Genuine question: what exactly are the major contributions of MIT media lab? I will admit my priors might be unfair,y hostile and my reaction to current travails a little too schadenfreude-ish.
Conversation
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 tarnished
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