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Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

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Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#121

Post by yannyu »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #96
cs702 wrote: post #21

Great 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…

> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization. In this framing of small organizations kept small by the government the largest organization is the State. Indeed in this framing the State's job is to control other organizations. While a…

Yes, but also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded the power of smaller organizations as a result.

You're correct to note that this phenomenon crosses all aspects of life in the US, whether talking about churches, PTAs, book clubs, business, forums, fraternities, and politics. There is hardly a part of our lives anymore that isn't intruded on by national narratives anymore. There is a very fundamental question of why that is, why it's allowed, and who benefits from it.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#122

Post by morkalork »

haunter wrote: post #19
UncleMeat wrote: post #5

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…

The so called Halo effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

If it didn't already have a name I'd call it the Noam Chomsky effect. No offense to Tao, it's just the first person that comes to mind

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#123

Post by wenc »

cs702 wrote: post #21

Great 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…

This is the classic tradeoff. (it's similar to the bias variance tradeoff, or fox and hedgehog analogy)

Monolithic systems are scalable and efficient when well-governed, but brittle under errors or bad leadership (e.g. China closing its ports in the 14th century had centuries-long repercussions).

Distributed systems are less efficient but more resilient to errors and poor governance.

It’s not always one or the other though. American founding fathers found a right set of tradeoffs in designing checks and balances (like separation of powers) and federalism structures that harden the system against bad governance (though this is under strain today).

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#124

Post by simpaticoder »

mediaman wrote: post #47
nostrademons wrote: post #28

Matches my experience. Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year; their actual preschool got bought by private equity and is struggling to survive. Longtime neighbors say the spirit of volunteerism in the upper schools is suffering. And institutions that were big civic centers when I grew up - freemasons, Boy/Girl/Cub/Brownie Scouts, 4-H, YMCA/YWCA, local bowling/skating rinks, etc - are now shadows of…

The reduction of volunteer organizations started long before COVID: "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000, and documents much of the same changes. The trend has been resistant to any particular link to localized economic ups or downs. Characterizing the 2023-2025 era (at least in the US) as "a time of scarcity" is divorced from any sort of factual reality; there is no quantitative data to support this idea and it seems…

There are different kinds of scarcity. I remember a time when people would "charge what it's worth" instead of "what they could get". Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a position to take advantage of a buyer. It was also the tail-end of the American era of employer-employee loyalty that went both ways. Those who famously violated those norms were looked down on, not admired. The American medical industry has been most visibly effected by this cultural shift, but it's everywhere. Scarcity isn't always about the availability of material goods. By that measure, we're doing better than ever!

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#125

Post by chermi »

cs702 wrote: post #70
rangestransform wrote: post #37

Earlier 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…

Great response. Yes, in some cases concentration may be desirable. However, I'm not persuaded it was necessary in the specific cases you mention: * Waymo: EVs were repeatedly killed by corporations highly in concentrated industries that would suffer disruption by EVs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F * TSMC: Wouldn't we all be better off if the entire world weren't so dependent on a single…

"Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance?" Notice how it was massive private spending that uncovered the power of scale in the first place. Would've been hard to say, get a federal grant for that. Would've probably happened gradually, with some gains from moderate scale justifying slightly larger grants for successively larger scale.

As for TSMC, the counterfactual assumes such technology would've happened regardless. Just because technology seems to happen inevitably, doesn't make it so. We have evidence of one approach (private) giving incredible results. And also some examples of public (in wartime) giving incredible results. I don't know the evidence for peacetime public incredible results. Maybe warpspeed?

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#126

Post by philipkglass »

serf wrote: post #89
woah wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding. I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we…

automating logistics lines does have military potential -- a waymo doesn't have to be holding bob and sara on the way to mcdonalds, it could also be long-hauling thousands of pounds of troop equipment and logistics needs. the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.

As I see it, the lineage of modern automated cars started with public funding from DARPA, with the first signs of success appearing in 2005:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo

That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon.

Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#127

Post by fraserharris »

dh2022 wrote: post #87
fraserharris wrote: post #50

Small organizations exist largely because volunteers will them to exist by donating their time. From our elementary school, it's clear the people who have time to volunteer are the stay-at-home parents. The dominance of two-income households eroded the small organizations, which created a market (distributing the costs over many more people) for large organizations to fill the void with a worse but market-serving pro…

Interesting take. What is the market-serving product you mentioned?

Whatever fills the void for people. ie: instead of bowling leagues, people watch TV or play video games. It's arguably a worse product because it doesn't fulfill the socialization or exercise needs of people, but it does fill the same block of time.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#128

Post by potato3732842 »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #104
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote.

Which seems to just devolve to "the lizards listen to whoever/whatever has money" at the high levels where the number of voters is very high.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#129

Post by bluGill »

woah wrote: post #100
bluGill wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say that, but when you point out that they could have that if they accept a lower standard of living they lose interest (and if possiple downvote or otherwise try to shout you down)

They want a trad farming lifestyle without technology but they get mad when you tell them that they have to work 4am-10pm in the summer and one child dies per winter

They also don't value "women's work" at all even though the women were working hard while watching those kids.

Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly

#130

Post by bluGill »

radlad wrote: post #114
lotsofpulp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this is impossible: >They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids If society also wants women to be able to have the same income earning opportunities as men and hence have financial freedom. Animals compete and compare themselves to others, and so everywhere, dual earning households will outcompete single earning households, and so most market participants will…

First of all, I don't know where this specific example is coming from or how it relates to what I said exactly. Secondly, when you look at the distribution of wealth in the US, and realize that the top 50% of Americans own 97.5% of the wealth, or that the top 1% owns over 30% of the country's wealth, or read a headline about Elon Musk's $1T pay package, conversations about "dual-earning families" versus "single-earni…

The whole thread is about people who want to have a single wage earner lifestyle. That is where this all comes from, and how it relates. You too can live a single wage earner lifestyle in the US, but it will mean significant compromises to your standard of living.
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