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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

#181

Post by roughly »

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…

> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters

This is exactly the key core distinction. The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors. It’s imperative, therefore, that it be democratic and representative. Notably, part of the instinct to break up other large organizations is to prevent them from assembling enough resources to have a supersized impact on the state - the problem with monopoly is that monopolies buy out their competition and neuter regulations, the problem with wealth disparity is the ultra wealthy are sufficiently powerful to move the state in the direction they want it to go.

I agree with you generally regarding reducing the overall size of governing bodies and I agree with Terrence about the benefits of small organizations and the drawbacks of large specifically around the investment and perceived ownership of members of those organizations, but having a small state fundamentally requires having small organizations everywhere - and anti-monopoly, antitrust, and anti-wealth concentration - because for the state to be democratic and representative, it must be the most powerful organization in the area it covers, otherwise it’s just a tool for the more powerful to use.

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

#182

Post by nradov »

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…

Major weapons development (or dual use) programs — especially for weapons of mass destruction — probably have to be government run due to national security concerns. But the notion that governments can effectively manage technology R&D projects is ludicrous. Look at what happened when Japan's MITI tried to run a Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project: total failure and waste of tax money.

In general, economic central planning is a dead end. People keep trying to claim that it would be more efficient or benefit society but it just doesn't work. Bureaucrats and politicians can't be trusted with resource allocation decisions.

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

#183

Post by ux266478 »

ezst wrote: post #154
ako wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Nothing of what you quoted is incorrect.

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

#184

Post by hansvm »

vmg12 wrote: post #156
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…

> 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…

"Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.

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

#185

Post by aleph_minus_one »

thewebguyd wrote: post #99
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) You can also vote in the shareholders meeting.

You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.

> You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.

In a democratic country, only the people who have citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote.

You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.

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

#186

Post by doctorpangloss »

simpaticoder wrote: post #124
mediaman wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

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

#187

Post by chermi »

jmyeet wrote: post #152

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…

"A farmer's market is socialism."

Lolwut? Here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism.

Are you thinking of farming collectives?

Also, farmers markets (today, in the West) are basically luxuries for wealthy people. In the real world, we try to feed as many people as possible for as cheaply as possible. But sure, let's grow everything locally and let people starve, because farmers markets give us fuzzy warm feelings of a utopia that never existed. And capitalism bad.

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

#188

Post by Karrot_Kream »

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…

To add to this, I think a lot of people are reading this post to be some sort of reflection of economic organization when I (and others I suspect) think it's a post on social organization. There's always overlap but, as you say, it's a very dense field.

I do think there's a dearth of scholarship in the decline of social organizing in the US. There's studies that show the decline but other than Bowling Alone every subsequent book I've read or skimmed on the topic uses this decline to rail off against their boogeyman of choice, more set dressing than problem to consider.

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

#189

Post by buellerbueller »

com2kid wrote: post #110
raincole wrote: post #56

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.

Reverting to the norm means most of us die as infants and toddlers or in childbirth, while a wealthy handful live lives of immense privilege.

I'll take the parent commenter's option, thanks.

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

#190

Post by tavavex »

HPsquared wrote: post #150
_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.

Corporations are still subject to law and ultimately under the control of the government. The current set of rules just gives them a fair amount of freedom to operate.

This only makes sense in a spherical-cow-in-vacuum world where government and business are somehow barred from communicating with one another. In reality, the "current set of rules" in many countries is a result of companies relentlessly trying to and succeeding in finding ways of influencing government. Political advertisements, campaign funding, lobbying, corruption, underhanded favoritism, countless other methods that are an amazing RoI for any business large enough to engage in it. Large enough corporations are resembling governments more and more in terms of value and power, and they use all of that power to endlessly try to bend the rest of society into serving their profit motive.
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