First, yes I know CSAIL and the media lab are different.
Second, it's quite conceivable actual (interesting) research things were and are happening in CSAIL.
To clarify, since this apparently was not obvious:
What I am saying is that basically whatever research and interesting things were being done was pretty much hidden behind a dog and pony show (and some robots and bragging about whatever architect designed the building), and that the marketing front was too slick and central for its own good. It didn't come across as a place for "hackers" (in the MIT sense, though they mentioned "hacking" plenty of times to tout the school) or even just as a place for someone who might want to learn about AI. Instead it came across as a place with a lot of resource for the marketing budget.
(So the impression that things at MIT might be the result of unusually successful marketing more than anything else doesn't surprise me.)
Seeing more whiteboards and coding would have helped, honestly.
CSAIL and the Media Lab are very different places, with different funding sources and ways of interacting with the broader community. There’s also some friction between the two. So to rope it all together is your incorrect outsider impression.
My guess is most high schoolers probably do want to see fancy buildings and robots. There’s no beakers with smoke or explosions (hopefully) happening in a computer science department, so it sounds like they’re doing what they think is their best to appeal to a younger audience. I’m sorry it wasn’t the right marketing message for you, but if you wanted to understand at a deeper level what they were doing there’s no lack of information on the department webpage if you go explore the actual research groups and papers.
From my perspective, MIT truly is an amazing and special place filled with fabulous minds and ample resources. But it’s not for everyone.
...I really hesitated to reply to your latest post but:
I was a high school kid with dial up internet that I had to ask permission to use and computer time that was rationed (not trying to portray this as a hardship - it wasn't). While I was the one kid in my class who enjoyed programming a graphing calculator, it's not like I was super "internet native," and liking programming already didn't mean that I knew it was computer science, or that it would have occurred to me to presume I shouldn't take the way things were presented at face value. I was a somewhat sheltered kid.
The point that MIT had a pretty significant marketing angle doesn't seem like it should be that wild. Even (what I think is) your website is pretty marketing-centric:
> "My work has been used by millions in 185+ countries, been shown in over 7 musueums world-wide, and has been covered by PBS, NPR, BBC, The Alantic, and more."
...and I'm not trying to say that MIT hasn't done groundbreaking research.
Also from (what I think is) your website:
> "I've been on a computer daily since I received my first Mac at age 5 in 1986."
Keep in mind that that's not common, or at least wasn't, even into the 2000s.
I don't understand your points then. You being sheltered or not has no bearing on lumping together CSAIL & ML, nor does it mean that CSAIL has the right or wrong marketing to high schoolers. Clearly they take in a lot of students every year, so it can't be all wrong. I'm sorry it wasn't done in an appealing way to you, and maybe they're missing others. Regardless, whomever is doing that is (for better or worse) quite distant to the actual researchers and professors.
Of course my personal website about my professional work is marketing. What's wrong with that? It's all true. It's important to market yourself, whether you're a biologist seeking grants, a philosopher seeking impact, or a university department seeking stature. That's how the world works. You need to tell people why they should care about you, otherwise you're just a forgotten soul in a world with billions of souls.
That I've used a computer since the early 80s wasn't common I think is a good thing, despite being made fun of for it all throughout my childhood. I think it has framed many of my perspectives in life, including an ultimate desire to get a PhD from the Media Lab and attend MIT. How is any of this relevant here?
Let me try and re-frame everything more bluntly (and perhaps a bit excessively).
I'm not lumping CSAIL and ML together, I'm ascribing common aspects to the way things at MIT get hyped, marketed, promoted, and portrayed, and pointing out that even if there's a nucleus of whatever is really being done that is significant, it's kept under a thick shell of a modern PR/marketing engine and fundraising apparatus. I'm suggesting that aspects of things across the institution might have similarities, because nearly everything these days pretty much has the same similarities. And that you could see it coming ever a dozen years ago as this aspect of marketing schlock isn't just centric to MIT.
It's the whole modern world, where every university has named institutes funded by donor dalliances, where every startup has been mentioned in the Washington Post, New York Times, NBC, and everywhere else, even though the banners usually don't link through. And where those mentions get inserted by professional networks where you know or even pay somebody who knows the right person to get the name drop for you (I've witnessed this) so that whatever flavor of the month some startup is pushing can get just the right nudge to take off, or at least get VC. It's kind of like TED like Talks and everything else positive, vacuous, and modern: that the world will be revolutionized by finding the perfect news feed algorithm, just like in another era snake oil would cure all ills.
It should hardly be surprising that ML happens when everything everywhere operates in the same way. It just had worse luck because its patron was Epstein instead of or not just Bezos or Bill Gates or whatever other person or entity with money to burn, and because its leader was ironically unusually adept at navigating the modern schlock culture.
Of course there are real people doing real and amazing work underneath this humongous and self-sustaining shell (and sometimes they break through enough for us to notice). Maybe you are or were one of them. But trying to tell is usually kind of like trying to look through a periscope that's filled with trick mirrors, and is part of the way it sometimes feels like the world is on the verge of descent into ruin.
So that was what I was originally getting at in a much less exhausting and overstated way.
What I also was addressing is that your responses to my comments implied a number of things that I think weren't realistic or germane.
For example, the implication that teenage me could just disabuse myself of whatever "mistaken" notions I got from my visit to MIT by exploring a department web page that in general I would barely have known about nor had much chance to access.
Or that because my experience wasn't your experience it's "wrong," even though it didn't really intersect a ton with what a graduate student might encounter.
When I referred to your website mention of getting a Mac at age 5, I wasn't meaning that having a computer was bad. What I was attempting to imply is that your comments assume an amount of convenience and access that didn't exist, and I was pointing out that your experience wasn't normative despite your presumption.
The only reason for the comment about being a bit sheltered is I think a certain type of background would have understood the game already: as you say "it's important to market yourself," but I've always despised self-marketing anyway.
Second, it's quite conceivable actual (interesting) research things were and are happening in CSAIL.
To clarify, since this apparently was not obvious:
What I am saying is that basically whatever research and interesting things were being done was pretty much hidden behind a dog and pony show (and some robots and bragging about whatever architect designed the building), and that the marketing front was too slick and central for its own good. It didn't come across as a place for "hackers" (in the MIT sense, though they mentioned "hacking" plenty of times to tout the school) or even just as a place for someone who might want to learn about AI. Instead it came across as a place with a lot of resource for the marketing budget.
(So the impression that things at MIT might be the result of unusually successful marketing more than anything else doesn't surprise me.)
Seeing more whiteboards and coding would have helped, honestly.