it affords to route around bad decisions and the bureaucracies and corporate institutions that make them. In a vertically integrated Soviet-style economy a single bad bureaucracy results in the total failure of that industry. It's not really possible to sidestep it; there is no "permission free innovation." In a free market those big dumb slugs still exist but it's at least possible for some people to go around them.
diydsp 7y ago
>they're really selling the image of technological progress. That's such a broad brushstroke. Consider, for example, Echo Nest's research in machine listening in Barry Vercoe's Music, Mind and Machine group. This all made it into Spotify when they acquired Echo Nest. His work led and pushed other researchers in the field at ISMIR, etc. Hard to downplay the impact of Spotify on our culture. This is not "hokum." And as I shoulder-surfed the whole thing, I can tell you it started out as a crazy dream. When Brian Whitman and Barry began it, CPU power was meager, GPUs were scarcely recognized as general computation aids. It was mostly about music similarity instead of social features. (I like to think I helped Brian think that way, egoist I am). Even storing 1,000,000 songs was once difficult. This was in the AJAX and perl days. But like Brian's daydream, many other projects there are daydreams. That's the point of the ML, to try the daydreams other people won't. Not to disrespect others for taking on research more likely to result in tangible results. In fact, that's very sane! So if you want to critique the place according to some personally-applied standards, that's great, that's your opinion, next.
- Chinjut 7y ago
  Spotify's impact on our culture is "People like to stream music. Here is a service that lets them do so.". You didn't need the Media Lab to come up with that idea, and indeed, it didn't.
  - Teever 7y ago
    Yeah OPs comment is some sort of idealistic historical revision that ignores the fact that there were a myriad of streaming services that predated Spotify. It's a pretty weird thing flex about too. Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?
    - SamBam 7y ago
      > Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy? No, I don't think so. Millions upon millions have been spent pouring money into recommendation engines (which is an advanced "based on preferences"). Companies like Netflix know that they can keep customers that much longer if they're good at finding the needles in the haystack for each specific customer, and they famously offered a million-dollar bounty to anyone that could improve their algorithm by even a few percentage points (and, just as famously, everyone recognized that it would be worth far more than a million dollars to them). Pandora tried to do it by creating a "music genome" for every single song in its database, with dozens of attributes per song, thus linking disparate songs though much more than just "genre." Nowadays it's pretty much "throw a massive database at a ML system, and pump out 'people who like these 10 songs tend to like this song'", but for a long time those systems were crappy. And, even now, its hard for those systems to find a balance between showing you something that matches what you've listened to, and playing you ten nearly-identical songs in a row.
vilhelm_s 7y ago
I guess it's not specific to academia either. Startups work exactly the same, they tell stories to investors to get grants, and are often staffed with idealistic people straight out of college.
netcan 7y ago
If you are funded by a grant process (or similar), you are shaped by it. The most common complaints form the inside are political games or PR games... like here. Either whoever has the best connections wins or whoever has the best (most?) image wins. Remember Banksy's shredder prank? He shredded a multi-million-$ drawing at the auction. Presumably this was some sort of angry gesture towards the art-buying world. I think it's the same sentiment Ted expresses here. A lot of researchers are idealistic, like many artists. They don't like "hype and hokum," and they take offence at how much influence PR has. It's cheapening. The value, potential or importance of research is being determined by a spokesman who doesn't understand (or care) about his own inaccuracies. The granter is obviously dumb too, judging by the dumb PR used to court them. Neither seem to care about truth. How is it possible that these dummies decide so much. I'm guessing Banksy hates that idiot art dealers and buyers decide the value of art. Them's the breaks though.
- catalogia 7y ago
  The guy who bought the painting prior to it being shredded decided to keep it, which was probably smart since that media stunt made that painting famous and doubtlessly more desirable than it was before being shredded. Maybe Banksy hates the guy for buying his art, or maybe Banksy did the buyer a favor. Also, the story of the shredder being prepared years in advance reeks of bullshit. And if that part of the story is bullshit, I can't help but question the rest.
  - netcan 7y ago
    Presumably, Banksy knew well that the stunt would increase the value of the drawing. So on some level, non-naivety is likely no matter what. That said, it's still a commentary on the "art world." The unidealistic ways & reasons art is bought and how the value of art works... contrast to the idealistic artist destroying his work rather than having it denigrated. It's also inevitably hypocritical because the artist is either benefiting from the whole hype and hokum or wishes to be. My guess is that the last part is why this is such a common navel-gazing motif in art. The heart at odds with itself. Idealists always struggle with all the hypocrisy, especially their own. Poor things.
  - 7y ago
darkmighty 7y ago
Research is, almost by necessity, based on "pipe dreams". If there's certainty of outcome it isn't research, and most likely doesn't belong in academia. Second, well, private investors give money to whoever they want. If they believed they'd get most out of their money by just following some academic metric like citation count or impact factor (and throwing money at them), that's what they'd likely be doing; I don't think this would work all that well for them, do you? For one it's very hard to come up with any objective metric that can't be gamed, distorted, etc. The Media Lab has a rich history of collaboration with industry and yes developing innovative products/ideas. They promote this history, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

The parallels to SV, VCs, and the startup ecosystem are striking.

xiaolingxiao 7y ago
Yeah I think overt exploitation is what happens when you have a situation where there is very thin or no layer of management between the most savvy players of the game ( professors, founders or VCs ) and fresh meat ( engineers or grad students ). They're both situations where the predators walk freely amongst the prey and take as they please. Also SV was an extension of academic-military-industrial complex, and they both engage in high risk projects that don't necessarily pan out.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- CalChris 7y ago
  You should group founders with the engineers and grad students rather than with the VCs. We have to figure out a market opportunity and a product to fit it, seed that ourselves, eat ramen, pitch it, recruit for it and then make it and sell it. We do all that for well below market rate wages for a chance a big return. Moreover, founders get common stock, same as engineers. VCs get a management fee and a carry. They also invest some money into the fund. Their management fee de-risks them entirely. You can't group VCs and founders on one side and engineers on the other. It just doesn't make sense.
  - xiaolingxiao 7y ago
    Ok yeah fair. Some founders are better situated than others, but in general yeah most get the raw end of the deal.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    It depends on the founders. Arguably the most financially successful founders are marketing-led, not technology-led. And some are perfectly happy to set up low-to-zero prospect companies, raise millions through networking and confidence, spend the millions with a good chunk going on their own salary/expenses, apologise to everyone in a punchy yet apparently humble post-mortem when the idea fails, and then do it all again. In reality startup land is a scammer's paradise on all sides. Some people knowingly run a con, some are delusional, some are sincere but unlucky and/or lacking the skills/contacts/presentation to make a good idea work. All of the above can get funding, especially in boom times. So there's surprisingly little pressure to build an ethical, product-focussed, engineer-friendly, stable business with lasting potential, and plenty of reward for not doing so. It shouldn't be a surprise if there are people who take the bait - on any of the possible sides.
smacktoward 7y ago
In a capitalist system, the easiest things to raise money for are monuments to the wisdom of capitalists.

kanzure 7y ago

> I have to tell stories too because if I don't.... Sounds like reputation afforded to academia (professors) might be inappropriate. Besides, science shouldn't be judged by reputation but by fact and result. The idea of evaluating the quality of an idea by one's social standing is sort of odd... for someone who should be preaching science.

apsanz 7y ago
This is pretty idealistic. Humans use reputation to judge everything. Even if we could bend human nature in this one area, how would it work? Who is really in a position to judge cutting edge research? Only other good researchers can really understand and judge someone's research. How do you tell who the good researchers are without reputation? How do you know how much each person is contributing to each insight? You quickly see that the same group of people need to judge each other and then you are at the whim of social dynamics and bias of the group.
bildung 7y ago
This is what you get when you introduce market mechanisms into research institutions. If the researchers have to solicit external sources of finance, they effectively become (part time) sales people. As the financial sources are by definition external, the people behind them have no clue about the actual research. So what can the researchers do to close the sale, if the actual science won't work? They necessarily have to tell stories.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  > So what can the researchers do to close the sale, if the actual science won't work? Maybe the problem is that the science won't work and they're trying to spin it otherwise.
  - maccam94 7y ago
    Sometimes you have to spend resources before you can reach a conclusion, which is is a risk. People are always looking for low risk/high reward investments, and when they're unable to evaluate an investment for themselves they incentivize optimistic proposals.

jancsika 7y ago

Just to add another data point: I asked an Ivy League professor about hype and they said the exact opposite of your Ivy League professor. Anyway, that's certainly the hype part that your anecdote refers to. Now how about the hokum? Did your Ivy League professor draw a computer on a cardboard box and put a kid inside there? Or did they use it for a bona fide machine learning research project? I think those are fair questions as there's at least one story of a Media Lab project that misrepresented its technology and did not really perform the tasks which it claimed to have performed.

xiaolingxiao 7y ago
Hmm it's a bit more subtle than that. There are all kinds of ways to misrepresent progress, the simplest way is to pick bogus metrics. For example, all of machine-learning based dialog system work uses metrics that were designed for machine translation ( basically n-gram overlaps ), this is an example of a metric that you can improve on but is meaningless. So the resulting system is very much the dog-and-pony show variety. Or people who use simulations to train and test ML systems, and say the metrics get better but do not address the sim2real gap. > I asked an Ivy League professor about hype and they said the exact opposite of your Ivy League professor The context matters, I have heard the opposite response as well, from a professor I was working for, while he was doing just that: packaging narratives w/o regard to how well the methods actually work. The honest take came at a wine-and-cheese party from a professor I was not working for. There is a real conflict of interest here, and if people stand to gain by withholding information, they will do Just that.
dkonofalski 7y ago
Just curious but what's the exact opposite of those statements? That he hasn't had to convince anyone of their work in order to get money? Or that it isn't based on that but on results? As someone that doesn't live in that world, I have no idea what the "exact opposite" of that really is.
- mattkrause 7y ago
  For research funding, the sweet spot is the flashiest idea that seems extremely likely to work. It’s hard to get grants to try something really out there, especially from the NIH or NSF; DARPA is a bit more adventurous. Pilot data helps with this, but those experiments cost money too, so one approach is to make the project sound almost, but not quite, obvious in light of existing work. At the same time, it’s also really hard to get funding to confirm something that everybody “knows”, even when the underlying data is actually not very convincing. These experiments need some hype.

EthanHeilman 7y ago

I see nothing wrong with professors communicating the value of what they are building as effectively as possible. If you believe a problem is an important problem to solve then you should work hard to convince other people it is important. >As for the Media Lab, they're really selling the image of technological progress. Disclaimer: I've worked with researchers at the DCI group in the media lab on hash function cryptanalysis. The media lab is made up of a large number of research teams doing very different stuff. It is unfair to just say "the media lab does X or operates like X". Look at the research from the DCI group at the media on zero knowledge proofs systems [0], hash-based accumulators [1], or work on Ring Signatures [2]. [0]: zk-sharks combining succinct verification and public-coin setup https://dci.mit.edu/zksharks https://dci.mit.edu/zksharks [1]: utreexo: a dynamic accumulator for bitcoin state https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/611.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/611.pdf [2]: It wasn't me! Repudiability and (Un)claimability of Ring Signatures https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/135.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/135.pdf

xiaolingxiao 7y ago
> I see nothing wrong with professors communicating the value of what they are building as effectively as possible. Oh for sure, the grad student get value out of it because there's someone established advocating their work. For people w/ no reputation and marketing know-how, being cross-selled like this is of value, in fact it's one of the primary value add of the PI. > The media lab is made up of a large number of research teams doing very different stuff. Yeah fair, wish I knew more about cryptography so I can comment. In general, I don't think narratives are "bad" per-se, or they are strictly less valuable than rigorous mathematically proven technical work. For example every nation has a shared myth/narrative right, and US's myth of freedom of thought and social equality encourage lots of people to try hard, which I think of as a good thing in general.
appleflaxen 7y ago
> The media lab is made up of a large number of research teams doing very different stuff. It is unfair to just say "the media lab does X or operates like X". Look at the research from the DCI group at the media on zero knowledge proofs systems [0], hash-based accumulators [1], or work on Ring Signatures [2]. I have no dog in the fight, but I feel like if any entity is branding itself as a discrete entity, then you take the lumps of the branding just as you take the brand recognition. If you're "part of the MIT Media lab", then this affects your reputation in the eyes of the public.

zaroth 7y ago

> I know several people who graduated from the Media Lab with masters/doctorates, and they are all of this exact mold: taken captive by pipe dreams and their own delusions of what this stuff could do, while their advisors are churning through students and packaging new narratives. I have a pretty hard time with the theory that Doctoral MIT graduates are an exploited underclass. Doctoral students everywhere are overworked and underpaid. Same as almost everyone, really. But the Doctoral students do get to walk away with, and heavily monetize that credential at the end of it. And if they are doing work on aspirational “pipe dreams” pursuing a dream of the future that doesn’t pan out? Rather than what, punting on the dream and getting back to the hard work of CRUD apps and monetizing clicks?

mattkrause 7y ago
> Doctoral students...heavily monetize that credential at the end of it. Ha! If only! To continue doing research, the usual next step is a postdoc (~$50k/yr). Industry positions pay better, but outside of ML, there aren't tons of them and biotech (for example, which the media lab does) salaries aren't crazy high. I'd bet that anyone with a PhD could have made more money with a masters degree and a switch to industry.
- jvilk 7y ago
  > I'd bet that anyone with a PhD could have made more money with a masters degree and a switch to industry. This is common knowledge for those pursuing CS PhDs. You don't do it for the money. If you only care about money, a master's degree is what you want.
  - exdsq 7y ago
    A lot of jobs I have seen recently say a PhD is highly desirable while a Masters is essential. Obviously I don't suggest people start doing a PhD for the money, however I'm surprised to think that you can't out-earn your alternative self with a Masters seeing as the difference in study time is 2 years but you'd be entering industry as an 'expert'. Especially if you target your PhD at something like computational finance, autonomous vehicles, etc.

api 7y ago

A cousin of this is what one researcher in the field of evolutionary machine learning called "dullwashing" to me in a conversation about academic funding. If he wants to do some really interesting somewhat outside-the-box work, he often has to find some way to make it look incredibly dull and inside-the-box and incremental in order to convince some funding bureaucrat to fund it. Most money is dumb and flows in a herd-like manner into things that look superficially like things that have been successful in the past. This includes stock market money, government money, and yes even VC money. You often have to trick the world into funding genuinely interesting or productive work. Without a bit of marketing money will just chase the latest bubble or fad. It's like you have to save money from itself. If truly creative and productive people don't lay on the marketing, money will instead flow to charlatans who do... see also WeWork, Juicero, etc.

panic 7y ago
> Most money is dumb and flows in a herd-like manner into things that look superficially like things that have been successful in the past. This includes stock market money, government money, and yes even VC money. You often have to trick the world into funding genuinely interesting or productive work. The last few decades of US economic policy has been based on the idea that private investment is more effective than taxing and redistributing money. But as it turns out, it's not just the government that's dumb -- all large investors behave in this dumb, herd-like way. And at least governments are more comfortable spending money without expecting a return.
- api 7y ago
  Yeah the supposed genius of private markets has been massively oversold. I really think the power of capitalism lies not in some magical ability of markets to make good decisions but in the freedom it affords to route around bad decisions and the bureaucracies and corporate institutions that make them. In a vertically integrated Soviet-style economy a single bad bureaucracy results in the total failure of that industry. It's not really possible to sidestep it; there is no "permission free innovation." In a free market those big dumb slugs still exist but it's at least possible for some people to go around them.

diydsp 7y ago

>they're really selling the image of technological progress. That's such a broad brushstroke. Consider, for example, Echo Nest's research in machine listening in Barry Vercoe's Music, Mind and Machine group. This all made it into Spotify when they acquired Echo Nest. His work led and pushed other researchers in the field at ISMIR, etc. Hard to downplay the impact of Spotify on our culture. This is not "hokum." And as I shoulder-surfed the whole thing, I can tell you it started out as a crazy dream. When Brian Whitman and Barry began it, CPU power was meager, GPUs were scarcely recognized as general computation aids. It was mostly about music similarity instead of social features. (I like to think I helped Brian think that way, egoist I am). Even storing 1,000,000 songs was once difficult. This was in the AJAX and perl days. But like Brian's daydream, many other projects there are daydreams. That's the point of the ML, to try the daydreams other people won't. Not to disrespect others for taking on research more likely to result in tangible results. In fact, that's very sane! So if you want to critique the place according to some personally-applied standards, that's great, that's your opinion, next.

Chinjut 7y ago
Spotify's impact on our culture is "People like to stream music. Here is a service that lets them do so.". You didn't need the Media Lab to come up with that idea, and indeed, it didn't.
- Teever 7y ago
  Yeah OPs comment is some sort of idealistic historical revision that ignores the fact that there were a myriad of streaming services that predated Spotify. It's a pretty weird thing flex about too. Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?
  - SamBam 7y ago
    > Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy? No, I don't think so. Millions upon millions have been spent pouring money into recommendation engines (which is an advanced "based on preferences"). Companies like Netflix know that they can keep customers that much longer if they're good at finding the needles in the haystack for each specific customer, and they famously offered a million-dollar bounty to anyone that could improve their algorithm by even a few percentage points (and, just as famously, everyone recognized that it would be worth far more than a million dollars to them). Pandora tried to do it by creating a "music genome" for every single song in its database, with dozens of attributes per song, thus linking disparate songs though much more than just "genre." Nowadays it's pretty much "throw a massive database at a ML system, and pump out 'people who like these 10 songs tend to like this song'", but for a long time those systems were crappy. And, even now, its hard for those systems to find a balance between showing you something that matches what you've listened to, and playing you ten nearly-identical songs in a row.

vilhelm_s 7y ago

I guess it's not specific to academia either. Startups work exactly the same, they tell stories to investors to get grants, and are often staffed with idealistic people straight out of college.

netcan 7y ago

If you are funded by a grant process (or similar), you are shaped by it. The most common complaints form the inside are political games or PR games... like here. Either whoever has the best connections wins or whoever has the best (most?) image wins. Remember Banksy's shredder prank? He shredded a multi-million-$ drawing at the auction. Presumably this was some sort of angry gesture towards the art-buying world. I think it's the same sentiment Ted expresses here. A lot of researchers are idealistic, like many artists. They don't like "hype and hokum," and they take offence at how much influence PR has. It's cheapening. The value, potential or importance of research is being determined by a spokesman who doesn't understand (or care) about his own inaccuracies. The granter is obviously dumb too, judging by the dumb PR used to court them. Neither seem to care about truth. How is it possible that these dummies decide so much. I'm guessing Banksy hates that idiot art dealers and buyers decide the value of art. Them's the breaks though.

catalogia 7y ago
The guy who bought the painting prior to it being shredded decided to keep it, which was probably smart since that media stunt made that painting famous and doubtlessly more desirable than it was before being shredded. Maybe Banksy hates the guy for buying his art, or maybe Banksy did the buyer a favor. Also, the story of the shredder being prepared years in advance reeks of bullshit. And if that part of the story is bullshit, I can't help but question the rest.
- netcan 7y ago
  Presumably, Banksy knew well that the stunt would increase the value of the drawing. So on some level, non-naivety is likely no matter what. That said, it's still a commentary on the "art world." The unidealistic ways & reasons art is bought and how the value of art works... contrast to the idealistic artist destroying his work rather than having it denigrated. It's also inevitably hypocritical because the artist is either benefiting from the whole hype and hokum or wishes to be. My guess is that the last part is why this is such a common navel-gazing motif in art. The heart at odds with itself. Idealists always struggle with all the hypocrisy, especially their own. Poor things.
- 7y ago

darkmighty 7y ago

Research is, almost by necessity, based on "pipe dreams". If there's certainty of outcome it isn't research, and most likely doesn't belong in academia. Second, well, private investors give money to whoever they want. If they believed they'd get most out of their money by just following some academic metric like citation count or impact factor (and throwing money at them), that's what they'd likely be doing; I don't think this would work all that well for them, do you? For one it's very hard to come up with any objective metric that can't be gamed, distorted, etc. The Media Lab has a rich history of collaboration with industry and yes developing innovative products/ideas. They promote this history, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.