11–20 of 592 posts
I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).
Recall the second Highlander film that Connor MacLeod was given the gift of telepathic empathy. He is able to hear people's thoughts and feel what they feel. He uses that to help scientists collaborate.
We don't have telepathic empathy in reality, but image using the LLM's contextual search across research projects? We could potentially have some type of approximation.
This would then allow smaller groups to make a significant contribution to society. It would go against the idea in the Mythical Man Month of adding more people, what we see in larger orgs.
I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes. I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep . Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are…
50-years ago, if you wanted to:
- read the news (local paper),
- get coffee (local coffee shop)
- get groceries (local grocery)
- buy tires (local tire dealer)
You’d get this from your local small business … and this created local small community groups.
But now between the internet and national distribution of goods/services - all those small local companies are gone (or has a much reduced role as Tao would say) … because CNN, Starbucks, Kroger, Discount Tire has replaced the need for those small local businesses.
I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes. I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep . Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are…
Yeah but this doesn’t invalidate his take. You’re just saying his take is as good as anyone’s which can still be 1000% correct.
When the topics are entire subfields (the development of multinational corporations, the development of states, the development of communication networks) it makes sense to build takes off of actual research.
OT question: if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a preference that disables dark mode? I would like to read this post and others by Tao, but I can't stand light-on-black text. It's insane to enforce something like that by default when every study since the 1990s has shown that it impairs readability on a computer screen.
I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes. I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep . Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are…
I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes. I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep . Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are…
I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes. I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep . Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are…
I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes. I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep . Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are…
This is ad hominem. He presents meaningful ideas and we would all benefit from you responding to the ideas.
The history of communications networks (just one of the many enormous topics he covers here) is a whole field with piles of academics publishing constantly.