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Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

PLEASE don't do donate to MIT. MIT is overcapitalized, and this, in particular, is waaay overcapitalized in light of the super-sleazy sale of edX for $800M.

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).

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same for Wikipedia . They keep asking for money even though they clearly have enough and rely heavily on volunteers

Wait till you find out about the International Red Cross or American Red Cross. They definitely don't need your money.

Tell me more about the fraud that's overrunning the Institute. I'd like to dig into it more.

Check out the media lab epstein stuff

That's already well-known news. The above seems to imply research fraud, possibly tied to grants, which is now "overrunning the Institute" and I'd like to know more.

I personally know the open agriculture stuff was a joke, I got wrapped up in it and actually had several conversations and email exchanges with Caleb Harper (not in any shady or illegal way, I just sold kits of their open source food computer after seeing Caleb's TED talk, until I found out they didn't work, and never did, and don't provide any real benefit over something like an Aerogarden) https://www.wired.com/story/dirty-money-and-bad-science-at-m...

Broken link?

Sorry, here it is

https://www.wired.com/story/dirty-money-and-bad-science-at-m...

This shouldn't be a downvote.

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.

It's actually pretty hard to dig into it unless you're a member of the community, and even then.

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.

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