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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

#151

Post by vondur »

radlad wrote: post #66
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc. So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)

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 think California's system is a mess. It's been overrun with private interests bankrolling ballot initiatives and steamrolling them through. Add to that the Government itself sponsoring ballet initiatives that sale bonds to finance things that people don't understand really loans and it turns into a mess. I do like the ability to remove politicians from office via ballot though.

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

#152

Post by jmyeet »

What I find fascinating about these kinds of legitimate complaints and the comments here and elsewhere is nobody wants to talk about the root cause: capitalism. What I've come to realize is Americans in particular can't define capitalism but will die on the hill of defending it. Another casualty of the Red Scare. Let me explain.

People often like farmers markets. People like locally grown produce. People like Mom and Pop stores over big chains. These things aren't strictly true but they're generally true.

Walmart is capitalism. A farmer's market is socialism. Your local Italian restaurant run by a family of immigrants is socialism. Olive Garden is capitalism.

What's the difference? Easy. The worker's relationship to the means of production. If you buy from a local grower at a farmer's market, that grower likely owns their farm and any production facilities. If you buy from Walmart, you're paying the Walton family, Blackstone, Vanguard and all the other shareholders (or capital owners). That money leaves your community.

This is rent-seeking behavior. And it's exactly what private equity is. What additionally makes private equity profitable are the legal enclosures PE firms create to increase profits at your expense. So they'll buy a medical practice, which was previously owned by the doctors most likely, and jack up the prices to pay off the LBO and their investors. They then use noncompetes to stop those medical practitioners in that local area or state (depdning on what they can get away with).

At this stage of capitalism, every aspect of your life is getting financialized. Housing, health care, education, vets, food, water, utilities and so on. In every one of them is rent-seeking behavior to use the legal system to create an enclosure for them to jack up prices at your expense.

Terence is a smart guy but the word "capitalism" doesn't appear once. Instead there's lip service to the notion of "economies of scale". This is in part propaganda. Why? Because if it were really true, why do all these large companies need legal protections of their business? Like states who ban municipal broadband?

Secondly, Terence notes essentially the destruction of community. This is an intentional goal of neoliberalism because any form of community or collectivism is dangerous to a neoliberal project. Also, people spending time on community is lost profit for some company who would rather you were creating shareholder value instead.

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

#153

Post by sigilis »

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.

The structure of giant corporations today is like those centralized societies that were so inefficient in your example. The mandates to put AI in everything are one example of out of touch leadership throwing money and effort blindly towards things of dubious value. The sycophantic managers, afraid that they will be eliminated for insufficient fervor for the board’s latest fascination, will seize upon anything to prove themselves loyal and useful to those above them.

By moving the locus of control, whether it be considered the ceo or shareholders, so far from the actual business and implementing mandates based on whatever the current fancy is and meaningless targets of growth on such a giant scale you get the same sort of excesses.

The current system is marked by irrationality and uninformed and ill considered decision making. With smaller organizations and actual business competition they would be held to account by their competitors or just by running out of money before something catastrophic for the greater economy happened.

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

#154

Post by ezst »

ako wrote: post #75
thevillagechief wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also just a consequence of globalization. A small company cannot compete globally, which means less power for the US government abroad. So it's not in the interest of the US government to break up Apple or Google or Microsoft. Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.

Agreed, and that is why big countries should also be broken up. No more countries over 50m citizens. Many people in Europe don’t want the EU, but there’s really no alternative when competing with large countries like China and US.

> Many people in Europe don't want the EU

Those things Americans say about the rest of the world...

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

#155

Post by solatic »

Author posits a causal relationship in a zero-sum game that he provides no evidence for. Paraphrasing, that uncontrollable intangibles like technology gave slightly more power to individuals and much more power to large organizations at the expense of small organizations. Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own? Is there some zero-sum pie of power to be distributed? So if I go into the desert or wilderness, somewhere where there are no individuals, small organizations, or large organizations as of yet; that means it is literally impossible for any of them to come in, develop it, and make it a center of power?

There's a much simpler explanation. Most entities most of the time (with such probabilities increasing with the size and age of the entity) seek to defend and expand their power. The American political tradition held that the blessings of liberty would be granted and prosperity would grow if the power of the largest such entities were kept in check; first and foremost the British Crown, second the newfound American governments (at different levels), and eventually the largest private entities as well. But America abandoned its commitment to that tradition in all but name. America is no longer committed to property rights, free markets, free expression, or free association, such protections exist today only on paper. So every entity makes locally optimal decisions, leading society into a slow collapse.

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

#156

Post by vmg12 »

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…

> but who decides how those resources are deployed

The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.

> We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects

And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?

Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.

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

#157

Post by Karrot_Kream »

stego-tech wrote: post #117

I would argue that the role of small orgs has shrunk significantly from the perspective of the majority, but grown in importance and impact for groups outcast from that majority. The example I like to trot out is the amalgamation of furry and queer persons into a larger unit when collaborating at scale, but otherwise fostering positive impacts in smaller groups. The response to their successes has been attacks by lar…

I've found this to be a funny framing on the left because it always ignores what happens when the group stops being outcast. It's always a framing based around the current time and conveniently orients itself around the mores of the current era. Anime and otaku interest groups used to be like this in the '80s and '90s, generally ideologically aligned, creating parallel economies, in response to attack and scorn from the outside. Then it became mainstream. The stigma in liking anime went away. And with it the pressure to organize against the mainstream.

We need to think about durable small organizations, not ones that are based around the social mores of the moment. The magic of a neighborhood group is that as long as people live in an area together there will be neighbors.

FWIW opposition-based interest groups have a long history in pretty much every state we've ever had records of.

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

#158

Post by pipo234 »

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 one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization

True, though (at least in principle) a democratic government is a very special organization because it (again, in principle) exists only because it's the people's will.

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

#159

Post by latexr »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #7

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.

> if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a preference that disables dark mode?

Yes. But note that if your account is on another instance, that wouldn’t immediately help you when you open the page; you’d still see the default theme for that instance. However, you could simply copy the link and paste it on the search box of your own instance to see the post with your chosen theme (including font and colour).

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

#160

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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