
The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab - DarkContinent
https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/mit-media-lab-jeffrey-epstein-joi-ito-moral-rot.html
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save_ferris
I recently re-watched “The Internet’s Own Boy”, about Aaron Swartz and his
tragic end.

Seeing how MIT had no problem ruining the life of one of the most brilliant
members of my generation over commercial interest said a whole lot about MIT’s
role in the world.

This clearly isn’t a new issue for MIT, they’ve been making ethically
questionable decisions for years.

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auvi
What are the major successes that came out of the lab? On top of my head I can
think of: e-Ink, Lego mindstorms, Scratch. I bet there are hundreds more.

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inflatableDodo
I can appreciate that millions are alive thanks to Fritz Haber's work on
chemical fertiliser and still think that it would have been for the best if
someone had shot him in the head shortly after completing it. And then again
to make sure.

edit to add the obligatory reference - _' The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas'_
\-
[https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf](https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf)

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dredmorbius
For the downvoters: Fritz Haber co-invented (with Carl Bosch) the Haber-Bosch
ammonia synthesis process, without which most people on Earth would not be
alive.

He is also credited as the father of chemical warfare, and directly ran and
oversaw development of chlorine and other poison gas weapons for Germany in
WWI.

His wife, Clara Immerwahr, committed suicide, using her husband's service
revolver, and was found mortally wounded though not yet dead by her 12 year
old son An act thought by many to have been a protest to her husband's work.

Parent comment is quite accurate.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Immerwahr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Immerwahr)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber)

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inflatableDodo
Thanks for the understanding of what I am trying to get at.

I'd just like to add that for an athiest, I am a great believer in redemption.

I don't think that it is time reversible however, that theory was thouroughly
tested during the crusades with the system of automatic indulgences and by all
accounts it did not go well.

Also, redemption is unfortunately rare enough that you shouldn't cut people
much slack over anything genuinely serious, while waiting for them to get
around to redeeming themselves.

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rayiner
> Each year it hosted a sponsor week during which research groups were
> expected to dance for their big-money benefactors, corporations like
> ExxonMobil, Citigroup, PepsiCo, GlaxoSmithKline, and Verizon. Many of its
> scientists were also involved with private companies that had been founded
> to monetize their discoveries. A year after I turned in my masters’ thesis,
> the key members of the affective computing group I had studied founded a
> company that today partners with “1400+ brands,” builds “automotive AI,” and
> works with market research firms and other companies to “measure consumer
> emotion responses to digital content, such as ads and TV programming.” This
> was what the idea factory was incubating?

This article is rather ignorant and seems consistent with the author’s
background as someone who has no background in technology or R&D.

MIT has always been this way. It has operated a billion dollar defense
contractor, MIT Lincoln Labs, since the 1950s. The current MIT campus was
built using a quarter-billion donation (in current dollars) of cash and Kodak
stock by George Eastman in the 1910s. MIT, moreover, is the archetype of how
America became a technological superpower. Collaborations between the
military, universities, and large private corporations is how things like the
Internet got built.

Trying to somehow tie Epstein together with all that, trying and taint MIT and
American industry with some spurious connection to Epstein, is sophistry. It’s
the easy prose of someone who has never tried to build a damn thing.

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yborg
I don't see how it's sophistry, the author goes into great detail on the fact
that MIT has long operated less as a university in the traditional sense than
as a contract R&D organization. The linkage made to Epstein is that the school
has long cared little for the moral implications of its research as long as it
brought in revenue to MIT, so soliciting funding from morally deficient
individuals was an easy extension of this ethos. You may agree or disagree
with the author's argument, but I don't see it as disingenuous.

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gumby
But that has been true since WWII, as was clear to anyone who attended the
school (or worked there). It's a large government research lab with a small
(14% of revenue/16% of expenses) school attached.

~~~
nvrspyx
> But that has been true since WWII, as was clear to anyone who attended the
> school (or worked there)

Yeah, pretty sure that’s a tiny percentage of the general population. I don’t
see how that invalidates anything.

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laser
If you remove corporate and private money from universities, you don't
automatically receive more funding from government. A publication like Slate
might like and lobby for this to be, but that's not reality. What you get is
less students and professors, less research, less innovation, less progress,
and less commercialization of new technologies that benefit us all. I'm sure
Mr. Peters means well when he advocates for his conception of moral and
academic purity, but he's implicitly advocating for gutting a part of our
world-class research universities, which is unnecessarily destructive and not
a trade we should be willing to make.

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perennate
The author seems to flip flop on whether the "moral rot" is isolated to the
Media Lab. First they write:

> Negroponte’s comments—even in light of his later clarification—indicate the
> structural rot at the heart of Ito’s choices. The Media Lab has long been
> academia’s fanciest glue trap for morally elastic rich people. ... In this,
> the Media Lab has apotheosized the capitalistic philosophy of its parent
> institution ... Theoretically, at least, professors are salaried and tenured
> so that they can conduct research pursuant to this communal scientific ethos
> free from any profit imperative. This is not how modern academic science
> often works in practice, and it is certainly not how things have worked at
> MIT for the past 100 years.

So the Media Lab, like the rest of MIT, is morally rotten because of its
extreme reliance on private sector funding. But then:

> Over the course of the past century, MIT became one of the best brands in
> the world, a name that confers instant credibility and stature on all who
> are associated with it. Rather than protect the inherent specialness of this
> brand, the Media Lab soiled it again and again

So, MIT is credible and the moral rot is isolated to the Media Lab?

Well, overall, the article presents some facts and seems to want to make a
larger point, but then fails to really make any point. The whole discussion of
the 1919 "Technology Plan" goes nowhere and it's unclear if the author thinks
it was a good or bad (or neutral) idea.

Given that the article seems to have been intended to be persuasive, it would
have been better if the article clearly stated either that the Media Lab took
the Technology Plan too far, or if the Technology Plan was flawed from the
beginning. At least then there would be a clear point which readers could
agree or disagree with.

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rayiner
I mean the juxtaposition here is pretty damning for the author's point:

> In this, the Media Lab has apotheosized the capitalistic philosophy of its
> parent institution ... Theoretically, at least, professors are salaried and
> tenured so that they can conduct research pursuant to this communal
> scientific ethos free from any profit imperative. This is not how modern
> academic science often works in practice, and it is certainly not how things
> have worked at MIT for the past 100 years.

> Over the course of the past century, MIT became one of the best brands in
> the world, a name that confers instant credibility and stature on all who
> are associated with it.

So MIT has followed the "capitalistic" approach instead of the "communal"
approach for the last 100 years and it has been ... wildly successful? That
doesn't seem to be the author's point, but it is the logical conclusion.

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inflatableDodo
If the authors point is that the institution is morally rotten, then whether
or not they have been successful and which particular economic system they
have used to achieve any success, is neither here nor there. I don't know why
you find it damning. Is orthoganal, if anything.

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ryacko
Many people conflate morals with your side vs my side, which seems to
transcend any definition of morality.

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wfbarks
Nice hit piece

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mdonahoe
I especially enjoyed reading about how the lab is beholden to it's corporate
sponsors, with every other paragraph interrupted by an advertisement from Ford
or Chevy or HP.

