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.
Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
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Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#12This 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…
The parallels to SV, VCs, and the startup ecosystem are striking.
In a capitalist system, the easiest things to raise money for are monuments to the wisdom of capitalists.
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#13This 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.
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#14This 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…
Just to add another data point: I asked an Ivy League professor about hype and they said the exact opposite of your Ivy League professor.
Anyway, that's certainly the hype part that your anecdote refers to. Now how about the hokum? Did your Ivy League professor draw a computer on a cardboard box and put a kid inside there? Or did they use it for a bona fide machine learning research project?
I think those are fair questions as there's at least one story of a Media Lab project that misrepresented its technology and did not really perform the tasks which it claimed to have performed.
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
The parallels to SV, VCs, and the startup ecosystem are striking.
Yeah I think overt exploitation is what happens when you have a situation where there is very thin or no layer of management between the most savvy players of the game ( professors, founders or VCs ) and fresh meat ( engineers or grad students ). They're both situations where the predators walk freely amongst the prey and take as they please. Also SV was an extension of academic-military-industrial complex, and they…
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Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#16As 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).
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#17I don’t think i’ve ever taken Media Lab “seriously” — or if i did, my age still started with a 1. To take media lab seriously is to miss the point. They aren’t supposed to be serious! If i may coin a term, they’re not even doing blue sky, they’re doing crack-of-dawn. 99% of what they think about will turn out to be a funny shadow on the wall from the laundry hamper that looked cool for a minute until the room brighte…
So what is its point?
A well-balanced research portfolio ought to include long shots. Sometimes they come up big, big winners. But they spend a lot of time looking weird and pointless.
Unfortunately, funding long-shots is really hard. I was going to write "in the present environment", but then I realized that was too specific. It doesn't really matter where the money is coming from. Funding long shots is fundamentally hard, whether it's from private investment, government, commercial, or whatever else you can think of. But it's still a good idea to put a small portion of the research resources into those long shots.
(Now, it may be the case that the Media Lab is a bad place to fund your longshot, but I don't know enough to evaluate that.)
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#18This 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 see nothing wrong with professors communicating the value of what they are building as effectively as possible. If you believe a problem is an important problem to solve then you should work hard to convince other people it is important.
>As for the Media Lab, they're really selling the image of technological progress.
Disclaimer: I've worked with researchers at the DCI group in the media lab on hash function cryptanalysis.
The media lab is made up of a large number of research teams doing very different stuff. It is unfair to just say "the media lab does X or operates like X". Look at the research from the DCI group at the media on zero knowledge proofs systems [0], hash-based accumulators [1], or work on Ring Signatures [2].
[0]: zk-sharks combining succinct verification and public-coin setup https://dci.mit.edu/zksharks
[1]: utreexo: a dynamic accumulator for bitcoin state https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/611.pdf
[2]: It wasn't me! Repudiability and (Un)claimability of Ring Signatures https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/135.pdf
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#19Says the guy who's been hyping Xanadu for tens of years but never made a workable product and now spend the last 20 years of his life bitching on the work of others.
Re: Ted versus The Media Lab [video]
#20This 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.
This is pretty idealistic. Humans use reputation to judge everything. Even if we could bend human nature in this one area, how would it work? Who is really in a position to judge cutting edge research? Only other good researchers can really understand and judge someone's research. How do you tell who the good researchers are without reputation? How do you know how much each person is contributing to each insight? You quickly see that the same group of people need to judge each other and then you are at the whim of social dynamics and bias of the group.