The dark side of an MIT brain

http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N34/normandin.html

by andrewljohnson • 15 years ago

69 47 15 years ago

tech.mit.edu

It was an interesting article, but it got real interesting in the last paragraph when the journalist just comes out and condemns the founder.

DennisP2• 15 years ago

"When a young woman is in desperate need of money and a wealthy man comes along and uses that vulnerability to get sex, that's the definition of exploitation."

Seems like you could also say: "When a man is in desperate need of sex and a young woman comes along and uses that vulnerability to get money, that's the definition of exploitation."

pyre2• 15 years ago

Lack of money is a much more severe situation than lack of sex. Lack of money comes with the possibility of poverty, while lack of sex just means that you will have to wait longer for sex.

zacharyvoase3• 15 years ago

Although you can get money in many more ways than you can get sex.

DennisP2• 15 years ago

The article also says "To test this proposition, make college free. If college girls were no longer desperately in need of money, I would be more than willing to bet that SeekingArrangement.com would cease to be highly profitable."

Seems to me he's saying that the women aren't doing it to survive, they're doing it to get a college education. I would submit that the drive for sex is a much more primal urge, going back a half billion years or so, than the drive for a college education.

orangecat• 15 years ago

Hmm. If you asked guys whether they would rather be permanently poor but be able to have sex with attractive women whenever they wanted, or to be wealthy but have no possibility of sex, I'd expect it to be close. (Assuming of course a first world environment where poverty doesn't mean starvation).

pavel_lishin4• 15 years ago

You could also say, "When a young man is in desperate need of money, and a wealthy corporation comes along and uses that vulnerability to get work, that's the definition of exploitation."

csomar2• 15 years ago

Culture and society put aside, all of them are the same. They are exchanges. You get something in exchange for something else. No exploitation in all of these cases. Exploitation is when you give something, getting nothing back; because you are forced to do it.

When the girl went and connected with the sugary daddy, no body obliged her to do so. No exploitation here. She could have worked hard to make money, save, take some loans and carry on her education. She definitively picked the easiest road.

joe_the_user2• 15 years ago

And I recall that that is something like the definition Karl Marx used...

pangram• 15 years ago

Yeah, that's one thing that bothered me somewhat about the article: the implied assumption that any sort of consensual arrangement where the man is getting sex is by definition exploitative. If it were a young man getting paid by an older woman for sex, is that still exploitation?

bitops• 15 years ago

It occurred to me as I read the article that SeekingArrangement.com actually could not have asked for better publicity than this article. Sure, there will be a round of condemnation and so forth, but there will also be a great many thinking "hey, that's just what I need".

gacba• 15 years ago

Just as his website was MIT-driven by encouraging Mr. Wade’s entrepreneurial spirit and putting him in those awkward social situations, it was also MIT-driven by twisting his view of reality into a purely utilitarian model, completely devoid of any morals. As SeekingArrangement.com says, “Who is to say what is right and wrong?” Many would see this as dangerous, but to Mr. Wade, it is purely a case of the output being worth the input.

It really rubs me wrong that the OP believes that MIT is responsible for certain actions that are really up to the individual.

- You are the only one responsible for cultivating a moral compass. A college can require an ethics course, but whether you absorb any of it or not will be entirely on you.

- MIT didn't fail him any more than any other institution. It's not MIT's job to give him or anyone social skills. Again, see point #1, it's on you to do something about it.

I get the point of the article and the general depravity of the site he started, but seriously, is MIT responsible for this or simply collateral damage in this article's bomb crater? What if Ted Bundy, or Osama Bin Laden graduated from MIT? Is it MIT's fault that they are sociopathic too?

esrauch• 15 years ago

I completely agree that it is not reasonable to say that any action taken by an individual is the responsibility of an institution or community, but conversely I don't think it is fair to say that individuals actions should never reflect poorly on the community that they are a part of.

> You are the only one responsible for cultivating a moral compass.

I don't really understand this point; you are the only one responsible for cultivating Physics 1 knowledge as well. If there were high profile instances of people who had recently taken Physics 1 at MIT and clearly did not absorb it at all, then that still can reflect poorly on MIT.

Clearly there are going to be outliers, but it doesn't even sound like you are arguing that this guy is an outlier, but rather that MIT shouldn't strive to cultivate ethical behavior and any amount of unethical behavior by MIT alum shouldn't reflect badly on them as an institution.

I'm actually living in Cambridge now, and (based on completely anecdotal evidence of conversations with students) it appears to me that MIT focuses far less on being a responsible citizen or an ethical engineer than most other universities that I have had experience with. At many schools, ethics is not only a required course, but something that is not uncommonly discussed in the context of any random CS course. One of my interns from MIT was specifically surprised to hear that I had talked about ethical considerations related to being employed in a CS related field in my undergrad.

zacharyvoase3• 15 years ago

Gosh, that was judgemental. I suppose it was intended to be an opinion piece, but it took prostitution to be wrong a priori, with no discussion or justification of this premise. Bandying about words like ‘exploitation’ is, frankly, cheap. The phrase “exploiting young women and enticing men to have extramarital affairs” reveals several of the author’s strong inner biases (to wit, that women are weak and men are evil). If anything, I'd say the author himself demonstrates ‘the dark side of an MIT brain’.

On a more general note, where are the articles discussing the long-term effect of prostitution on psychology? For example, do students who sell sex at college go on to be less or more successful than their cohort? Do they form longer-lasting or more volatile relationships later in life? Those are the articles I’d like to read.

pyre2• 15 years ago

I'd also like to see the correlation between prior sexual abuse and selling sex at college. I would assume that those who were abused may be more likely to do so, but by how much? Is the group of students that do this 99% abused (1% not) or is it closer to something like 60/40?

zacharyvoase3• 15 years ago

Just out of interest, why would you make that assumption?

joe_the_user2• 15 years ago

I doubt the correlation is as high as the correlation with ... needing money.

And while one might say there are always college students needing money, my impression is skyrocketing tuitions combined with an ethos of "sell anything you can to succeed" makes this site very much "of the now"...

klbarry• 15 years ago

Thank you for succinctly expressing my own thoughts and anger on the matter.

samlevine• 15 years ago

> To test this proposition, make college free.

In this case you'd still be taking money from rich men and women and giving them to the people going to college, only without the services rendered.

It's like asking whether I'd still do IT if I were paid to hang around playing video games. Obviously I'd rather study, tinker or engage in leisure rather than do my job. This doesn't answer the question of whether the exploitation is right or wrong.

DasIch• 15 years ago

The fact that woman feel compelled to go to such lengths is a problem, the fact that this site (in part) exploits that may be a problem morally speaking but what are those women supposed to do instead? To which length would they feel compelled to go if they didn't have this option? It appears to be that this site provides at least some sort of security. I don't think anyone wants to see them "work the street" either.

I think the real problem is at an entirely different level and begs an entirely different set of questions:

- Why do these women feel compelled to do this?

- Do they have alternatives and if so why don't they use them?

- If they have usable alternatives how do we educate them about those?

- If they don't have alternatives should they be given financial help and by whom?

EDIT: How do I make this a proper list?

mst• 15 years ago

Why do you assume they "feel compelled" to do this? I mean, it seems highly likely in my opinion that some percentage (possibly/probably the vast majority) are doing so as a last or near-to-last resort, but "highly likely in my opinion" doesn't strike me as sufficient grounds to write up your questions with what seems like an implicit assumption that the percentage is as close to 100 as to make no useful difference.

Vivtek• 15 years ago

Wow. This is an astonishingly hypocritical screed coming from a college that costs $55,000 a year.

guard-of-terra• 15 years ago

"To test this proposition, make college free. If college girls were no longer desperately in need of money... When a young woman is in desperate need of money and a wealthy man comes along and uses that vulnerability to get sex, that’s the definition of exploitation."

I would say that the poor blamed site is less responsible for the exploitation happening, and the mre responsible is higher education being paid and pretty expensive in USA.

The site in question is a mere adaptation against a problem. And the problem have a lot more grave consequences than some victimless prostitution. Like having no future.

acroyear• 15 years ago

..and another thing - MIT brains should never engage in 'one-night stands'.

..and another thing - MIT brains should never buy a girl a drink unless they fully intend on making an emotional commitment.

(gimme a break)

Tichy2• 15 years ago

I thought desperate need is starving, freezing, facing eviction, not "struggling to pay for a college degree". Can't you put those degrees on hold for a while (not sure how the system works)?

wmf• 15 years ago

Many high-school students are told that you have to have a college degree to get any job above subsistence level, so student loans look like the only option.

delinka• 15 years ago

"...exploiting college women by taking advantage of their financial need..."

Let's replace 'college women' with 'software engineers.' Where's the difference? You need money, you have a skill set, you trade your skills for money. Is that not exploitation?

How about at the "lower" end of the wage pool? Are employers not "exploiting" teenagers with "financial need" by paying the teens minimum wage?

Lest you reply "but ANYONE can have sex," allow me to suggest that you might not have the ability to offer me sex in a manner for which I am willing to pay. I don't get this taboo against paying for sex.

EDIT: I am aware that a thread on this topic appeared while I was typing. It happens.

reader5000• 15 years ago

I think the basic argument the writer was failing to make is that it seems a bit of a waste of an MIT education for a guy to make a prostitution website.

More disturbing was the site's creator trying to align his site with MIT's admittedly idealistic "mission statement" with the obtusely reductionistic argument that a business wouldnt have customers if it didnt "create value".

It would have been less disturbing if the creator was just like "yeah it's kind of fucked up and sure some of the girls are going to regret doing it but hey it makes me a lot of money and thats enough for me."

Maybe the more interesting debate is, had MIT known this individual was going to spend his education on running a prostitution website, should it have admitted him?

johnnybgoode• 15 years ago

Leaving aside the arguments about prostitution for a moment, I think it's fair to say that a number of these women (not all) are uncomfortable with being prostitutes and are only doing it to pay for college. College is expensive largely because it is essentially the policy of this country that everyone, especially women[1], ought to have college degrees. We've seen how student tuition rises along with student loan limits; we've seen how students tend to go to college somehow no matter how expensive tuition is, how much debt they're getting into, or how important the degree is.

In these terms, far from being contrary to the spirit of universities like MIT, this type of prostitution arrangement service is in keeping with the proclaimed importance of college education. I.e., going to college is considered so important that many female college students are now willing to prostitute themselves (something most of them would not ordinarily do) to make sure they can keep attending.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=611440

dreww• 15 years ago

MIT - not a school known for its English or Journalism programs.

peteforde• 15 years ago

This "opinion piece" isn't very well written, and I'm genuinely unclear why it's on Hacker News.

Surely the author isn't the only hack journalist at MIT, and I doubt Mr. Wade is the only sex entrepreneur to emerge from MIT.

It's just not that interesting.

Hyena• 15 years ago

The reason that people feel prostitution is wrong is because they feel that no-consequences sex is wrong and so providing an inducement is doubly wrong, likewise, that doing anything immoral for money is worse than simply doing it.

All the various comments which go on and on about exploitation fail to see what actually makes most people uncomfortable about the situation.

anonymous2• 15 years ago

lol he mad.

The dark side of an MIT brain

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