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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

#131

Post by [deleted] »

bluGill wrote: post #130
radlad wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#132

Post by kansface »

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…

People's time is conserved, so a couple of questions: 1. What percentage of decline can be attributed to social media purely as a time sink? 2. What percentage of decline can be attributed to increased political polarization encroaching/claiming/colonizing formerly and nominally neutral spaces?

One remarkable counter example in my neck of the woods is the Orthodox Church, which has done extraordinarily well since covid, picking up tons of converts. Of course, people themselves are conserved, too. That growth has come at the expense of protestant churches which in my reckoning sorta stopped being churches during covid. I'd estimate 1/3 of my local congregation is non-Greek converts who seemingly have no intention of learning the language (services regularly run 1.5 to 2 hours, largely in koine Greek)!

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

#133

Post by radlad »

bluGill wrote: post #130
radlad wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, I missed the second part of this sentence:

> 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.

I stand by what I wrote above. I agree with you that it is possible today at a reduced QoL and I also would like to see society distribute wealth more equitably, which might also achieve the goal at a higher QoL.

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

#134

Post by masfuerte »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #95
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…

I worry that theres a cyclical nature to it all. When society has smaller organizations, people saw what community organizing looked like, and folks were far more likely to have a hand being leaders simply by virtue of there being so many businesses when they were smaller and more distributed. What terrifies me is a pocket thesis I have that the local leadership—the local activating & bringing people to a purpose— va…

I mostly agree, but is it cyclical? There doesn't seem to be any force pushing back against this social atomization.

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

#135

Post by prngl »

Certainly onto something but misses how much large organizations are actually controlled by small organizations operating in the “large complex system” environment. It is only individuals and small organizations that have agency at all. Large organizations and large complex systems are both emergent, one with hierarchical control, and one with distributed control. What has really changed is how unequal small organizations have become in their influence and power. The small cadres of people at the “top” (of organizations, media, government, tech, etc) control/influence more and more, not only at the expense of other small organizations (power is zero sum) but also at the expense of the decentralized mechanism, ie the large complex system becomes increasingly hierarchically/centrally controlled (vs distributed/decentralized control).

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

#136

Post by Karrot_Kream »

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…

> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.

I think the biggest flowering of organizations both small and large happened in the post-WWII period. In the US sure that was a very hopeful time. But many of the other belligerents were reduced to rubble and Germany and Japan were occupied by foreign powers. Yet organizations did still sprout in this period of, what we modern people would probably think as, utter despondency. I think there's more to it than just time and security.

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

#137

Post by latexr »

rangestransform wrote: post #37
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…

- 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 of the things you mentioned serve the primary purpose of making the rich and powerful more rich and powerful, not improving the lives of the majority.

We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary when we’re using them to waste away watching six hours of ten seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue, convincing people to kill themselves, making cocky ignorant assholes more sure of themselves, and increasing the spread of lies and misinformation.

Humanity would probably benefit from moving slower, not faster.

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

#138

Post by billy99k »

thewebguyd wrote: post #48
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…

Large projects need resources, but who decides how those resources are deployed, to what end, and who benefits from them is the important part. All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society. We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companie…

"All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society."

Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'.

"We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc."

Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this.

Even big pharma supplies the world. The rest of the world with socialized medicine create knock-offs at a fraction of the cost, because they didn't have to spend decades going through testing and billions of dollars developing it.

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

#139

Post by radlad »

potato3732842 wrote: post #128
_aavaa_ wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some governments restrict the extent to which "lizards" can use their money to gain air time, etc.

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

#140

Post by radlad »

ls612 wrote: post #115
tavavex wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th century it is that societies that gave more private control over how resources were used did better than those that had more state control over how resources were used. Perhaps in the 21st century that has changed, but for me that falls under the "extraordinary claims" category with the corresponding evidence requirements.

> If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th century it is that societies that gave more private control over how resources were used did better than those that had more state control over how resources were used.

In some metrics (such as GDP), yes. And in other metrics (such as wealth inequality and health care), the answer is less clear-cut.

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