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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

#161

Post by roughly »

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…

Notably all of these choices and policies didn’t fall from the trees, but were come to after seeing what happened in their absence.

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

#162

Post by paddleon »

woah wrote: post #79
thewebguyd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

Wait, could you remind me what war was going on when NASA took us to the moon?

Could you remind me what war was going on when the CDC eradicated malaria from the United States?

Could you remind me what war was going on when FDR build our basic social safety nets?

Broadly speaking, people have 3 ways to organize large groups: business, government, and (organized) religion. Each has strengths and weakness. To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch.

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

#163

Post by addcommitpush »

See also [0]

    This paper proposes that idiosyncratic firm-level shocks can explain an important
    part of aggregate movements and provide a microfoundation for aggregate shocks. Ex-
    isting research has focused on using aggregate shocks to explain business cycles, argu-
    ing that individual firm shocks average out in the aggregate. I show that this argument
    breaks down if the distribution of firm sizes is fat-tailed, as documented empirically.
    The idiosyncratic movements of the largest 100 firms in the United States appear to
    explain about one-third of variations in output growth. This “granular” hypothesis sug-
    gests new directions for macroeconomic research, in particular that macroeconomic
    questions can be clarified by looking at the behavior of large firms. This paper’s ideas
    and analytical results may also be useful for thinking about the fluctuations of other
    economic aggregates, such as exports or the trade balance.
[0] https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~xgabaix/papers/granular.pdf

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

#164

Post by ViktorRay »

sigilis wrote: post #153
ls612 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

This is an excellent point. Thank you for posting it.

Large monopolistic mega-corporations do tend to have the same issues that one would see in the old 20th century planned economies like the Soviet Union.

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

#165

Post by ferguess_k »

Using the feudal system as an analogy. Smaller aristocracies cannot fight larger ones without the support of king.

Does the king support smaller aristocracies nowadays? No. The king works with the larger aristocracies to eat everyone else.

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

#166

Post by actionfromafar »

radlad wrote: post #139
potato3732842 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Lizards must not obstructed in any way! Consume! Obey!

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

#167

Post by paddleon »

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…

> 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.

Not sure it is bad times which drives this. Plenty of examples in human history of the tendency of humans to form small local support groups when times get tough.

Volunteerism has been on a massive decline my entire life, good decades and bad decades. There is some other force in our current social order which is tearing it apart.

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

#168

Post by tavavex »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #88
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…

> 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).

1. Not all companies are publicly traded, and they don't have to be

2. The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money. The value of your 'vote' is proportional to how much money you have. This isn't a democracy or some sort of equal system that will converge on serving people, it will converge on serving money. I'm genuinely baffled at how "you get one vote per person" and "your value and voting power is directly tied to your net worth" are in any way comparable. You and I have zero effective power over them, and always will.

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

#169

Post by monknomo »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #67
jstummbillig wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon I do! Unironically: AI assisted software development – and please, we can call that anything else, we do not need to confuse it with Serious software development. Just the amount of super simple software (Apps Script, Office Script) that baseline tech savy people can now/soon build to enhance what they think their business needs are, without the impossible…

> Unironically: AI assisted software development Downstream reliance AI companies is not "smaller" in any sensible manner

There is a chance that local models get good enough and efficient enough that we won't need the large companies, so much as a reasonable graphics card.

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

#170

Post by pphysch »

Social graphs used to be constrained by individual human capacity, roughly parametrized by Dunbar's Number.

Nowadays, a single commodity computer server can store information and relationships for every single living human.

You can have a direct economic relationship with a factory 5,000 miles away. This used to be utterly impossible, and required many degrees of primary human interaction through a chain of relatively small organizations.

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