4 ms·

Unpopular opinion, most of MIT's research claims are preposterous and can be safely ignored. Their undergraduate education is quite good, but the research outpu

by ipsum2 3y ago

Unpopular opinion, most of MIT's research claims are preposterous and can be safely ignored. Their undergraduate education is quite good, but the research output is quite shoddy. The only exception is their computational photography group (Fredo Durand) is pretty legit.

sashank_1509 3y ago
No their research is much better than most. In my field of Robotics, Russ Tedrake, Alberto Rodriguez regularly get out impactful work (and I have a disdain for most work especially the kind Google does). I think they kind of lost out in Deep Learning to Berkeley and Stanford but they’re slowly building their expertise in it (frankly most of Academia doesn’t compare to industry outputs in Deep Learning so I don’t think it’s that big a deal)
- ipsum2 3y ago
  I agree that Russ Tedrake is great, I've watched his online lectures on underactuated robotics.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  > No their research is much better than most. Yeah, so good they were extensively faking their research and demos for a "personal food computer"...and even selling the fucking things to unsuspecting schools. Literally snake oil scamming. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=MIT+media+lab+grow+box+scam https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=MIT+med... Then there's your robotics team, backed by millions of dollars in free products and "consulting" (ie doing work for them) in sponsorship by defense contractors...beaten by a bunch of high school kids who raided a BoatUSA store and Home Depot to build an underwater robot with bilge pumps and a bunch of PVC pipe. The most exciting thing to come out of MIT Media Lab in two decades is an alarm clock wrapped in carpet that rolls off your nightstand when it goes off. MIT is a defense industry thinktank masquerading as a university.
  - sashank_1509 3y ago
    Sadly scams happen in every school, and I think it may only increase in academia moving forward but what’s the issue with their robotics team? Russ’s student Scott later went on to make Atlas (Boston Dynamics Humanoid) backflip. They were the first to come up with a backflipping quadruped. Alberto’s team won the Amazon pick and place challenge (also demonstrated a robot playing Jenga). Recently Pulkit showed how to rotate any arbitrary object with a dexterous robotic arm. I’d honestly find it hard to name universities better than MITs at robotics
causi 3y ago
If you Ctrl+F "patent" on an article about a technological breakthrough and get no results you can go ahead and close the window. It's not going to be relevant to your life for at least a decade if ever.
lofatdairy 3y ago
MIT's research output is certainly top notch, but the blame for this breathiness is squarely on the institution's communication office and whoever directs them to constantly put out such fluffy pieces. FWIW they're not the only institution with that particular problem, and it clearly does well to boost their prestige with the general public.
turnsout 3y ago
I wonder how much of this is due to the fact that the Media Lab sells access to corporations? They need to make their research and patent portfolio seem utterly transformative to justify the hefty subscription fee.
EthanHeilman 3y ago
MIT doesn't have research claims, it has professors and graduate students who do research. As an elite institution that is hungry for research grant dollars, it attracts top researchers that often do excellent research but not always. What human being would even be qualified to judge the research output of a large research university across all fields? A research university is an umbrella under which hundreds of independent teams perform research. You can do journal metrics, but those have a long latency, you are measuring performance 2 to 10 years in the past, and such metrics are not without bias.

by ipsum2 3y ago

sashank_1509 3y ago

No their research is much better than most. In my field of Robotics, Russ Tedrake, Alberto Rodriguez regularly get out impactful work (and I have a disdain for most work especially the kind Google does). I think they kind of lost out in Deep Learning to Berkeley and Stanford but they’re slowly building their expertise in it (frankly most of Academia doesn’t compare to industry outputs in Deep Learning so I don’t think it’s that big a deal)

ipsum2 3y ago
I agree that Russ Tedrake is great, I've watched his online lectures on underactuated robotics.
KennyBlanken 3y ago
> No their research is much better than most. Yeah, so good they were extensively faking their research and demos for a "personal food computer"...and even selling the fucking things to unsuspecting schools. Literally snake oil scamming. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=MIT+media+lab+grow+box+scam https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=MIT+med... Then there's your robotics team, backed by millions of dollars in free products and "consulting" (ie doing work for them) in sponsorship by defense contractors...beaten by a bunch of high school kids who raided a BoatUSA store and Home Depot to build an underwater robot with bilge pumps and a bunch of PVC pipe. The most exciting thing to come out of MIT Media Lab in two decades is an alarm clock wrapped in carpet that rolls off your nightstand when it goes off. MIT is a defense industry thinktank masquerading as a university.
- sashank_1509 3y ago
  Sadly scams happen in every school, and I think it may only increase in academia moving forward but what’s the issue with their robotics team? Russ’s student Scott later went on to make Atlas (Boston Dynamics Humanoid) backflip. They were the first to come up with a backflipping quadruped. Alberto’s team won the Amazon pick and place challenge (also demonstrated a robot playing Jenga). Recently Pulkit showed how to rotate any arbitrary object with a dexterous robotic arm. I’d honestly find it hard to name universities better than MITs at robotics

causi 3y ago

If you Ctrl+F "patent" on an article about a technological breakthrough and get no results you can go ahead and close the window. It's not going to be relevant to your life for at least a decade if ever.

lofatdairy 3y ago

MIT's research output is certainly top notch, but the blame for this breathiness is squarely on the institution's communication office and whoever directs them to constantly put out such fluffy pieces. FWIW they're not the only institution with that particular problem, and it clearly does well to boost their prestige with the general public.

turnsout 3y ago

I wonder how much of this is due to the fact that the Media Lab sells access to corporations? They need to make their research and patent portfolio seem utterly transformative to justify the hefty subscription fee.

EthanHeilman 3y ago

MIT doesn't have research claims, it has professors and graduate students who do research. As an elite institution that is hungry for research grant dollars, it attracts top researchers that often do excellent research but not always. What human being would even be qualified to judge the research output of a large research university across all fields? A research university is an umbrella under which hundreds of independent teams perform research. You can do journal metrics, but those have a long latency, you are measuring performance 2 to 10 years in the past, and such metrics are not without bias.