Why Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Epstein’s money
1–10 of 72 posts
Re: Why Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Epstein’s money
#2Nobody should be trying to cover for the Media Lab in any way or form. If you're a professional and you take money in this way you are complicit, period.
An article claiming Epstein was a victim because pedophiles and rapists are "victims" would have been less vapid than what Vox focuses on in this article.
Re: Why Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Epstein’s money
#3Normally, organizations accept anonymous donations from people because of modesty or privacy -- the donors don't want their name on the wall or in the press. They have a mechanism for that called "anonymous donations", but the mechanism isn't meant to guarantee that no reputational benefits at all can be gotten by the donor.
In this case, several people knew he had donated to MIT and he invited professors to his dinners to show off to his friends, so there were substantial reputational benefits.
Lessig's utilitarian calculus doesn't convince me it's OK to take money anonymously from villains.
Re: Why Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Epstein’s money
#4[deleted]
Re: Why Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Epstein’s money
#5Normally, organizations accept anonymous donations from people because of modesty or privacy -- the donors don't want their name on the wall or in the press. They have a mechanism for that called "anonymous donations", but the mechanism isn't meant to guarantee that no reputational benefits at all can be gotten by the donor. In this case, several people knew he had donated to MIT and he invited professors to his dinn…
right. the veil of anonymity was torn apart in this case. this doesn't seem like a robust test case for Lessig's theory of anonymity.
Re: Why Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Epstein’s money
#6Nobody should be trying to cover for the Media Lab in any way or form. If you're a professional and you take money in this way you are complicit, period. An article claiming Epstein was a victim because pedophiles and rapists are "victims" would have been less vapid than what Vox focuses on in this article.
Hey! I'm the article author, and I didn't write about what the Media Lab was thinking to give them "cover". As I put it in the article, the Media Lab's actions were so horrific that it brings into question the whole philosophy behind anonymous donations. So why take a close look at their justifications? Well, a couple reasons. Firstly, I think it's interesting when smart people argue themselves into incredibly bad decisions that anyone could've warned them against. It's an easy failure mode to fall into, and looking in gruesome detail at some cases where other people fell into it has taught me a lot about how these failures happen.
Secondly, I think that condemnation hits harder when it's the result of sincere engagement with someone's justifications. Yep, I listened to you when you said why you did it. And you were wrong. It's not always worth taking that step, of course, but in a big case like this, I think it is.
Re: Why Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Epstein’s money
#7Normally, organizations accept anonymous donations from people because of modesty or privacy -- the donors don't want their name on the wall or in the press. They have a mechanism for that called "anonymous donations", but the mechanism isn't meant to guarantee that no reputational benefits at all can be gotten by the donor. In this case, several people knew he had donated to MIT and he invited professors to his dinn…
Right, his identity may have been concealed from MIT's accounting department, but when it came to getting personal/social access to MIT professors, it's clear people were aware he was contributing to their program.
Re: Why Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Epstein’s money
#8You know what you should not do if you really believe "the money gets put to a better use, and they don’t get to accumulate prestige or connections from the donation because the public wouldn’t know about it."
> The financier would meet with faculty members, apparently to allow him to give input on projects…
(from the New Yorker article).
Also, if you know you are violating the policies of MIT's central fund-raising office, and you are taking active steps to HIDE it from them... you can say you just had a different philosophy of philanthropy than them, and this was so important to you that you were willing to violate MIT's policies and risk whatever consequences if found out...
...but come on, we all know it's just plain greed.
I don't think these are sincere philosophical beliefs about philanthropy, I think they are just the rationalizations that the powerful and greedy tell themselves to avoid admitting it's just about power and greed.
Re: Why Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Epstein’s money
#9Normally, organizations accept anonymous donations from people because of modesty or privacy -- the donors don't want their name on the wall or in the press. They have a mechanism for that called "anonymous donations", but the mechanism isn't meant to guarantee that no reputational benefits at all can be gotten by the donor. In this case, several people knew he had donated to MIT and he invited professors to his dinn…
right. the veil of anonymity was torn apart in this case. this doesn't seem like a robust test case for Lessig's theory of anonymity.
I think no theory of anonymity works. A villain isn't going to keep their pinky-promise to not tell everyone that your prestigious institution took their money.
Re: Why Media Lab thought it was doing right by secretly accepting Epstein’s money
#10“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
-Upton Sinclair
I think most people from the outside could see the problem in accepting donations from Epstein. People at the Media Lab (with some very notable exceptions) allowed their desire for money to get the better of their judgment.