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Comment by mepian | Hacker News Reader

I wonder whether the Media Lab is going to be shut down after the recent revelations, or the MIT administration is going to pretend that nothing happened.

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I believe Media Lab is more than a "lab", it's also a place where students can build their own degree.

Eric Drexler, the "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology" author, got his PhD at the MIT Media Lab.

>His Ph.D. work was the first doctoral degree on the topic of molecular nanotechnology

>nanotech/grey goo, space colonization, cryonics, super AI

>futurist thinktanks/institues and similar

Sounds like a good fit for media lab since it's all fluff.

>> nanotech/grey goo, space colonization, cryonics, super AI

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. All of the things on this list are desirable and somebody has to do research for us to ever achieve them. The problem still is people trying to misrepresent the state of the art, whether in academia or in the industry.

media lab has a motto "demo or die", i don't think that's conducive to research in any way

From afar, the Media Lab has always appeared to me personally to be a place where engineers who are not good at engineering and artists who are not good at art get to burn through cash at astounding rates.

I may be wrong.

lol this is around 1% of the projects going on at any given time in the Media Lab.

It says something that one of the most well known and highly-praised media lab projects is basically a sham. What does that say about the other 99% of projects that aren’t even worth mentioning?

I don't know about the other projects. To me, it says that the funding model has eaten the reason for the Lab existing.

Feeding the hype machine that generates donations is considered more important than the work (not to mention the truth-seeking function of academia) the donations are supposed to fund.

There needs to be some serious house-cleaning if they want to be considered an actual research lab of any repute. Ito was a problem, but he quite clearly was not the only one.

MIT grad here. This is just one more reason I have stopped giving money to the Institute.

Academic donation seeking is a much easier thing to disconnect from real world ROI than most businesses can get raising capital. And 99.9% of businesses are not the 5 unicorns you read about in the media.

I think to a certain extent that's actually fine. An academy should not be run as a corporation; I think that notion is part of what is causing problems.

What academia should not be divorced from is knowledge and truth seeking. I don't mean that in some wooly, idealistic sense: if that isn't the focus, you're hucksters and frauds, not academics.

Possibly that they aren't as overhyped and thus look less impressive.

They have been a major proponent of various overhyped blockchain projects. I don't claim to know everything they do but my image of MIT have already been tarnished long before the Epstein connection came to light.

I would like to point out that the Media lab isn't all of MIT. We do some really incredible research (LIGO, Black hole imaging, poverty research, to just name a few recent achievements). Incidentally, the media lab has a reputation within MIT as a place for often impractical ideas that never pass the demo stage. That said, the way in which a number of members of the MIT community (including outside the media lab) were associated with Epstein is troubling to say the least.

[ETA: a large number of media lab projects are still really good, as the other commenter mentioned]

Absolutely. My apologies if the comment above came across as disparaging to the whole institution. I come from academia myself and the MIT name still carries unparalleled prestige with it. But this only makes it more heartbreaking to see the brand diluted by a small yet highly visible section ran by a former nightclub owner.

Some Media Lab projects are quite real, like Scratch.

> What does that say about the other 99% of projects that aren’t even worth mentioning?

At least one other major project, the OLPC from media lab and the infamous Negroponte gang was a total failure. Negroponte was back in the news recently due to the whole Joi Ito-Jeffrey Epstein pedo funding debacle.

I don't think this was one of the most well-known or highly-praised projects before this scandal. Certainly I can think of at least 10-20 other projects from the same time that were more well-known to me.

But can you name a single one that wasn't TED talk friendly nonsense?

Ez: https://news.mit.edu/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213

Or most of the rest of the stuff from that group: http://cameraculture.media.mit.edu/research/

And most of the other 99% are vaporware and media hype, just like this one.

Source: I was there for the worst two years of my life.

And of the recent revelations? [0]

"Why MIT Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Jeffrey Epstein’s money"

[0] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/11/20860717/mit-me...

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