I love the institute but I agree they really need to think hard about how it runs.
The past 30 years have been a continuous project in weaning the institute off being merely a very large government research lab.* IMHO this process has not been successful.
* with a small school bolted onto the side: the educational side of the institute is only 16% of the budget and is run at a small loss. This might explain their interest in Epstein.
The Institute doesn't deserve your love. It has a habit of not protecting young people in its own community. Now it's under fire for turning a blind eye to the abuse of young people by its donors.
Let the Institute burn. It brought this upon itself.
I must agree that the institute (i.e. the faculty and staff) mostly consider students a nuisance unless they are interested in research. But I think it's been and continues to be a net positive for the planet. And if most students HTFP (or claim to) there's a solid group -- even a majority? -- who love it.
I admit I was one of the lucky ones for whom it was an almost perfect environment. But even as an undergraduate I had no illusion that I was there to "attend school". I was there to learn AND do.
I am really soory if it screwed you. I have friends who had that experience.
Your comment suggests you believe those screwed by MIT are somehow naive about how the Institute works. You use the word "illusion."
I can tell you're not trying to insult anyone but you have to understand how that's kind of insulting.
If your point were correct and the issue were a simple question of being mentally prepared for the research slant of the school, Professor Tonegawa's son would not have killed himself in his freshman year.
Don't blame the students for what the system itself is structured to encourage. I was there to "learn and do" (to use your words), and I was still horrified by my experience there.
>I think it's been and continues to be a net positive for the planet.
Can you name something concrete that the place has actually done? From where I'm sitting, it has worked on a lot of trendy bullshit which never amounted to anything, but got curiously good press.
For example, that ridiculously twee and obviously fraudulent claim to have built "personal food computers" is a recent nothingburger that comes to mind.
> Can you name something concrete that the place has actually done? F
MIT graduates, faculty and staff have earned quite a few Nobel and Turing prizes; half a dozen graduates have walked on the moon; the lead professor in my Unified class left to become secretary of the Air Force; she was replaced by the former head of NASA. Almost every or every department has contributed in fundamental ways to its respective field.
From Chemistry to Electronics to Mechanical Engineering to Electrical Engineering to Economics to Physics...I think the modern world would be unrecognizable without MIT.
Everyone knows that MIT the school, as opposed to Negroponte's pedo-blackmailer funded wank fest, has historically done some important things. If you were originally saying MIT the school is a net positive for humanity, that's not what I am asking for clarification on at all.
Sorry, “the institute” is MIT slang for MIT. The media lab is called the media lab and indeed many people at the institute view it with scorn and/or envy. The document under discussion was about the institute.
Several interesting things came out of the media lab including mindstorms OTOH. Not in proportion perhaps to the amount of press, but the media lab was not funded from government grants by and large.
Media lab emphasized demos, true, but in some ways I admired it, as the rest of the institute (a part from Architecture, wher the ML sits) but you know, everywhere else was good at burying things or assuming the technical detail was all that mattered.
I ask because media labs often annoyed me with the twee "look at the future" stuff that never really panned out. The "food computer" thing mentioned above being a particularly ridiculous recent example.
I think it mostly annoys present day me in that I was taken in by this in the early 90s, when I was an avid reader of Mondo2k, Wired and the other kinds of publications Negroponte used to shill in. If the best thing that came out of the place since it was founded back in 85 is ... lego extensions... well, maybe people should stop funding them. I mean, Seymour Papert was pretty cool for his day, but he's dead.
The Media Lab is sort of an odd duck. They did some "cool" forward looking work way back when (in the 90s as you say) but not a lot concrete ever came out of it and it felt like they were largely eclipsed by the "real world" during the dot-com era.
They did eventually get enough money to build a second building. (Which has a really nice event space--so there's that.) And I assume if I went through their research I'd find some interesting things. But I certainly don't know of anything particularly world-changing off the top of my head.
I’ll admit that doppler radar, noise canceling headphones, RSA cryptography and GPS might all be “trendy”, but they’re only a few of the many, many inventions that came out of MIT, mostly bankrolled by military funding.
You'll have to give Gumby the courtesy of responding to what he wrote, first. He is clearly talking about "the institute". In the sentence you quoted, "I think it's been and continues to be a net positive for the planet", the pronoun "it" refers to "the institute (i.e. the faculty and staff)" in the previous sentence, consistent with "The Institute doesn't deserve your love" in the parent posting and "I love the institute" in the grandparent posting. It's 100% unambiguous that "the institute" he's talking about is "MIT" (that's what the middle "I" stands for: "institute"), not Media Lab, which didn't even exist when he joined MIT in 1982.
I am quite amused by MIT having to make some kind of apology for Jeffrey Epstein, but: the Rad Lab series, unless you count that as curiously good press.
Also don't forget that Rafael Reif was responsible for orchestrating the massive coverup of fraud at MIT Lincoln Laboratory regarding Ted Postol's allegations of fraudulent missile defense tests:
If the Department of Defense had not punted on the investigation, then provost Rafael Reif and his supervisor president Susan Hockfield would be serving time in a federal penitentiary with former dean of MIT Sloan School of Management Gabriel Bitran
Not just hand signed paper thank-you notes, but also Neri Oxman's artistically illuminated 3D-printed glass marble, sent as a thank-you gift for a $125,000 donation to her design lab.
>The newspaper also reported that her lab produced "a grapefruit-sized, 3-D printed marble with a base that lit up", as a personal gift for Epstein that was delivered to his Manhattan apartment.
>This form must be competed in its entirety by any graduate or undergraduate student wishing to end the biological process of his or her life. Postdoctorates and faculty members should not complete this form; instead, these individuals should complete alternate Form 27B-9.
Voo Doo also published a biting spot-on parody of "Hunter S Negroponte" and Media Lab (including a reference to his brother John Negroponte's war crimes and lies to Congress):
Tales of shame and degradation in the Big Idea Lab
by Hunter S. Negroponte
Too Many Bits
The other day I was thanking my good friend Former President Bush (or ``George'' as I call him) for pulling some strings to get my brother out of that Iran-Contra mess, and he asked me if I knew any hot technologies he could sink his Presidential Pension into. In my opinion, the smart money is on filters. It's getting so you can't read Usenet without seeing that ``Dave Jordan'' Ponzi letter followed by forty replies from dickless wannabes threatening to mail-bomb the poster's sysadmin for the ``innapropriate post.'' Of course, I personally have my staff of Elegant British Women pre-edit my .newsrc for me (God how I envy the British), but that option is not open to the unwired masses outside the Media Lab.
One way to eliminate the blather while keeping the First Amendment intact is to create active ``Filter Agents,'' as I like to call them, that presort my Netnews articles and eliminate the tiresome pseudo-commercial posts. Can you imagine what the net's raw content will look like when all the half-literate morons in the U.S. can publish any text that their tiny minds ooze? The very thought makes me want to refill my glass with the '56 Chateau Lafite. America's Intelligentsia will need some serious Digital Butlers guarding our Offramp on the Digital Highway's Mailing Lists (damn metaphors) when this comes to pass.
The Big Lie
Media Lab critics (there have been a few) have occasionally questioned the practical application of our work. Well, have you heard about the Holographic Television? No longer a device found only in the back of comic books, we've actually made this sucker work. An honest-to-god motion-picture hologram, produced in the Media Lab basement on a 2000 pound holography table by computers, lasers and mirrors spinning at 30,000 RPM. It's real! It works! Life Magazine even came in to photograph it in action (of course, they had to fill the room with smoke so the lasers would show up on film). Practical application? Sure, it requires a 2000 pound air-suspended rock table and a Connection Machine II to run, but hell, everyone knows the price of computing power and 2000 pound rock tables is cut in half every year. My point, however, is more mundane: we have created a demo literally from smoke and mirrors, and the Corporate World bought it. Even my good friend Penn (or ``Penn,'' as I call him) Jillette would be proud.
In fact, I'm a few points up on Penn. You may have heard of the Interactive Narrative work that is proceeding in the lab. Folks, I'll be honest with you for a moment. I know as well as you do that it's a stinking load of horseshit. Roger Ebert said ``Six thousand years ago sitting around a campfire a storyteller could have stopped at any time and asked his audience how they wanted the story to come out. But he didn't because that would have ruined the story.'' You think Hollywood would have learned this lesson from the monster ``success'' that Clue, the Movie enjoyed several years ago. But no! I've repackaged the ``Choose your own Adventure'' novels of childhood as Digital Information SuperHighway Yadda Yadda crap, and again, they bought it! Sony right this minute is building an interactive movie theater, with buttons the audience can push to amuse themselves as the story progresses. Dance for me, Corporate America! I'm SHIT-HOT!
Why, just the other day I listened to a member of my staff explain to potential sponsors that we had spent \$US 4,000,000 of Japanese sponsor dollars to construct a widescreen version of ``I Love Lucy'' from the original source. And HE SAID IT WITH A STRAIGHT FACE! CAN YOU FUCKING BELIEVE THAT? Boy, I bet those Nips wish they had their money back now! Earthquake? No, we can't do much to rebuild your city, but we SURE AS HELL can give you a 1.66:1 cut of Lucy to fit all those busted HDTVs of yours! HA HA HA!
A Sucker Born
Last week I was off the coast of Greece on my yacht ``Nippo-bux'' (I put the ``raft'' in ``graft,'' as I always say) with my close personal friend Al (``Al'') Gore. He asked me ``Nick--er, Hunter, how do you do it? You maintain a research staff of, in the words of Albert Meyer [an underfunded Course VI professor], `Science Fiction Charlatans,' yet you never fail to rake in monster sponsor bucks? I could fund Hillary's socialized medicine boondoggle in an instant if I had that kind of fiscal pull.''
I told him that it's merely a matter of understanding our sponsor's needs. Our sponsors are represented by middle-aged middle-managers who need three things: Booze, good hotels, and hookers. Keep 'em busy with free trips and the slick dog and pony shows, provide them with pre-written notes for their upper-managment, and the money will keep rolling in.
Do I worry that one day some sponsor will wake up and say ``Wait a minute--what the hell did I do last night? Did I shell out a million bucks to fund a LEGO Chair in the Media Lab? Tequila!'' Over the years I've learned not to care. I could pull the cigar out of W.C. Field's mouth and sell it back to him at a profit. And he'd thank me for the deal. I'm that goddamn good.
Obligatory Plug
By the way, if you enjoyed this article, you can read it again in my upcoming book: Being Gonzo -- Life on the Digital Information SuperHighway Fast Lane. Buy one now.
The past 30 years have been a continuous project in weaning the institute off being merely a very large government research lab.* IMHO this process has not been successful.
* with a small school bolted onto the side: the educational side of the institute is only 16% of the budget and is run at a small loss. This might explain their interest in Epstein.