171–180 of 592 posts
Could we perhaps remove "Terence Tao" from the title? It feels somewhat disingenuous to lean on their name to bolster the argument. While someone in this thread is criticized for an ad hominem attack, this risks being the opposite, a kind of pro hominem. The arguments should stand on their own merit without invoking authority in the title, no?
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> 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.
Sure a democratic government derives its legitimacy from the people's will but not from your will, and that is the role of the small community organization.
Earlier 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."
>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.
Also worth mentioning that in that time period the rest of the world was recovering from devastation. Either the devastation of two world wars or the devastation of imperialism.
Besides the main identified contributors of personalized media, suburbanization, real estate prices, and the increase of dual-income households, I've started to suspect that government-funding of organizations has also had a significant impact.
In the past, organizations had to raise funds from their communities. As government grants for organizations increased, the cost floor was raised on all organizations (i.e. fundraising, rents, salaries, etc.), and led to the professionalization of what was previously handled by volunteers.
In the same way that the 30-year mortgage and zero-interest-rate policy made it harder for individuals to raise the initial funds to buy a home (by enabling an increase in home prices, making it easier to buy a home if you already own one), I suspect access to government capital has made it harder for small organizations to remain small while they compete with more professional (read "larger") organizations for their members' time and money.
And this is a problem because as Terence Tao points out, "...[Small Groups] also fill social and emotional needs, and the average participant in such groups can feel connected to such groups and able to have real influence on their direction."
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…
Did we have more telecom innovation when Bell was huge or after that?
* Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans.
* Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not contributing to growing the economy (but creating money out of thin air to flood the market with mortgages does increase housing prices...).
One way to solve this problem is to break up the big banks and incentivize small regional banks to lend to productive small businesses. Worse for the bankers but better for the economy. Incidentally, this is exactly China's strategy, but as long as big banks are paying politicians millions for luncheon talks, it's unlikely to happen here.
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…
If you both believe capitalism is evil and that no one wants to talk about it (while you do), you should definitely rethink the circles you frequent. And we’re discussing a Mastodon post, of all platforms, just search for #capitalism and you’ll find no end of critiques.
See also Wikipedia if you want more sources.
Earlier 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."
>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.
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…
> 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 massi…
The current system selected people that have maximized shareholder value and financially engineered it into other financial assets that provide power under the capitalist system. This includes private equity services that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to avoid the consequences of the externalities of their economic activity.
> 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?
Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a profit motive behind every large government initiative when the profit motive substracts value away from society at large.
Earlier 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."
>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.