[tinkerdol]

He/she is talking about the newer home of CSAIL, the Stata Center: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Center

It is notoriously difficult to work in, with way too many open spaces (open in the sense of being public, as well as open in the sense of having random 3-story-high atriums of air above you in some places for no discernable reason) and not enough quiet nooks that are conductive to focused work.

[hga]

Ah, yeah, sorry about that qwertyuiop924, and thank you tinkerdol for filling him in sooner, and confirming what I've heard from other sources.

It shows every sign of being a two for one own goal in diminishing MIT's future ability to "be MIT".

[qwertyuiop924]

Ouch. Yeah, that would suck. But then, IIRC, people have been saying that X is dimishing MIT's future ability to be MIT since before the death of 6.001. I suspect it's another manifestation of the same kind of human impulse that makes the elders of every generation decry the youth of the next ones. And a bad building design isn't impossible to work around, just very, very, very, very inconvenient.

But then, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

[hga]

There's 2 things here:

The incubator that was Building 20 was is gone, as far as I know. Many many good things came out of it, some of which got very big, starting with the Research Lab For Electronics right after WWII (it was previously the main building for the "MIT Radiation Lab", i.e. a place to prototype and in some cases build small lots of RADARs). As of the '80s, some of its 3 phase ceiling busbars were still live, one of my favorite professor's coffepot ran straight off one.

That's a relatively subtle thing, but to the extent MIT becomes stolid and not doing new things, becomes more of a place run by consensus and the conventional wisdom, that would be an important thing to look at.

The second is of course the Stata Building. It will absolutely diminish the useful output of what's now CSAIL, if for no other reason than those who need to be able to work without distraction by and large won't be able to in the building. It's the sort of thing that can put a ceiling on the difficultly of projects people will be able to do, if they can't get into or stay long enough in flow.

Obviously people will work around this, using e.g. laptops in quiet places, but collaboration will then seriously suffer if past research on the subject is of any validity (e.g. > 30 feet? or a stairway makes a big difference).

I don't know if anyone was out to get them, it's just that a) people who had weird and very wrong ideas about how to do things, like the head of the LCS, who among many other things tried to physically enshrine a permanent disconnection between CS and AI, b) people who simply didn't give a shit about those who really were going to use it, and/or c) people who were grossly incompetent, were in charge of getting it designed and built, but not the actual "users".

And the screwups are legion. Tom Knight, #1 Lisp Machine designer back in the day and someone who did a lot of important stuff, now a "synthetic biologist" AKA into artificial life, asked for one thing, a floor that sloped to a drain. Which he didn't get. And I now notice as of 2008 he's doing this at a company he co-founded.

I suspect those two fact are not entirely coincidental. And potentially a grave loss to MIT, that part of the future just might not be done there, losing "The Godfather of Synthetic Biology" per Wikipedia is not a small thing.

And I have the tiniest window into CSAIL, and can speak freely about it (my one theoretically vulnerable source isn't really, and hasn't told me anything I can't repeat), there's I'm sure much much more to be told, and sifted through by historians or archaeologists of science someday.

6.001 is a rather different thing, after the dot.com crash, which resulted in a crash of EECS undergraduate enrollment, less than half after being 40% of the student body for decades, people panicked, those with an agenda against Scheme/LISP used the opening, but primarily, MIT decided an MIT EECS degree was going to be a fundamentally different thing.

That doesn't mean they're wrong, just that if you're looking a focus on the 6.001/SICP sort of thing, you might want to look elsewhere, like CMU I think. And maybe this was inevitable, a department like MIT's or UCB's is simply never going to be the same as a CS focused department that didn't grow out of an EE one. And Sussman at least always thought the 2 subjects were both of great importance and should be taught together, he himself just never figured out a way to really make that work, including at least one experimental one year long course covering both prior to the development of SICP and the 4 6.001-4 courses.

[qwertyuiop924]

That's fair enough. I didn't say the removal of 6.001 was bad, but many decried it as the death of MIT.

But in short, you're saying that MIT may no longer be "where the future happens."

That's quite possible. But at the moment, there's still an abundance of talent there. OTOH, the lack of an incubator is a problem.

I guess what I'm saying is that you might be right, ut the future is pretty hard to predict.

[hga]

But in short, you're saying that MIT may no longer be "where the future happens."

Or maybe MIT is now starting to seriously revert to the mean, some of the future will most certainly happen there, just potentially quite a bit less.

I may have seen some of that in the '80s, certainly the midnight execution of the Applied Biology department by envious chemistry and biology professor administrators was a sign of some sort, especially since the fate of the latter should have been much worse than having their administrative careers ended. The faculty as a whole certainly viewed it as a betrayal, which is was in spirit and "law" (MIT has the institution of the Visiting Committee to keep units of it on the straight and narrow, they were of course ignored in this).

And this is part of a bigger trend, pure administrators are growing in vast numbers in US higher education, their costs are one of the biggest drivers in this clearly unsustainable trend, they're funded by ever more Federal dollars (even if laundered as loans, which the Feds entirely took over in 2010), and from money comes power, they're taking over US universities from the faculty. Who themselves are getting segregated into small numbers of high cost tenured and large quantities of low cost associates who care barely make ends meet, plus the old bane of graduate student instructors who aren't good at it.

MIT, at least for now, is not going to succumb to some of these trends, as long as associate professors are rare exceptions that prove the rule, like SF author Joe Haldeman, for classes are otherwise taught by tenured or tenure track faculty, and adequate teaching ability is required for tenure, as well as the minor detail of being #1 or #2 in your subfield (as judged, in part, by those Visiting Committees).

Similarly, like CalTech, there's a high floor on admitting undergraduates, they've got be able to do one term of the calculus beyond the AP BC sequence, and calculus based mechanics and physics (and chemistry and maybe biology).

But....

[qwertyuiop924]

Yeah. My father went to CMU, and told me some stories about a few professors that were... less than enthusiastic about teaching. Like one that was pretty much using the class for his reseach project, and didn't teach the intended subject matter. At all.