[gumby]

> Can you name something concrete that the place has actually done? F

MIT graduates, faculty and staff have earned quite a few Nobel and Turing prizes; half a dozen graduates have walked on the moon; the lead professor in my Unified class left to become secretary of the Air Force; she was replaced by the former head of NASA. Almost every or every department has contributed in fundamental ways to its respective field.

From Chemistry to Electronics to Mechanical Engineering to Electrical Engineering to Economics to Physics...I think the modern world would be unrecognizable without MIT.

[scottlocklin]

None of these are achievements of MIT media labs.

Everyone knows that MIT the school, as opposed to Negroponte's pedo-blackmailer funded wank fest, has historically done some important things. If you were originally saying MIT the school is a net positive for humanity, that's not what I am asking for clarification on at all.

[gumby]

Sorry, “the institute” is MIT slang for MIT. The media lab is called the media lab and indeed many people at the institute view it with scorn and/or envy. The document under discussion was about the institute.

Several interesting things came out of the media lab including mindstorms OTOH. Not in proportion perhaps to the amount of press, but the media lab was not funded from government grants by and large.

Media lab emphasized demos, true, but in some ways I admired it, as the rest of the institute (a part from Architecture, wher the ML sits) but you know, everywhere else was good at burying things or assuming the technical detail was all that mattered.

[scottlocklin]

Got it; sorry for the confusion.

I ask because media labs often annoyed me with the twee "look at the future" stuff that never really panned out. The "food computer" thing mentioned above being a particularly ridiculous recent example.

I think it mostly annoys present day me in that I was taken in by this in the early 90s, when I was an avid reader of Mondo2k, Wired and the other kinds of publications Negroponte used to shill in. If the best thing that came out of the place since it was founded back in 85 is ... lego extensions... well, maybe people should stop funding them. I mean, Seymour Papert was pretty cool for his day, but he's dead.

[ghaff]

The Media Lab is sort of an odd duck. They did some "cool" forward looking work way back when (in the 90s as you say) but not a lot concrete ever came out of it and it felt like they were largely eclipsed by the "real world" during the dot-com era.

They did eventually get enough money to build a second building. (Which has a really nice event space--so there's that.) And I assume if I went through their research I'd find some interesting things. But I certainly don't know of anything particularly world-changing off the top of my head.

[gumby]

Ever taken a Suggestion by amazon, netflix, etc? That originated in Pattie Maes’s group at the media lab and was first commercialized as Firefly.

[scottlocklin]

Pretty sure it didn't originate in Pattie Maes group.

For example these all before her group:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d663/d25cbc8212adf560b2b1f1...

http://soda.swedish-ict.se/2225/2/T94_04.pdf

MIT, but not Mae's group or Media lab: https://sites.ualberta.ca/~golmoham/SW/web%20mining%2023Jan2...