NelsonMinar

But that'd be the easiest thing in the world to own up to. "I've grown and changed a lot in my thinking and am now more open minded. I regret the harm I caused my colleagues and the LGBT community". The fact he's not saying that speaks volumes.

I worked at the Santa Fe Institute in 1995 when you wrote your Scientific American article about the place. It was hugely dispiriting at the time and along with a bunch of other stuff really set the research institute back.

My question is, what do you think of that article now, after 25 years?

In this 2017 NYTimes article there's a long discussion about the difficulty of getting an FDA waiver for the variety of sizes you sell. Do you still have problems with regulation? Or is that mostly solved now?

Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I was just a young student at the time and it definitely felt mean then. Later on (after a stint at the MIT Media Lab) I came to understand the value in deflating hyped up science although it does have a cost too.

The substantive criticism does seem spot-on though; SFI has not revolutionized the science of everything. But it has made some valuable contributions, particularly the community it has enabled. For me, the systems and complexity background has served me well in my distributed systems career.

No surprise, either. It's too easy to work to deny people their civil rights and then just not let anyone hold you accountable for it.