21–30 of 162 posts
Pot, meet kettle. Ted's been banging on the Xanadu drum for 50 years... if he'd have just bothered to learn to program, he could have implemented it himself, but it seems he'd rather give interviews about it than sit down at a keyboard.
This was rambling and smelled of bitterness. I especially didn’t like his suggestion that he “could have been” Jef Raskin because their viewpoints were “essentially the same” or whatever. Really?
As a high school student I got a chance to visit MIT's CSAIL with some other high school students and it killed all interest I had in attending MIT because what I previously thought would be a total hacker and mad scientist sort of place turned out to be a bunch of marketing gimmicks (with a couple carefully managed demos of things that were "cool" more so than useful, new, or innovative).
The day of my high school visit, the campus was plastered with posters for "The Asbestos Cork Award." http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/asbestos-cork-award.html
Another recent case: the University of Central Florida is the news this morning for their research institute professors running a "grants for PhD" quid-pro-quo program where grant funders were receiving PhDs in exchange for continued funding. Other students funded by these grants were writing the grant-funders' theses.
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2020/01/27/ucf-facul...
"If you describe something as hokum, you think it is nonsense. " [0]
[0]https://www.collinsdictionary.com/es/diccionario/ingles/hoku...
This is well known in academia and exist outside of Media Lab as well. For example, I asked a professor (not associated with the Media Lab) about using hype to get grants. He said: "It's just like the stock market right, money goes here, it goes there, it's all story telling. I have to tell stories too because if I don't, then other people will tell this story and get the money. But I think I can use it better than o…
> I have to tell stories too because if I don't.... Sounds like reputation afforded to academia (professors) might be inappropriate. Besides, science shouldn't be judged by reputation but by fact and result. The idea of evaluating the quality of an idea by one's social standing is sort of odd... for someone who should be preaching science.
As the financial sources are by definition external, the people behind them have no clue about the actual research. So what can the researchers do to close the sale, if the actual science won't work? They necessarily have to tell stories.
Pot, meet kettle. Ted's been banging on the Xanadu drum for 50 years... if he'd have just bothered to learn to program, he could have implemented it himself, but it seems he'd rather give interviews about it than sit down at a keyboard.
Pot, meet kettle. Ted's been banging on the Xanadu drum for 50 years... if he'd have just bothered to learn to program, he could have implemented it himself, but it seems he'd rather give interviews about it than sit down at a keyboard.
Bill Lowe of IBM fame on Ted; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kasu0BhRFGo
A zigzag demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yFcJXBMGQQ
Finally, the man is 82, and deserving of respect, not some flippant, inaccurate, badly argued and frankly idiotic comment.
This is well known in academia and exist outside of Media Lab as well. For example, I asked a professor (not associated with the Media Lab) about using hype to get grants. He said: "It's just like the stock market right, money goes here, it goes there, it's all story telling. I have to tell stories too because if I don't, then other people will tell this story and get the money. But I think I can use it better than o…
I have a pretty hard time with the theory that Doctoral MIT graduates are an exploited underclass.
Doctoral students everywhere are overworked and underpaid. Same as almost everyone, really. But the Doctoral students do get to walk away with, and heavily monetize that credential at the end of it.
And if they are doing work on aspirational “pipe dreams” pursuing a dream of the future that doesn’t pan out? Rather than what, punting on the dream and getting back to the hard work of CRUD apps and monetizing clicks?
Pot, meet kettle. Ted's been banging on the Xanadu drum for 50 years... if he'd have just bothered to learn to program, he could have implemented it himself, but it seems he'd rather give interviews about it than sit down at a keyboard.
When a pot calls a kettle black, that doesn't mean the pot is wrong.