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Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
101–110 of 592 posts
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#102I 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…
like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources.
So this is 99% of the internet and a lot of what passes for journalism too. If you want official sources, you're limited to published papers. People typically don't have sources at hand when making opinions.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#103In the early 1800's Alexis de Tocqueville attributed a lot of American success to its small organizations/associations: "There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America.... In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one." [0] https://press.uc…
Tocqueville is the first person I thought of reading this!
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothi…
> Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Stock corporation, even if flawed, are accountable to their stock holders at least to an extent; thus your point > Private companies are accountable to no one clearly does not hold. Corporations, of course, can also be steered and course-corrected (shareholders meetings).
Corporations are in principle and practice accountable to those with more money. For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#105this seems to be oriented at a specific region of the world. my advice would be to encourage to provide information about what regions it affects would be included in the title to avoid people opening information irrelevant to them...
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#106I think too many people starting companies dream of getting bought rather than running a profitable business. They care far more about financial games rather than the complex details of say their products manufacturing that matter most (instead relying on a third party in china who arguably is the more important partner). I don’t know how saas relates to this problem. This is HN though so my complaints are ironic for…
The behavior wouldn't exist if the system didn't so heavily incentivize it. How many pizza place owners do you know with a net worth of $10,000,000 or higher, vs how many pizza place owners have ever tried?
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#107Great post, thought-provoking. Highly recommended. Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Here are just a few examples, from memory: * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local. * Banks cou…
- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b? - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? - Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all? There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades l…
All those things could still happen if private enterprises pooled their resources and did R&D together. This is already routinely happening in the car industry, where companies band together to develop new engines, to make the R&D expense hurt less.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.
> I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) You can also vote in the shareholders meeting.
If you have money. And the more you have the more vote matters both in practice and within the rules of the system.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids. Is it a naive way to view the world? Yes. But it resonates with people more than "ChatGPT is going to replace you."
It’s naive either in the way you put it or at the very least in your eyes. There is a lot to be said about the narcissism of innovators radically rethinking anything and everything traditional just because we think we can do better by our current metrics. If things continue to be advanced haphazardly just because these companies have budget capacity what’s to say that in a hundred years the bulk of humanity will have…
> Our humanity is potentially at stake if we don’t deliberately evolve this tech.
Username checks out.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b? - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? - Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all? There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades l…
Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids. Is it a naive way to view the world? Yes. But it resonates with people more than "ChatGPT is going to replace you."
>They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids.
That job market only existed in a handful of countries for a ~40 year period on all of human history.
Saying that should be the norm ignores that historically it wasn't and it may very well be that it isn't a sustainable basis for a society.