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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

MIT in general has degraded in quality for decades.

I knew an absolute idiot who got a PhD from the Media Lab for putting a motion sensor and servo motor in a toy bear so it waved at you when a coworker wanted to talk to you and coworkers could tell when you were in your office. A fucking PhD.

The MIT underwater robotics team - backed by defense contractors giving them access to all the latest and greatest toys - has lost to high school teams making their robots out of tupperware containers and bilge pumps.

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>a PhD from the Media Lab for putting a motion sensor and servo motor in a toy bear so it waved at you when a coworker wanted to talk to you

Part of the reason I declined a PhD scholarship back in my university days was that due to this kind of credential inflation, the value of a doctorate is steadily declining and there are far too few academic jobs to go around - most of the graduates I talked to were essentially forced out into industry, and if you're not specialising in something with real-world utility you've essentially wasted several years of your life while making yourself overqualified for lower-level jobs.

This agrees with my professional opinion of a lot of mathematics coming out of MIT, as of late, but I’m kind of afraid to say anything about it publicly. I wonder what happened? Is it because of decadence, or something else?

I would guess that once a school becomes "elite", the people that apply begin to aggressively optimize to win the competition to get in. Think weight lifting competitions. Sure, they may be the "strongest", but they border on useless in the real world. And that's being generous.

I worked at an MIT research lab for about 2 years after college. Thought I had landed my dream job, turned out to be one of the most disappointing experiences of my life.

Using figurines as avatars for remote workers seems like a pretty cool idea to me

I would buy that.

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