Ted versus The Media Lab [video]

If he wants to do some really interesting somewhat outside-the-box work, he often has to find some way to make it look incredibly dull and inside-the-box and incremental in order to convince some funding bureaucrat to fund it.

Most money is dumb and flows in a herd-like manner into things that look superficially like things that have been successful in the past. This includes stock market money, government money, and yes even VC money. You often have to trick the world into funding genuinely interesting or productive work. Without a bit of marketing money will just chase the latest bubble or fad. It's like you have to save money from itself. If truly creative and productive people don't lay on the marketing, money will instead flow to charlatans who do... see also WeWork, Juicero, etc.

I used to feel dumb and waste time trying to figure things out, but then I decided that if I wouldn't get something quickly enough, that's because it was badly presented, and I had better discard it and move on. This approach saved me both much ego and time. (This can be read as a joke, but I'm mostly serious. I also use it when I design: I keep reworking things until they feel as easy to grasp as possible, and then only I can start to really build on top of them.)

ie. go down promising areas, end up with no significant inferences and a lot of utile effort, and in very rare cases, make breakthrough contributions.

The key difference being that the things Media labs work on is usually in areas with underdefined academic landscapes, which makes it hard to make any significant progress.

Media labs is not the frontier of academic research that some make it out to be. Rather, it is just like other insignificant academic labs, in that they mostly produce duds. Media labs is just higher risk and higher reward.

However, the amount of media hype they generate definitely belies the amount of significant progress it produces.

That's such a broad brushstroke.

Consider, for example, Echo Nest's research in machine listening in Barry Vercoe's Music, Mind and Machine group. This all made it into Spotify when they acquired Echo Nest. His work led and pushed other researchers in the field at ISMIR, etc. Hard to downplay the impact of Spotify on our culture. This is not "hokum."

And as I shoulder-surfed the whole thing, I can tell you it started out as a crazy dream. When Brian Whitman and Barry began it, CPU power was meager, GPUs were scarcely recognized as general computation aids. It was mostly about music similarity instead of social features. (I like to think I helped Brian think that way, egoist I am). Even storing 1,000,000 songs was once difficult. This was in the AJAX and perl days.

But like Brian's daydream, many other projects there are daydreams. That's the point of the ML, to try the daydreams other people won't. Not to disrespect others for taking on research more likely to result in tangible results. In fact, that's very sane! So if you want to critique the place according to some personally-applied standards, that's great, that's your opinion, next.

I really think the power of capitalism lies not in some magical ability of markets to make good decisions but in the freedom it affords to route around bad decisions and the bureaucracies and corporate institutions that make them.

In a vertically integrated Soviet-style economy a single bad bureaucracy results in the total failure of that industry. It's not really possible to sidestep it; there is no "permission free innovation." In a free market those big dumb slugs still exist but it's at least possible for some people to go around them.