Ask HN: What is Lex Fridman's association with MIT? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is Lex Fridman's association with MIT?

12 pointschirau7 comments

Is he staff? Is he a professor? Did he attend MIT? None of those things check out.

He made a video on this (https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZlnRlYvPvbs) where he explains he is a research scientist at MIT, but was only active from 2015 to 2020 when he switched focus to his podcast.

He published 15 first author papers during that time period: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=wZH_N7cAAAAJ

His research group at MIT: https://lids.mit.edu/people/research-staff

See: https://old.reddit.com/r/mit/comments/1m2ewe5/what_standing_...

TL;DR: He is officially listed on MIT site as research scientist, has research published in association with MIT and also did some teaching. However, he does not have any prominence in campus beyond being a media personality and his connection to MIT, while real, is generally considered to be oversold for what it is. Furthermore, Fridman's alma mater is Drexel, not MIT.

He taught classes and and was in charge of their online deep learning materials for a while at deeplearning.mit.edu, back when the idea of universities putting materials online was still very new and cutting edge. A lot of his video lectures are still on his channel.

Ah good to know. Is he permanent staff or he did this as a guest lecturer or something?

no, Lex has barely any connection to MIT. He taught (only once) a January community class, that’s all. If you want to get the full picture, I recommend watching this video: https://youtu.be/Z1Ua1hVRtdE

This is not accurate, you can look up the fact that he was a paid research scientist. Why are you using a poorly sourced youtube video to inform an opinion that you then repeat without doing any research?

Don't people feel embarrassed by being this easily swayed?

Lex gets a lot of hate, probably mainly for political reasons and the way he manages his public persona. However not many people can argue with the fact he has probably the best collection of programmer interview/podcasts out there. If that's what you're into you probably won't find anything better:

e.g.

Carmack Brian Kernighan Gosling Guido DHH Demis Bjarne

List it endless, and something to be celebrated I think.

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