Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe the problem is that the science won't work and they're trying to spin it otherwise.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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
[1]: utreexo: a dynamic accumulator for bitcoin state 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The career consequences are also weirdly mixed. Some places seem to recognize that, along with your area of specialization, getting a PhD also involves a fair amount of project management, writing, etc skills. Other places (or even different people at the same place), seem to think it's a glaring red flag that you can't "get real work done" because you sit around all day in a smoking jacket, thinking. (I think that's mostly bunk--academia moves fast these days, but that sentiment is nevertheless not uncommon).
And, if anyone has actual advice on monetizing a comp/neuro PhD, I'm all ears :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's a pretty weird thing flex about too. 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.
That may be true, but Negroponte was proselytizing streaming media back in the early 90s, long before anything like Spotify or Netflix were actually practical. Did all this hot air have any effect? I have no idea. But from where I was sitting, he was definitely pushing hard for something that others were not at the time.
Also, the first music recommendation service I ever heard of was started at the Media Lab. It was called Ringo, and you'd email it a list of your favorite bands, and it would then email you back recommendations for other music you might like. Ringo was implemented using some sort of statistical correlation amongst other people's lists of favorite bands.
Ringo was eventually spun off into a company called Firefly which ran a music community website that used this technology. It didn't do so well, though, and was eventually bought by Microsoft, which shut down the website about a year later.
> Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?
Sure, but I don't think that doing it very well is. I mean they typically do an okay job, but I've yet to find one that just blows me away with its ability to find music for me that I will love.
Yes, I'm introduced to some good new music this way. But I also have to listen to a lot of dreck too.
#1 is "It must have all of the music", which is really a lawyer problem, not an engineering problem.
(#2-#11 are just variations of "No no, I mean all the music", "Does it have really old music, like X?" "What about really niche music like Y?" "Oh, oh, what about Z? I bet it doesn't have Z.")
Well, maybe that's why they generally are not so great.
On the other hand, Pandora has traditionally existed with playing music that you'll like, but didn't explicitly select, as its reason for existence. Maybe that's why it seems to do a better job at this than other streaming services.
That must be why Spotify constantly fills my once useful “discover weekly” feed with what I would describe as “Ambient Indian Buddhist Trip-Hop”. Not really what I wanted at all. Though this week it seems to be “Ambient Irish Bagpipe”, which is also not at all what I wanted.
So, no... I think Spotify has a long ways to go to learn how to give me what I want...
[0] http://the.echonest.com/pressreleases/spotify-acquires-echo-...
Recommendations and turning that into useful products (like auto generated playlists, mood playlists, upcoming talent, etc) are a huge draw to Spotify and creates a high bar for new competitors (including Apple Music).
Didn't the Music Genome Project / Pandora do this half a decade before Spotify?
An example I used to use with Brian was that Bad Religion and NOFX sound similar. However, fans of one of those bands weren't often fans of the other. In this model, people have a need for an amount of that sound and a social connection, NOT a need for more and more and more of that sound.
Another diff is that Pandora used human music experts where EN used machine listening. They have some overlap, and some differences, but obv the machine listening is offline.
I'd say it be hard to convince anyone that Spotify has had any material impact on our culture...but here we are. Music (sure); the internet (sure); smart phones connecting us wirelessly to the internet (sure); a single music streaming app with countless competitors (I have heard the name Spotify, but never used it, and yet I still stream music everyday...just don't see any impact on our culture)
There were a ton of music recommendations available at the time. Every music service had them: Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Last.fm, Mog, iTunes, Grooveshark... Echo Nest's weren't even that good. I don't think they had song level recommendations iirc.
The explanation made sense to me and would support your point of view, but sadly I don't know if it's actually true as I heard it from someone not actually working for Spotify.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That quote made me look up who Ted Nelson was. His most notable project that I see is Xanadu which Wired described as "the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing". Started in 1960, it didn't ship a working version until 2014.
I don't disagree that the Media Lab often overhypes things. But you need to be able to sell your ideas and get people excited about them to have an impact on the world. That involves being positive and having genuine excitement for the potential of something which today might be very hacky. I'm convinced this positivity is a lot of what makes Silicon Valley work.
A long time after Xanadu was founded, a contractor at CERN put together a basic, very imperfect way of publishing and connecting research papers on the computer networks called the World Wide Web. The Xanadu team said he stole their ideas and it was a "bizarre structure created by arbitrary initiatives of varied people and it has a terrible programming language". Tim Berners-Lee just kept shipping code and getting people to join his vision of the future and so today his WWW is what we're all using.
This is true. But there's a notional dial I think about. It's labeled "effort distribution". The left end says "substance" and the right end says "hype".
I've come to accept that 0% hype is a setting that mostly doesn't work. You need to make some people aware of your work, or you'll never get word of mouth. So let's say 5%. And really, you have to go higher than that, because you need to compete some with other people's hype. So maybe 10%?
The trouble is that hype is an arms race. So if the Media Lab is hoovering up money by overhyping things, then a) that money is being pulled from more substance-focused efforts, and b) to compete, now everybody has to burn more time on hype. Except funders, of course, who have to burn more time and money hoping to see through hype.
I can almost accept this in commerce, where we burn hundreds of billions of dollars per year on this arms race via advertising, PR, etc. But it makes me especially sad to see it happening in research.
I dunno, given that marketing is almost certainly overhyping marketing the amount of human effort wasted on this is kind of depressing too
If you talk like you're the hottest thing since sliced cheese in some places, you're looked upon as an arrogant braggart; if you don't in other places, it is assumed you are completely incompetent.
It saddens me that he doesn't get the recognition he deserves.
He wrote a couple of very influential books on what computing would be as early as the sixties. Very notable people have gone on record saying he was one of the most important inspirations for their work: Alan Kay, Tim Berners Lee, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and many others.
It's difficult to pin point his precise contributions, because he's all over the place, but his contributions are many.
He coined the terms, but didn't invent the concepts. Memex was much more important in that regard.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/in-se...
Oh FFS. This is Hacker News. And you had to look up who Ted Nelson is?? He thought up 90% of how you spend your time today, and he did it in the 60s.
Yeah, he had a big problem shipping. And we now know how big a mistake that was. But nevertheless Ted Nelson is a god.
His criticisms are fair and well thought out, and I definitely agree with him in this case, both his high praise of Ted and his books and other work, and his criticism of him for not joining the party the rest of the wide world is having on the real web, as deeply flawed as it is:
https://eagereyes.org/influences/ben-shneiderman
>Ted Nelson’s clever and innovative Computer Lib (1974) book and other writings demonstrated what truly innovative thinking was like. I’ve had the chance to meet Ted occasionally and am constantly impressed by his innovative thinking, but I am among those who wish he would link himself more closely to practical realities. Maybe that is too pedestrian of me, but it reflects my desire to be innovative while also having an impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines
>Computer Lib/Dream Machines is a 1974 book by Ted Nelson, printed as a two-front-cover paperback to indicate its "intertwingled" nature. Originally self-published by Nelson, it was republished with a foreword by Stewart Brand in 1987 by Microsoft Press.
Ben Shneiderman is quite positive and excellent at explaining and sharing and selling his impactful ideas, which are based on empirical research and user testing. (For example, Berners-Lee used his recommended light blue colors for links, which user studies demonstrated had the best balance of visibility without disrupting reading.)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/ben/about.html
>The direct manipulation concepts led Ben Shneiderman and his students to develop the interface for the hyperlink. Originally called "embedded menus" empirical evaluations appeared in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies in January 1986 and in the Communications of the ACM in April 1986. These projects led to the commercially successful Hyperties hypermedia system, which was produced by Cognetics Corp., Princeton Junction, NJ. Hyperties was used to produce the world's first electronic journal, the July 1988 issue of the Communications of the ACM. The ACM sold 4000+ copies under the title Hypertext on Hypertext.
>Hypertext on Hypertext: World’s first electronic journal for CACM, July 1988
>This electronic journal was cited in Tim Berners-Lee's Spring 1989 manifesto http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html for the web as the source of the "hot spots" or links idea. Berners-Lee even used our recommended light blue colors for links, which our user studies demonstrated had the best balance of visibility without disrupting reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#History
>In a series of books and articles published from 1964 through 1980, Nelson transposed Bush's concept of automated cross-referencing into the computer context, made it applicable to specific text strings rather than whole pages, generalized it from a local desk-sized machine to a theoretical proprietary worldwide computer network, and advocated the creation of such a network. Though Nelson's Xanadu Corporation was eventually funded by Autodesk in the 1980s, it never created this proprietary public-access network. Meanwhile, working independently, a team led by Douglas Engelbart (with Jeff Rulifson as chief programmer) was the first to implement the hyperlink concept for scrolling within a single document (1966), and soon after for connecting between paragraphs within separate documents (1968), with NLS. Ben Shneiderman working with graduate student Dan Ostroff designed and implemented the highlighted link in the HyperTIES system in 1983. HyperTIES was used to produce the world's first electronic journal, the July 1988 Communications of ACM, which was cited as the source for the link concept in Tim Berners-Lee's Spring 1989 manifesto for the Web. In 1988, Ben Shneiderman and Greg Kearsley used HyperTIES to publish "Hypertext Hands-On!", the world's first electronic book.
Here's more I wrote about Xanadu a long time ago, after reviewing the open source code (Smalltalk machine translated to C++!) that they released in 1999:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224154
>I think his biggest problem is that he refuses to collaborate with other people, or build on top of current technology. He's had a lot of great important inspirational ideas, but his implementation of those ideas didn't go anywhere, he's angry and bitter, and he hasn't bothered re-implementing them with any of the "inferior technologies" that he rejects.
>Back in 1999, project Xanadu released their source code as open source. It was a classic example of "open sourcing" something that was never going to ship otherwise, and that nobody could actually use or improve, just to get some attention ("open source" was a huge fad at the time).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/08/27/web_precursor_xanadu...
>Register believe it or not factoid: Nelson's book Computer Lib was at one point published by Microsoft Press. Oh yes. ®
>They originally wrote Xanadu in Smalltalk, then implemented a Smalltalk to C++ compiler, and finally they released the machine generated output of that compiler, which was unreadable and practically useless. It completely missed the point and purpose of "open source software".
>I looked at the code when it was released in 1999 and wrote up some initial reactions that Dave Winer asked me to post to his UserLand Frontier discussion group:
http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010163....
http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010164....
http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010165....
http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010166....
http://static.userland.com/userlanddiscussarchive/msg010167....
>A few excerpts (remember I wrote this in 1999 so some of the examples are dated):
[continued in old hn thread here:]
Negroponte himself has always been a politician, a hypester, and a sleaze. His one true innovation was in fundraising – he was able to get industries that weren՚t used to funding research (eg the newspapers) to pony up for industry consortia. This was, maybe, better than the usual DoD funding that kept the AI lab alive, but it came with constraints of its own, including trying to impose IP agreements on the graduate students that made it difficult to open-source software. And of course in later days (I was mercifully gone by then) the creative approach to fundraising ran into even more serious issues with Jeffrey Epstein.
I՚d say evaluations of the Media Lab as an institution should be done separately from evaluations of any particular program or researcher who may have passed through there, because while the institution has some fundamentally broken aspects, there has been a lot of good work done there.
To take media lab seriously is to miss the point. They aren’t supposed to be serious! If i may coin a term, they’re not even doing blue sky, they’re doing crack-of-dawn. 99% of what they think about will turn out to be a funny shadow on the wall from the laundry hamper that looked cool for a minute until the room brightened up.
There’s nothing wrong with that per se, though we do have a narrative around funding right now that discourages silliness.
Media Lab falls over when they try to sing the serious song instead of their true one, and often falls over quite hard. They should not have to try, but such is the way of the world right now.
† ...prototypes of single components of ecosystems that don’t exist, usually.
Unfortunately, funding long-shots is really hard. I was going to write "in the present environment", but then I realized that was too specific. It doesn't really matter where the money is coming from. Funding long shots is fundamentally hard, whether it's from private investment, government, commercial, or whatever else you can think of. But it's still a good idea to put a small portion of the research resources into those long shots.
(Now, it may be the case that the Media Lab is a bad place to fund your longshot, but I don't know enough to evaluate that.)
My first job in industry outside academia was as a programmer in the 'Advanced Techniques Department' (a.k.a. Toy Shop) of a traditional UK engineering company. We were quite often incorporated into the agenda of senior VIP visits, and we were instructed to focus on the innovative aspects of what we did. I realised later that the demos were actually great training for me as well, giving me insights into communicating with non-technical executives. I also got to work with European partner research groups in industry (spells in Denmark and Germany), which was also excellent experience.
Incidentally, the ATD had much better tooling for AI research (Lisp and a small fleet of Lisp machines) than I'd used for research at Uni (C / Unix). I was also introduced to proper software engineering discipline. My productivity (in terms of demo'd systems / capabilities) was much higher than it had been as a postgrad, which I quickly came to realise had been undisciplined hacking.
[edit - refined the argument a bit]
The Media Lab brought together a diversity of nontraditional tech interests and capabilities in one place to explore how cutting edge ideas in how we interact with information might disrupt everyday life in artful ways, creating cool demos to titillate the masses and foment fear in the hearts of competitors.
And it largely worked, for the first 15 years or so, anyway. But eventually, Being Digital (or WiReD) wasn't all that disruptive or cool any more, and the bloom was off the rose.
ie. go down promising areas, end up with no significant inferences and a lot of utile effort, and in very rare cases, make breakthrough contributions.
The key difference being that the things Media labs work on is usually in areas with underdefined academic landscapes, which makes it hard to make any significant progress.
Media labs is not the frontier of academic research that some make it out to be. Rather, it is just like other insignificant academic labs, in that they mostly produce duds. Media labs is just higher risk and higher reward.
However, the amount of media hype they generate definitely belies the amount of significant progress it produces.
The day of my high school visit, the campus was plastered with posters for "The Asbestos Cork Award." http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/asbestos-cork-award.html
Which is still progress for the research community, but not something that's exciting.
I won't say there's absolutely nothing gimmicky about CSAIL. Maybe the parent was more sophisticated than the tour's target demographic. But I also question how much depth someone's perspective could have if it's based on a tour they got in high school.
Second, it's quite conceivable actual (interesting) research things were and are happening in CSAIL.
To clarify, since this apparently was not obvious:
What I am saying is that basically whatever research and interesting things were being done was pretty much hidden behind a dog and pony show (and some robots and bragging about whatever architect designed the building), and that the marketing front was too slick and central for its own good. It didn't come across as a place for "hackers" (in the MIT sense, though they mentioned "hacking" plenty of times to tout the school) or even just as a place for someone who might want to learn about AI. Instead it came across as a place with a lot of resource for the marketing budget.
(So the impression that things at MIT might be the result of unusually successful marketing more than anything else doesn't surprise me.)
Seeing more whiteboards and coding would have helped, honestly.
My guess is most high schoolers probably do want to see fancy buildings and robots. There’s no beakers with smoke or explosions (hopefully) happening in a computer science department, so it sounds like they’re doing what they think is their best to appeal to a younger audience. I’m sorry it wasn’t the right marketing message for you, but if you wanted to understand at a deeper level what they were doing there’s no lack of information on the department webpage if you go explore the actual research groups and papers.
From my perspective, MIT truly is an amazing and special place filled with fabulous minds and ample resources. But it’s not for everyone.
I was a high school kid with dial up internet that I had to ask permission to use and computer time that was rationed (not trying to portray this as a hardship - it wasn't). While I was the one kid in my class who enjoyed programming a graphing calculator, it's not like I was super "internet native," and liking programming already didn't mean that I knew it was computer science, or that it would have occurred to me to presume I shouldn't take the way things were presented at face value. I was a somewhat sheltered kid.
The point that MIT had a pretty significant marketing angle doesn't seem like it should be that wild. Even (what I think is) your website is pretty marketing-centric:
> "My work has been used by millions in 185+ countries, been shown in over 7 musueums world-wide, and has been covered by PBS, NPR, BBC, The Alantic, and more."
...and I'm not trying to say that MIT hasn't done groundbreaking research.
Also from (what I think is) your website:
> "I've been on a computer daily since I received my first Mac at age 5 in 1986."
Keep in mind that that's not common, or at least wasn't, even into the 2000s.
Of course my personal website about my professional work is marketing. What's wrong with that? It's all true. It's important to market yourself, whether you're a biologist seeking grants, a philosopher seeking impact, or a university department seeking stature. That's how the world works. You need to tell people why they should care about you, otherwise you're just a forgotten soul in a world with billions of souls.
That I've used a computer since the early 80s wasn't common I think is a good thing, despite being made fun of for it all throughout my childhood. I think it has framed many of my perspectives in life, including an ultimate desire to get a PhD from the Media Lab and attend MIT. How is any of this relevant here?
I'm not lumping CSAIL and ML together, I'm ascribing common aspects to the way things at MIT get hyped, marketed, promoted, and portrayed, and pointing out that even if there's a nucleus of whatever is really being done that is significant, it's kept under a thick shell of a modern PR/marketing engine and fundraising apparatus. I'm suggesting that aspects of things across the institution might have similarities, because nearly everything these days pretty much has the same similarities. And that you could see it coming ever a dozen years ago as this aspect of marketing schlock isn't just centric to MIT.
It's the whole modern world, where every university has named institutes funded by donor dalliances, where every startup has been mentioned in the Washington Post, New York Times, NBC, and everywhere else, even though the banners usually don't link through. And where those mentions get inserted by professional networks where you know or even pay somebody who knows the right person to get the name drop for you (I've witnessed this) so that whatever flavor of the month some startup is pushing can get just the right nudge to take off, or at least get VC. It's kind of like TED like Talks and everything else positive, vacuous, and modern: that the world will be revolutionized by finding the perfect news feed algorithm, just like in another era snake oil would cure all ills.
It should hardly be surprising that ML happens when everything everywhere operates in the same way. It just had worse luck because its patron was Epstein instead of or not just Bezos or Bill Gates or whatever other person or entity with money to burn, and because its leader was ironically unusually adept at navigating the modern schlock culture.
Of course there are real people doing real and amazing work underneath this humongous and self-sustaining shell (and sometimes they break through enough for us to notice). Maybe you are or were one of them. But trying to tell is usually kind of like trying to look through a periscope that's filled with trick mirrors, and is part of the way it sometimes feels like the world is on the verge of descent into ruin.
So that was what I was originally getting at in a much less exhausting and overstated way.
What I also was addressing is that your responses to my comments implied a number of things that I think weren't realistic or germane.
For example, the implication that teenage me could just disabuse myself of whatever "mistaken" notions I got from my visit to MIT by exploring a department web page that in general I would barely have known about nor had much chance to access.
Or that because my experience wasn't your experience it's "wrong," even though it didn't really intersect a ton with what a graduate student might encounter.
When I referred to your website mention of getting a Mac at age 5, I wasn't meaning that having a computer was bad. What I was attempting to imply is that your comments assume an amount of convenience and access that didn't exist, and I was pointing out that your experience wasn't normative despite your presumption.
The only reason for the comment about being a bit sheltered is I think a certain type of background would have understood the game already: as you say "it's important to market yourself," but I've always despised self-marketing anyway.
I wish I'd gone there - but I would have drowned, so perhaps it's more accurate to say "I wish I was the kind of person who would benefit from going to MIT"
I used to feel dumb and waste time trying to figure things out, but then I decided that if I wouldn't get something quickly enough, that's because it was badly presented, and I had better discard it and move on. This approach saved me both much ego and time. (This can be read as a joke, but I'm mostly serious. I also use it when I design: I keep reworking things until they feel as easy to grasp as possible, and then only I can start to really build on top of them.)
As an interaction designer I cannot stress how right you are about this and that it is no joke at all. There's a seven-year old comment here on HN[0] that really drove home the importance of looking beyond the tech-savvy bubble that we live in for me:
> I look at UI changes in a totally different way now. My saw me come online on Skype, so she called me. There's an ocean between us currently. She said she called me because she was writing an email to me, but couldn't find the Send button, so didn't know how to send it. Either it made her feel stupid or frustrated, or she felt so sad that she couldn't send an email to me that she had spent some time writing, or whatever, but she started crying. She was crying because she couldn't find the Send button in gmail.
It's fine to be proud of our ability to navigate technology, but to let that become a form of gatekeeping due to carelessness is terrible. Whenever I'm designing something now I try to think of my retired parents and wonder "will they be confused by this?" as a basic smell-test. If an interface makes my users feel intimidated rather than empowered, I have failed as a designer.
However.
Balanced against that is the reality that those same users are often the most entitled about it when something breaks. Tears to jeers in an instant.
So I don't know.
Especially because a lot of interface changes that confuse the latter group are really, really hard to justify beyond "fashion", while genuinely causing problems for them, whereas with the former group it's often an annoyance that they know how to work around that is nevertheless blown up to epic proportions, like Sayre's Law in action but for the graphic design of an interface.
I wish Media lab refocuses in enormous resources & talent on advancing science, and significantly dial-down the show-biz aspects of the Media Lab.
It'd have been great if Pranav had researched a completely new modality of recognizing gestures, using Wi-Fi signals for example, or EMG - and that would have been befitting of an MIT Ph.D!
My 2 cents worth.
True to his roots, the guy was pretty good at promoting his work (although, having worked on the system he was developing at that time for a bit, I highly doubt the outcome of his project is as good as he made them look like) and he always made sure to get his work featured one way or another in media (be it University publication, local newspapers and through non-profit media channels).
I’m not surprised Nicholas had a hard time defining media, as that was the active question in the 70s that is still driving the lab now in 2020. What is media? What does it touch and encompass? What are the forms of it still unexplored? There are plenty of important books on many aspects of media, so to expect an easy definition from an academic is silly, particularly when it seemingly must fit your film-oriented framework.
He’s seemingly forgetting that the lab has several hundred more people at any one time... all of which are doing their own vision to try and invent the future in their own way. The Media Lab just provides a space for like minds to explore. To focus on the fundraising is to miss the point of the lab, which is who is there and what they attempt to do during their tenure. When your goal is to invent the future that’s 10-20 years out, you’ll get a heavy mix of output... some silly, some tedious, and some genius.
Mixing in a rant about the definition of interfaces and that you should have replaced Raskin is both disrespectful to Raskin and his genius, and has all the hallmarks of a “get off my lawn” style argument. There’s no teeth to it, not all of computing can or should be like film (what’s film like about satellites, networking, or data mining?), and it just takes away from the rest of the argument.
I’d also like to note that in my experience working at Apple, no one has ever advocated to make things more complicated so you’ll need a nearby expert (or for any other reason). This smells of conjecture that’s so far removed from the internal realities that I’m disappointing it’s made it to the front page of HN.
Correct.
> Don't hold people to a higher standard than you hold yourself
I disagree. Of course it's best to practice what you preach. But failing that, if you can't or won't reform yourself (and Ted obviously won't; old dog, new tricks, etc) being accurate in your criticism of other people is better than saying nothing, which in turn is better than defending the bad behavior of others.
Charlatans calling out other charlatans is a net good for society.
Bill Lowe of IBM fame on Ted; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kasu0BhRFGo
A zigzag demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yFcJXBMGQQ
Finally, the man is 82, and deserving of respect, not some flippant, inaccurate, badly argued and frankly idiotic comment.
I tried here: http://xanadu.com/xuspViewer.html
I got this file: http://xanadu.com/xuspD9y,2013 which is a .zip file. So it's ~7years old, Windows only (though full of _MACOSX files). Keyboard only. No installer. No source available. Described as "spent several years trying to refactor it, but it's beyond fixing"
But yeah it does run on my laptop, at least! Any other versions out there?
The page for the Xanadu demo a sibling comment mentions says "The enthusiastic and talented programmer, Rob Smith, of Manchester England, did a beautiful job combining a lot of our ideas" but "Unfortunately this made it a very complicated package, eventually too tangled to improve further, and Rob had to get on to other things. John Ohno and Jonathan Kopetz, in Connecticut, spent several years trying to refactor it, but it's beyond fixing" [2]. I read this as 1) someone implemented a demo for Ted, 2) some other people tried to fix it but gave up, but 3) there's no sign of Ted actually doing any of the work.
If there's proof Ted has actually implemented his own ideas in the past, I'll retract my criticism and refrain from posting it further. I certainly don't argue that the man has been influential, in any case!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software) [2] http://xanadu.com/xuspViewer.html
For instance, he was insisting on ASCII only, byte addressed implementation of a cross referencing system with me in 2014 for the Xanadu implementation you mentioned. I couldn't convince him that multibyte encoding systems were worth considering or that offsets would change leading to fundamental data inconsistencies, thus corrupting formats...the rabbit hole gets deep. He gets very opinionated on details that don't matter and frankly don't work.
Thus it could only ever be a demo because you can't just feed open formats from the open internet it in any dynamic organic way. Everything would have to be curated, filtered, and babysat. That's not memex, that's some digital form of Pearson publishing with some proprietary e-reading system. Which is fine, but TBLs W3 system of intentionally leaving things open ended so every step becomes a potential platform for the next is so much dramatically better then just a cathedral cross referential monolith hybrid of hypercard and pdf. The brilliance of TBL is the W3 is half assed in just the right ways to make it not yet another unused visual language or mind map format. Should more be done? Sure, of course.
You may think it sounds absurd that Ted thinks there will be manual publishing under some private company's direction in the new format and not automated machine transliteration, I agree, it sounds like an archaic museum piece at the living computer museum in Seattle and not a future oriented system of thought. Well here we are anyway.
He needs to cede ground and intentionally leave pieces open ended so that other groups, in other cultures, with other priorities can fit in their specialized pieces into the puzzle. He apparently is still unwilling.
He's a brilliant philosopher but a classically toxic engineer. Usually that second group is full of people with bad ideas. His are undoubtedly revolutionary and profound, but the delegation of other thought systems to other humans and then interacting with them is like Drucker management 101 and he's just not onboard.
Also, without going into detail Andrew is a backstabbing ass. I hope he reads this and I'll state that publicly.
PS: In case Ted sees this (he probably still doesn't browse hn, but he gets forwarded things), I love you, you know this. You know my criticisms comes from a desire to make the acts as revolutionary as the thought and I want it to happen as much as you do. Hope to hear from you and hope all is well.
Which is not to say that selling visions doesn't have a useful place in the world.
I was tempted to laugh it off and dismiss him as just an envious nutcase, but then I realized something: his vision actually did have a lot of neat ideas in it. I came to the conclusion that Ted Nelson is a creative thinker, who had been way ahead of his time in certain ways. To me, it would be a mistake to not listen to him at all. It would also be a mistake to listen without a huge amount of skepticism.
Surely once the number of hyperlinks grew past the thousand mark (in 1991?), their further exponential growth made it clear that the manual curation of link semantics of any kind was hopelessly infeasible. Some 30 years hence, I'm surprised such windmills are still tilted at.
I think Ted Nelson is one of those people whose main effects are through their influence on others, rather than through what they directly produce themselves.
This was rambling and smelled of bitterness. I especially didn’t like his suggestion that he “could have been” Jef Raskin because their viewpoints were “essentially the same” or whatever. Really?
And while I’m on the topic of Baumbach movies, there’s a scene in the Squid and the whale where the kid gets in trouble for performing a Pink Floyd song at a high school talent show and claiming it as his own. When he’s rightly brought to task for it, he says something like “I could have written it, it’s a simple song” to which he is told “but you didn’t” (paraphrasing, it’s been a while). There’s an echo of that here too.
"If you describe something as hokum, you think it is nonsense. " [0]
[0]https://www.collinsdictionary.com/es/diccionario/ingles/hoku...
Another recent case: the University of Central Florida is the news this morning for their research institute professors running a "grants for PhD" quid-pro-quo program where grant funders were receiving PhDs in exchange for continued funding. Other students funded by these grants were writing the grant-funders' theses.
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2020/01/27/ucf-facul...
Maybe Xanadu as envisioned would have been better than the web we have now, but what we have as ostensible working proof of that isn't incredibly convincing. Okay, I could link to any text on another web page, not just text with "anchor" links, and the text I linked to would be highlighted. That's nice, but is it essential? And I can transclude text from any other page, which is coo, but man, Nelson seems to stubbornly ignore the ramifications -- or perhaps think commerce and law will rearrange itself suitably to accommodate his vision. "Publishers of original content are free to require payment, or not"; what's the mechanism? What if I just don't want you to transclude text from my document, or only want to allow transcluding certain parts? How are EDLs updated when transcluded documents change? How come, after fifty years, these fundamental questions are still answered with lines like "[Page and document logic] is defined by the data structure, which we will publish when ready"? Has anyone associated with Xanadu considered even basic HTML 2.0-level presentation aspects like tables, images and fonts?
I can't help but think Ted Nelson is the archetypal poster child for "the perfect is the enemy of the good." He's not the Jef Raskin of Apple because, at the end of the day, Raskin was willing to work with other people and make compromises to get some of his vision out the door. Xanadu's failure -- and by all practical measures, it is indeed a failure -- isn't due to the MIT Media Lab, or Tim Berners-Lee, or Apple, or Microsoft, or its variously brilliant-slash-flaky development teams. It's because they never. Ever. Shipped.
And, yes, the mandatory identity for all users sounds like a potential privacy nightmare.
"Ted Nelson: For 30 years, MIT Media Lab has used hype and hokum to raise money"
This title is taken from the first sentence of the video description, edited to fit the character limit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Landsberg
I agree 100% with Ted's take on self revealing user interfaces:
>Now, I happen to be in the school of Jeff Raskin, you know. As I said, my interface slogan was "Making things look right, feel good, and come across clearly." And if I hadn't snubbed Jobs and Woz and, uh, what's his name at PC '76, I might have been the Jeff Raskin of Apple, instead of Jeff Raskin. Because essentially, Jeff Raskin and I have the same point: making things look clean, and simple, and self revealing. That's a term I got from Klaus Landsberg (sp?) by the way. The term "self revealing". The term "intuitive" is stupid. Because, is a mouse "intuitive"? You look at it, and oooh, oooh, oooh. But the moment you see it work, it has revealed itself. So it's "self revealing", is the term. Pac-Man is another very nice example of a "self revealing" piece of software. I've often used it as an example of how software ought to work. Because you learn the rules within three quarters, putting three quarters into the machine. That was then. And could, after then, gradually pick up on other aspects. Whereas, it is in the interest of companies like Microsoft, and alas now Apple, to make things entangling and unclear, because that way you become committed to them. Like Microsoft Word. There has to be a Microsoft Word expert in your office in order to do all the dingy little things that people want to do: formatting text.
That’s the perfect term to describe how self revealing pie menus support rehearsal: by popping up to lead the way when you click without moving, and then follow you when you mouse ahead after clicking, and finally get out of your way when you gesture quickly without pausing.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-design-and-implementation...
>The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus
>They’re Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing.
>Originally published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991.
>For the novice, pie menus are easy because they are a self-revealing gestural interface: They show what you can do and direct you how to do it. By clicking and popping up a pie menu, looking at the labels, moving the cursor in the desired direction, then clicking to make a selection, you learn the menu and practice the gesture to “mark ahead” (“mouse ahead” in the case of a mouse, “wave ahead” in the case of a dataglove). With a little practice, it becomes quite easy to mark ahead even through nested pie menus.
>For the expert, they’re efficient because — without even looking — you can move in any direction, and mark ahead so fast that the menu doesn’t even pop up. Only when used more slowly like a traditional menu, does a pie menu pop up on the screen, to reveal the available selections.
>Most importantly, novices soon become experts, because every time you select from a pie menu, you practice the motion to mark ahead, so you naturally learn to do it by feel! As Jaron Lanier of VPL Research has remarked, “The mind may forget, but the body remembers.” Pie menus take advantage of the body’s ability to remember muscle motion and direction, even when the mind has forgotten the corresponding symbolic labels.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
>Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective
>By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018.
>Pie menus should support an important technique called “Mouse Ahead Display Preemption”. Pie menus either lead, follow, or get out of the way. When you don’t know them, they lead you. When you are familiar with them, they follow. And when you’re really familiar with them, they get out of the way, you don’t see them. Unless you stop. And in which case, it then pops up the whole tree.