The problems with Oxman's dissertation are way worse than reported

Am I missing something or is there more than this single tweet that is essentially identical to the title?

Why should I care about this person's opinion?

Here's the thread for those without Twitter accounts:

(I don't care about typoes per se but in the context of the rest of the dissertation it's notable that it reads like the kind of typo that would be really weird to make if you were comfortable with math, or if you looked it over once before submitting.)

There are also things like random figures copypasta'd from papers from the 80's (happily, cited this time) that are never discussed or referred to in the main text.

Phase diagrams for metal alloys from other papers are presented without comment, in a dissertation that otherwise makes no mention of phase diagrams, alloys, or even the subject of metallurgy, excepting a brief and abrupt digression about samurai swords [!]

Similarly, there's an impressionistic and entirely verbal gloss of Riemannian manifolds and metric tensors that comes out of nowhere and disappears just as quickly. They are never mentioned again.

In one of the most technical passages of the work I found, which concerns, like, the vibe of constructing Voronoi diagrams on manifolds, Oxman seems to come close to suggesting that differential geometry might be a thing people could study. But the thought is quickly dropped.

Practically, it's not really a matter of forgetting a few punctuation marks (as I was led to believe). The cumulative effect of the volume of plagiarism and general disorganization of thought is that it's quite difficult to tell what Oxman wrote, let alone understood, at all.

So AFAICT there is basically no original technical content, and much to suggest that Oxman isn't well-acquainted enough with the fields she draws upon to even fake it convincingly.

(To be fair there are some photos of funky sculpture-type-things, and the aesthetic is consistent enough to make me believe that one unique individual actually did all of them rather than ransack google images. Let's assume it was Oxman.)

But after looking into this for five minutes, the plagiarism issue seems more like busting Al Capone for tax evasion.

The real issue is that there's just no there there, and if you read it with any technical background it feels like that scene from The Shining.

More, the issues with the dissertation are so clear and unignorable that you have to wonder what was going on with her committee during the years they were supervising her.

Like even if you cynically assume that her committee members farmed out the review process to F1-visa grad students, you have to think the grad student would immediately write back: "u sent wrong file?"

I mean, I did my doctorate at an institution rather less swanky than the Media Lab, and I'm pretty sure my committee would have just stopped talking to me if I turned in something like this.

Didn't imagine myself ever saying this but the sketchiness of the dissertation is actually more cut and dried than the whole "fashioning orbs for Jeffrey Epstein" thing, the latter of which at least had some kind of plausible deniability.

Anyway, if you wonder whether I'm being unfair in my characterization of the work and want to read it yourself, it's here: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/59192

But the defense that "it was a different time, man" is even more bizarre, because it wasn't.

I didn't grow up in a household with two professors, but in my mediocre public schools we got a plagiarism lecture at least once a year from such time as we were capable of committing it