MIT 24-Hour Challenge
mit24hourchallenge.mightycause.com
mit24hourchallenge.mightycause.com
I'm a member of the MIT community for over a quarter century (including right now). There are a lot of things one can do to help MIT, but giving money is NOT one of them. It actively harms the Institute to have more.
MIT's endowment stands at $25 million per faculty member. More money leads to worse behavior. This is one of those cases where there's plenty of money, and less would be more -- lead to better research, better teaching, and less fraud (which is now overrunning the Institute).
There is financial fraud at the top. It's really easy to skim off the $25B. I'm not too worried about that.
What worries me more is widespread research fraud. Hiring rewards high-impact research, and not high-integrity research. I do have visibility into a lot of research in the Institute, and about half of the high-profile results I see come out have had some level of fraud that I know about (at least as a typical person would define it), and I suspect far more that I don't know about.
Note that I chose my words carefully there. The caveats:
(1) Many things, if done carefully, aren't fraud in the prosecutable sense, but lead to bad science.
(2) Most results are low-profile results. I define "high-profile" as roughly the level to either make major press or to get a tenure-track job.
I had a position which gave me a lot of visibility into this stuff. I can talk about this in online forums, but in real life, I'm under legal agreements with the Institute which would make this kind of conversation impossible.
One of the first things which would need to happen for me to trust MIT research at all is the elimination of NDA / non-disparage gag agreements.
Step 1: Download the MIT Epstein transparency report. http://factfindingjan2020.mit.edu/
Step 2: Go to archive.org, and pull up Epstein foundation web site photos. See MIT faculty on sex island.
Step 3: Try to find those names in the transparency report.
Many more MIT faculty flew to sex island.
No press did due diligence here. Literally the only people who got thrown under the bus were the honest ones who came forward, and ones who were dead.
MIT delayed until the story was no longer hot, and released a boring 60+ page report, so the press apparently didn't even bother reading it.
https://www.wired.com/story/dirty-money-and-bad-science-at-m...
Neither Harvard nor MIT represent "the very crust of talent" either.
DEI initiatives and legacy applicants make up a significant fraction of their admissions.
But it won't be because there's an "if (legacy_p) admit_chance++;" in their process.
* - https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/just-to-be-clear-we-do...
Also, don't forget that Susan Hockfield never referred her dean of admissions at MIT to the attorney general's office to face prosecution on wire fraud charges after it was discovered that she had fabricated a medical degree from a medical school that she had never attended on her resume.
You have a much higher degree of faith in the ability for humans to cooperate and never defect than I do.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/07/mit-gets-a-140m-anonymous-...
has the same chances of being accepted to MIT as yours or mine, regardless of test scores, then "I've got some property overlooking South Beach down on Martha's Vineyard that I'd like to sell you," as Alan Dershowitz recently told a news reporter :)
Regarding your degree of faith in the ability of humans to cooperate without ever defecting, let me refer you to this aptly entitled book:
https://www.amazon.com/SuperCooperators-Altruism-Evolution-O...
How do you think Harvard and MIT helped Mr. Jeffrey Epstein evade prosecution on the child sex-trafficking charges for over thirty years?
Type into your favorite search engine: "Martin Nowak Jeffrey Epstein Alan Dershowitz and the legal definition of a Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization" if you need a refresher.
And quite frankly, I could care less who MIT or Harvard accepts these days. Admission to these schools has become nothing more than a modern-day equivalent of the 'beauty pageants' of yesteryear ... for all of the nerdy teenagers who don't look good enough in a bathing suit for Mr. Epstein apparently:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/fbi-want...
I am honestly surprised there is no “2x match for the next 24 hours” or something similar (which again is completely unverifiable).
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-041sc-probabilistic-systems-an...
I just gave a little to the OCW Challenge.
If you'd like to support OCW, you can support to the Consortium: https://www.oeglobal.org/about-us/history-of-oeg/
What a way to throw away a strong decade old-brand.
My understanding was that they were doing the open coursework thing because it was "the right thing to do" and doesn't truly undermine their selection and certification process. If that's the case it shouldn't be profitable and the college should be fully paying for it without donations. This makes it seem more like some independent body that needs funding to survive
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-univer...