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.