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Comment by xhkkffbf | Hacker News Reader

Could I ask you to enumerate, now that we've had the distance of time, just what went wrong? As best I can tell, Ito wasn't guilty of doing rogue fundraising. The President of the University signed off -- literally -- on the gifts.

The other folks who were angry struck me as particularly odd. The best was the visiting researcher who announced that he wasn't coming back after his contract was over -- and pretended that he was somehow quitting or making a statement or virtue signaling.

So can you explain what I'm missing?

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Well, Joi Ito came forward, apologized, and showed remorse, so he got canned. Seth Lloyd came forward, apologized, and showed extreme remorse, so he got severely disciplined. All the folks who went to Epstein's island and partook of the girls didn't even get mentioned in the "Factfinding report."

The sin seems to be coming forward and apologizing.

I know I'll get down-voted for this by MIT fanbois, but if you'd like to find photos of MIT faculty on Epstein's island, you'll find at least a half-dozen on archive.org for Epstein's various charities.

MIT CSAIL shut down its mailing list because someone had the gall to raise the issue of Minsky, not so much because Minsky did anything wrong (he probably didn't), but because Minsky was conspicuously absent from Factfinding too. Have at it:

http://factfindingjan2020.mit.edu/

I have a lot of insider information, but I'm only mentioning things which are public record at this point. A lot of people did a lot of wrong. The only ones who were punished were the ones who came forward.

Stepping beyond public record, lots of NDAs and non-disparage agreements at MIT now... MIT is a cesspool of corruption these days. And yes, if you went to MIT and care about MIT, you should NOT be donating money. That leads to more corruption. You should be pushing for it to clean up, although it seems too late for that...

So the upper echelons of MIT are all-in on playing the shadowy political game.

Is there any hope for alumni + some combination of other interests to alter the dim future of a once proud organization?

Dunno. A possible set of steps:

1) Being able to connect and discuss openly.

Probably the largest community mailing list at MIT -- the ancient csail-related mailing list, whose roots date back to the AI Lab days is gone after a thread titled "What is CSAIL's stance on Marvin Minsky?" (Minsky was on Epstein's island once, and one of the Epstein girls was pressured to offer herself; by Minsky's wife's account, he didn't take her up on it). MIT killed the whole list -- probably a half-century old community mailing list with thousands of people. I'm not sure how to recover from that.

Keep in mind that MIT emails were also mined for evidence to cover up (also not a secret; just a buried open fact -- part of the "Factfinding" process was finding evidence and getting ahead of it, and MIT was straightforward that MIT private emails were now under surveillance -- and I presume they're still monitoring). I'm not sure how nasty MIT will get if people start organizing. Higher-ups are well-connected.

2) Letting folks know what's up.

Keep in mind that a lot of the MIT community trusts the administration implicitly. A lot of school pride. And public evidence is mixed.

3) Reform.

Ideally, across elite schools. These issues aren't unique to MIT. MIT is a leader in corruption, as it is in so many areas, but other schools are neck-and-neck, and others will follow. Working to block funding, pending transparency reforms. No more NDAs and non-disparage agreements. Make universities subject to FOIA-style requests. Implement open governance measures. Etc. Ideally, that would go for alumni donations, government grants, and foundation funding.

4) Providing a face-saving out.

Sad to say, lots of people at MIT illicitly made millions of dollars. They're powerful and connected. A direct fight is unlikely to be successful. They're less likely to block reforms they feel less threatened by.

Whether the future is dim or bright is hard to say. MIT has a massive endowment, and professors are very comfortable. My major concern is that we need an MIT-classic: a pre-brand-obsessed, low-key institute where nerds can nerd, build need things, do credible science, etc. Ideally, that'd be MIT again, post-reform. Less ideally, we'd take another institute and run with it. If all alumni donations went somewhere new, that'd be an option too: pick a school, and pending transparency and anti-corruption checks-and-balances, build it up.

But I don't really know if that would do it, or if that's reasonable. Thoughts?

Depending on how far up the ladder the people behind Epstein are, all education institutions in the US maybe are vulnerable as long as Washington has any control over them. Which would really mean every current and potential institution in the US would be at risk from asymmetrical shadowy maneuvering.

i.e. if there truly were folks pulling Epstein’s strings through the CIA/Mossad/etc., then they will do anything to preserve and expand their capabilities including tolerating a boundless amount of corruption within academia. Since it’s very likely they’ve already been intimidating federal judges, offing journalists, undermining NIST, undermining the NSF, etc., disrupting newMIT would be peanuts compared to that.

If all that turns out to be the case, the US won’t be able to support such a genuine organization without very powerful backers to shield it behind-the-scenes. Maybe if all the influential tech folks combined and really were motivated to resist those sorts of influences.

For complete protection from a motivated Epstein+ level of intrigue from Washington, I can only think of Russia and China, which aren’t very promising either. They can hardly be expected to be more open to intellectual freedom this century, in practice, unless there were some geopolitical goals they could achieve through it.

That leaves only a decentralized and anonymous option if you want to be able to completely ignore political maneuvering. Perhaps some sort of blockchain+ combined with some sort of trust network scoring to make anonymity workable.

A neutral middle power option with a minimal amount of careful maneuvering is also possible. Though of course Canada/Australia/Japan/Norway/Switzerland/etc. are not immune to these things, they certainly increase the bar, at least from forces outside their borders, such that with only a bit of precaution and vigilance situations like this can be avoided without calling in favors from power brokers. As middle sized countries they don’t have nearly as motivation to play these shadow games themselves.

In all likelihood a newMIT based in the US would need some seriously powerful backers to run proactive interference if the wrong crowd really wants to undermine it. Which suggests why current MIT may have fallen into the quagmire they’re in. In this light the decision makers at MIT, of those at any of the big research schools, are tragic actors; they have no hope without playing the same game, or reforming the whole of society.

I care less about national-level conspiracies and the deep government as I do about my alma mater.

Harvard, as far as I can tell, was pretty straightforward. MIT lied and covered up. Whatever dynamics apply to MIT certainly apply to Harvard.

That culture extends way beyond Epstein. If a well-connected researcher fakes research, everyone signs an NDA and moves on too. That has no national level dynamics.

I'd just like an honest MIT back. And I'd like to be able to trust all the elite schools. Yes, once in a while, man in black suits might sweep in and classify something, but that shouldn't be the modus operandi.

And in this case, I don't think MIT was nearly important enough to have been bullied by anyone. As far as I know, MIT was protecting its senior officials, not anyone else.

The key difference is that MIT had someone with decision making authority admit it to it on the record, i.e. Joi Ito, whereas Harvard did not. This is precisely what gave the whole Epstein debacle some fresh oxygen. In fact it may have been what tipped mostly vague conspiracy theories into a critical mass of undeniable reality.

Although there definitely were numerous folks at Harvard also doing dubious things they simply closed ranks and didn’t say anything substantial. They almost certainly are less straightforward than the MediaLab crowd, after all they have far more to lose since it was done directly under the school administration and not a semi-autonomous entity.

Doesn’t that seem like a very strong incentive for certain folks to do something to MIT? At the very least to discourage anyone at Harvard from getting funny ideas in their old age, and to encourage in the future immediate responses like Harvard and discourage another Ito when something like this happens again.

Because there probably are even more damaging things under wraps than the worst fantasies Epstein had, as another commenter alluded to with strange accounting anomalies of Defense research money in the several hundred million range, i.e that a significant percentage of the money going to MIT from the DoD was shady. If you extrapolate that to a nationwide scale, that’s a lot of billions going who knows where.

... I think you missed how this played out at Harvard. The Harvard administration -- exaggerating only a little bit -- said "Yes, we took a bunch of money from Epstein, yes we gave him an office, and by golly, we're not giving any of it back and if we had a mulligan, we'd do it all over again just the same way."

Of course, they used more erudite, PC language to say that, but that's in effect what Harvard did. Perhaps you might not like it, but it had the virtue of being honest.

They did pull back a little bit from that stance, upon taking flack for it, but at the end of the day, not a lot.

MIT, in contrast, bullied, covered-up, and intimidated.

It's a different type of corruption, but I prefer the open and honest Harvard type of corruption.

That’s what they admitted to. Harvard could have done worse and kept it under wraps, we won’t definitely know until someone does an Ito there too. In fact there are credible reasons to believe something even more dubious was going on there.

Think about the process of what giving anyone a nice office in one of the prime buildings at Harvard in that manner requires in that timeframe, what else it implies, and here’s the critical thing, without anyone else in that building or on that floor raising any concerns publicly.

It at the very least means all those concerns were intercepted privately before anyone could have aired the dirty laundry.

And do you know of anyone who could have gotten all that just by asking nicely, some smooth talking, a flight to an island, and a big cheque?

A named building maybe, nice press releases sure, an actual position complete with office, slot in the org. chart, and name plaque, in the academic bureaucracy of the most status conscious school in the world?

The one that ousted their own esteemed president, the former treasury secretary who got an AM and PhD at said school, for an off the cuff remark in a speech not long before?

Can just some millions be enough to motivate the decision makers at Harvard to do that?

Put another way, there are only a few, far more credible, folks who had setups even a fraction as cushy as Epstein had, at least on the record.

You sound like someone who understands how academia truly works. From your experience doesn’t that chain of events imply something more was involved?

Though of course the fact that BillG was acting as a secret intermediary for Epstein’s funds at MIT also really implies something more was involved there too and it implies that Ito still has some secrets and/or was used as a patsy. So in the end you may be correct.

Whatever force(s) powerful enough to motivate BillG to act like that may indeed make Harvard’s type more preferable, assuming the folks there were strong enough to resist what BillG could not.

The funky DoD accounting though... has profound implications nationwide.

It's possible, but I'm skeptical.

Giving someone a nice office doesn't take all that much. Unpaid "visiting scientist" or "research affiliate" positions aren't actually very hard to come by. It doesn't take more than one decision maker. I've had similar positions at several schools, mostly as a convenience, and all it takes is one prof to send an email or fill out a one-pager form (depending on the school). Office space is largely a matter of availability. If it's scarce in a lab, you're not getting it. If it's plentiful, well, I've had random offices at universities too.

I know plenty of people with such positions at MIT with minimal academic backgrounds. The general arrangement was that a professor wanted something done. Someone was willing to do it for free, usually because it was interesting and fun. Professor signed a form. In one case, this was a random person more-or-less off-the-street (at MIT).

Harvard is also broken up into silos; it's more like a loose confederation of schools than a unified university. That makes things like this even easier, since only one place needs to agree.

Most of Harvard seems to take their motto of veritas pretty seriously, still. That doesn't mean they don't keep secrets -- they do -- but I haven't seen them openly lie much. Their corruption is different; it's more about building out a political power base.

As far as I know -- although this is really quite third hand -- Larry Summers was an explicit, planned takedown. Harvard politics are... complex.

You're not getting downvoted by me!

>Ito wasn't guilty of doing rogue fundraising

He sort of was. I don't remember all the details but he apparently deliberately obscured where the money was coming from.

>The President of the University signed off

As I recall, he did sign a routine thank you letter but it was a committee of three people in treasurer's office who actually OKd it. Two had already left and the EVP of finance resigned to do a pursue other interests sort of thing, presumably because he saw the writing on the wall.

I would guess it was a very near thing for Reif but he didn't quite have his fingerprints on it.

>The President of the University signed off -- literally -- on the gifts.

They were both wrong in doing so. And the idea that Reif was a naïve first year college president does not make sense (an argument used to gaslight the MIT community). He'd spent years in positions of bureaucratic power at MIT and is masterful at playing Institute politics.

Mr. Reif allegedly was promoted to president of MIT for his role as then-provost of MIT in covering up a several hundred million dollar fraud in missile defense research at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which some observers believe led Susan Hockfield to unexpectedly resign from her position as president of MIT when the university was forced to enter into a sealed settlement agreement with MIT Prof. Ted Postol under the threat of facing potential criminal obstruction of justice charges after a closed-door investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee was opened and FBI agents were placed on notice.

The idea that Mr. Reif was somehow a "naive" rookie in this game is pure nonsense ... he's earned his stripes for running a very well-greased protection racket, whether he's masterminding the cover-up of a massive fraud in the defense contracting business or laundering money from the sex-trafficking one.

Ito knew all about money laundering - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/business/mit-media-lab-je...

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