Back in ~2001-2 one of my own mentors at U. Michigan went on a rant against Media Lab in one of our sessions. Among other things calling Negroponte “a fool” (not the full insult... the source would be too guessable if I quoted exactly).
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Another mentor went on a (IMO less well-founded) rant against the robotics lab, calling Rod Brooks a “charlatan” (this was before Taleb copyrighted that particular insult).
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Something you may not know if you haven’t been in academia. Many highly reputed non-MIT academics at other top univs hate MIT for a very specific reason: their tendency to hire their own PhD alumni, often right after they finish. This inbreeding explicitly flouts a strong norm.
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Most univs have a policy of not hiring their own grads until they’ve worked elsewhere first. There’s a bias in favor of cross-pollination. Though there’s lots of mutual respect between star academics at MIT and other univs, as an institution, it’s in the doghouse for this.
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Mentioning this for context. With other univs in trouble, there will at least be gestures at wagon-circling by all peer univs, even as they move to poach stars. With MIT, the knives may be out more openly. I do think the inbreeding culture helped create the Epstein shitshow.
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Also doesn’t help that MIT has had a history of dismissing external criticism of its culture as mere envy
Well, I hope there’s no lasting damage from this or genuine talented innocents with no complicity having careers ruined because the Media Lab brand is tarnishedShow this thread
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This was a good question, so I looked it up. It seems like a lot of its research got spun off into private companies, which is a thing now, but they also made MPEG-4 SA and femtophotgraphy
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Media_Lab … I’m just looking at this page, kind of confused by all the overlap and synergy and what have you
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Have you heard of One Laptop Per Child? (The $100 laptop for kids in developing countries that never really went anywhere) That was supposed to be the breakthrough project.
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More succinctly, the Media Lab is MIT's startup exec training program. You work there to get experience with trying to make big, kooky ideas happen. (And to get experience with rationalizing away your failure at it.)
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