Talk:Joi Ito

message: I don't know Ito, but this article gives me a bad impression.  It's trite. It's sappy. It's a masterpiece of bloviation.  It was worse before, and it is still nauseating.    — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.135.164.197 (talk) 05:41, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  This Article is Extraordinarily Bad 

message: "Ito is Timothy Leary's godson." There is no mention of a godson on the Timothy Leary article. ;-) Reference needed! (Yosofun 07:58, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It was actually in older versions. Someone deleted it. For instance:  - I think someone doesn't like this fact. The original simple "Ito is Timothy Leary's godson" was replaced by some weird longer "Ito claims" comment. Not that it's not true, but... ;-) Anyway, I don't really feel like bickering over this sort of detail, but it is slightly annoying. If you need references, I think I can dig up letters or something from Tim with a reference. --Joi 14:46, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

text: Here's a reference: http://www.leary.com/joiito/ -- Joi 00:26, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

text: I'm curious about this, pardon the language, bullshit. Isn't it obvious that there is a secular tradition of selecting godparents and godchildren? It's just not as documented a tradition... No need for this convoluted weirdness, Leary had simply taken Ito as his godson? (which I'd of course be personally interested in learning more about, but that's private not public). I'm gonna go poke at the Godparent talk page to see if someone can reflect the secular tradition as well. -- CarlJohanSveningsson (talk) 10:38, 29 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timothy Leary's godson 

message: Don't want to add things directly to my page, but if someone could review the following references and add them to my article if it makes sense, that would be great. Thanks. -- Joi 00:25, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: References

message: I invested in and joined the board of Rupture founded by Shawn Fanning - Joi (talk) 14:38, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Rupture

message: Is that really your photo?  You're a dead ringer for some Japanese celeb!
Can't remember who...maybe it was a Nikkei celeb now that I think about it....
Anyone know?
64.48.78.7 (talk) 21:03, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Doppelganger 

message: Why is there no mention of Jonkichi, We Know and falling asleep at the keyboard? :-P (AKA Allyn) JS747 (talk) 13:15, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Jonkichi 

message: The talk page seems to be out of order date wise? No biggie, just sort of hard to follow. Also, in the info box, it has this persons schools listed with "drop out" in parenthases, is this standard? Cheers, --70.109.223.188 (talk) 19:14, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Out of order talk page?

message: I guess the old "partner vs. spouse" debate has finally been resolved ;-)  http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2008/12/03/we-got-married.html  Mizuka and Joi just got married. I'm replacing "longterm partner" with wife, please make any other appropriate changes. --Skyfaller (talk) 09:42, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: For instance, did Mizuka change her name or is her full name still Mizuka Kurogane? Inquiring minds want to know! --Skyfaller (talk) 13:42, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: She is now Mizuka Ito. Which is unfortunately VERY similar to my sister's name, Mizuko "Mimi" Ito... hmm... IN Japanese their names are slightly more different however. 瑞佳 vs 瑞子--Joi (talk) 13:58, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: you spoil us, this is far too easy now! are you not suppose to be on honeymoon or something like that... all the best for you two. --SasiSasi (talk) 16:15, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks! I make it easy so you can save your energy to save the rest of Wikipedia. ;-) --Joi (talk) 05:02, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Joi got married! 

message: "Doctoral Candidate" in my studies at Hitotsubashi is redirected to Doctor of Philosophy, but it's actually a Doctor of Business Administration that I'm getting (DBA) not a PhD. --Joi (talk) 06:44, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the edit, but it's still wrong. It still links to Doctor of Philosphy but it should link to Doctor of Business Administration. This isn't a vanity point... I think PhDs are probably harder to get than DBAs. It's just not correct the way it is now. --Joi (talk) 17:53, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Corrected link  - GateKeeper(X) @ 02:33, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks! --Joi (talk) 13:06, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  DBA not PhD 

message: Not going to add these myself, but if anyone has time, maybe add them to the references. I'll try to keep this section updated with stuff that isn't in the article.
* Fred Wilson in New York Times http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/one-on-one-fred-wilson-union-square-ventures/ -- Joi (talk) 18:01, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photos 

message: Someone removed Limelight in Chicago from my article saying that there wasn't a Limelight in Chicago, but in fact there was.
Here's the edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joi_Ito&action=historysubmit&diff=367980220&oldid=367962351
You can see in The Limelight article that there was in fact a Chicago Limelight.
-- Joi (talk) 11:51, 20 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Limelight Chicago 

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message: This article is very difficult to edit today, however, I am attempting to limit the number of times the lead states allegations. It would be great if Wikipedians could stop to read first before adding more repetition. -SusanLesch (talk) 23:37, 7 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hold on please 

message: In the Education section it states "Keio University PhD". What does it refer to and is there any evidence of this?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.146.62.121 (talk) 14:58, 21 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Education 

message: Ito resigned from his roles at MIT, Harvard, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, PureTech Health, and The New York Times Company on September 7, 2019, following allegations of financial ties to sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Every coffee shop I've ever patronized has "financial ties" to my sordid life. But we don't hold this against them, because no patron with shirt and shoes and at least a superficial semblance of personal and civic hygiene is ever refused. 
From Alex Vermeer quoting Rodney Brooks: 
In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky discusses suitcase words—words that contain a variety of meanings packed into them, such as conscience, emotions, consciousness, experience, thinking, morality, right, and wrong.
:
The word 'consciousness' is used to describe a wide range of activities, such as "how we reason and make decisions, how we represent our intentions, and how we know what we've recently done [p128]."
:
If we want to better understand the various meanings of consciousness we need to analyse each one separately, rather than treating it as a single concept.
"Financial ties" is not a suitcase word by this definition, but does belong to a nearby category I was inspired to create for myself of trombone words: words with a wide, unstated range of zeal. My financial ties to my local coffee shops fall at the low end of that range. Progressing upwards from there, the word encompasses fifty different shades of grey. 
Absolutely critical to this article is to distinguish Ito as:
# an administrative functionary acting on behalf of his institution, with normal oversight and approval
# a rogue functionary explicitly side-stepping institutional controls 
# somewhere in between: an administrative functionary acting in part measure on behalf of his institutions, with also an element of rogue behaviour, and if rogue:  
## as freelance rogue, marching entirely to his own drum 
## with explicit but unrecorded permission under some institutional don't ask, don't tell cone of silence
## somewhere in between: some explicit permission recorded, subsequent permission shrouded in fog
## under extreme but deniable institutional incentives to engage in PR risk on the prospect of great career rewards if all goes well (no public controversy), or axed into a pit of spikes and alligators of institutional denial with surviving remains—if any—thrown under a bus should the risk explode into public view
# operating entirely in his own capacity (e.g. entrepreneurial side-hustle)
We have strong evidence to home in on menu item 3.3 right from the outset here, because L. Rafael Reif is not even contesting his signature and oversight committee involvement in the original oversight process, after which point, Farrow's reportage shades to shameless: 
The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him.
:
Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as "disqualified" in M.I.T.'s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university.
Everyone involved knew of Epstein's criminal record as a sex offender, yet higher administration scheduled a meeting to discuss among themselves whether they might nevertheless take his money. If the "disqualification" list functions as Farrow wishes to imply—as the Eliot Ness of no-mess rectitude—that meeting never happens. (What every overburdened administrator craves is the opportunity to add another discussion point with no marginal upside to the agenda for their next airless assembly.)
Menu item 3.3 is an ever-popular institutional compromise. No sane individual wishes to go 100% rogue, so initial permission is sought on some kind of paper trail (it may be deeply buried paper trail stored in a nondescript warehouse beside the Ark of the Covenant, but it's secure enough to not accidentally die in a fire). But on the other hand, you never please your superiors by getting their hands dirtier than necessary, so the initial Rx is implicitly a bottomless cup with no in-built refill limit. 
What we must not do in a BLP is allow the trombone phrase "financial ties" to implicitly suggest that Ito went rogue in his role as an administrative caretaker of the institution he represented. It's an entirely different crime to drag someone else into your muck unwittingly. What he did outside of MIT on his own account is an entirely different moral realm. For one thing, in this realm you can honourably fall on your own sword, without also being actively and aggressively tossed into a pit of alligators and spikes by your formerly trusting colleagues now racing to the exit to distance themselves from a bad smell. It's one thing to stain your own reputation, it's entirely another thing to stain the reputations of others, unwittingly. 
At this juncture, Farrow could show up to double down: if Epstein is formally on MIT's no-fly list, and Ito is the PR face the MIT (he was), then he should have kept his private entrepreneurial life equally spick and span. (Almost inevitably, the hypocrisy involved in the moral calculus of guilt by association is thick enough to chew, but that's not immediately pertinent here.) 
Only we know for certain that MIT was not Eliot Ness in their own administration of their own no-fly list. In fact, the "disqualified" annotation in M.I.T.'s official donor database might have been a hypocritical PR facade right from the get go. The film Belle de Jour puns on "belle de nuit" (lady of the night). We all understand that prostitution is an institution of the night: if you're doing it in broad daylight, you've jumped the shark. Raising money often degenerates into a form of prostitution: your success on the whole is inversely proportional to how much you care where it comes from. Squeaky clean money is hard to get. (And not just because squeaky clean billionaires are thin on the ground to begin with; the philanthropic impulse often burns brightest in the dankest corridors.) 
Perhaps M.I.T.'s official donor database only thoroughly disqualifies Belle de Jours. 
If that's the institutional context that Ito was operating within (why else would he even refer the question to committee?; why else would the committee even meet to discuss this?; why else would L. Rafael Reif now be distressed to confess his formal signature on a very embarrassing document?) then his subsequent minimal and perhaps evasive reporting standard is best viewed as institutional capture rather than outright rogue malfeasance. 
Shouldn't the standards of BLP and innocence before proven guilty suffice to restrict our trombone insinuations to the right crime?  
Ito's financial ties come in three stripes: 
* some with full institutional oversight at the highest level of administration 
* some less fulsomely disclosed within the institution, with ongoing implicit endorsement of that ongoing relationship yet shrouded in fog 
* some entirely on his own account, outside of MIT, and broadly outside the governance of MIT's "disqualification" list 
All we need to do to silence the trombone of overly broad insinuation is to hoist material from citation Preliminary fact-finding about MIT and Jeffrey Epstein in the final lead sentence. 
I'm 100% with Lessig that waiting until after the lead to clarify the blunt trombone does not constitute justice here.
* On Joi and MIT — 8 September 2019
But I'm too hot-headed right now about this to dive in myself, and I've said what I intended to say (if it falls on deaf ears, restatement will not rescue my point), and so I will now simply move along and leave this for the next editor to adjudicate. 
— MaxEnt 20:27, 14 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semantic weasel words in lead of the trombone variety