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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

#191

Post by woah »

paddleon wrote: post #162
woah wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

The cold war. Putting a man on the moon was meant to demonstrate how easily we could put a nuke on Moscow.

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

#192

Post by 1270018080 »

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…

Were you born pre-industrial revolution?

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

#193

Post by nostrademons »

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…

There's a line in one of my kids' Bluey books that says "Do you want to win, or do you want the game to continue? Because sometimes you can't have both."

I feel like that's sorta where we are in America. In the glory days of the 50s-70s, people wanted the game to continue - they were willing to sacrifice a little bit of winning for the sake of keeping the system intact. Then starting in the 80s, people gradually started sacrificing the game for the win, doing things that they knew would eventually lead to the collapse of everything so that they could come out on top. This is corrosive. Once it starts becoming apparent, everybody will start sacrificing the system as a whole for their own personal gain, because the system is dead anyway.

I think we're right on the brink of everyone realizing that the system is now dead, and bad things will likely come of it.

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

#194

Post by nradov »

yannyu wrote: post #121
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded the power of smaller organizations as a result. You're correct to note that this phenomenon crosses all aspects of life in the US, whether talking about churches, PTAs, book clubs, bu…

Cities (and other types of local governments) never really had any legal rights on their own. They have always been creatures of the states.

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

#195

Post by derefr »

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…

I would point out that, regardless of the US federal government's stance on monopolies, any legislation or civil action toward that end would be far less applicable today, because of globalization.

If your country prevents any domestic tech companies from becoming trillion-dollar behemoths, but such things are still permitted in at least one other country with a similarly-sized economy to yours, then that just means that all your smaller domestic tech companies are going to be outcompeted by the foreign trillion-dollar behemoth selling into your domestic market.

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

#196

Post by buellerbueller »

DSingularity wrote: post #80
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."

It’s naive either in the way you put it or at the very least in your eyes. There is a lot to be said about the narcissism of innovators radically rethinking anything and everything traditional just because we think we can do better by our current metrics. If things continue to be advanced haphazardly just because these companies have budget capacity what’s to say that in a hundred years the bulk of humanity will have…

Our humanity is at stake no matter how we evolve this tech, because the tech evolves our humanity. It's not a one-way street. Culture, not genetics, is the dominant human evolutionary force today:

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article-abstract...

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

#197

Post by computably »

billy99k wrote: post #138
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…

"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 pro…

> 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'.

The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for the greater good - you yourself note "big pharma" research, and in fact historically the US gov provided more than half the funding of all basic research nationally.

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

Shinkansen.

Anyways, governments across the world are driven by incentives that do recognize long-term economic/strategic interests. You can see it with AI, with climate change, even with the broad desire to create a "homegrown" Silicon Valley.

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

#199

Post by simpaticoder »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #186
simpaticoder wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

I associate the Hacker News forum with authentic, reasoned debate and sharing of personal experience and perspective. Your comment wants to engage in a kind of rhetorical pugilism that is very common in other forums, but is uncommon here. It is a style I personally dislike and find counter-productive for every topic, inflaming emotions and driving division rather than synthesizing a variety of perspectives into an interesting whole.

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

#200

Post by Karrot_Kream »

roughly wrote: post #181
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

I'm actually not advocating for a reduction in the size of government bodies and I'm a bit frustrated about it. I'm not advocating anything about the size of government bodies (though naturally I have my feelings.) I'm confused why people seem to be intuiting this. I'm in fact doubly frustrated because I feel that people seem to be injecting modern political points into something that I feel predates many of our modern problems.

My point is: the social problems of disenfranchisement that come from large organizations are a property of their size. They may differ in that they're volunteer based, profit oriented, non-profit in a capitalist system, democratically organized, or several hundred or thousand more distinctions. But I'm going to feel just as disconnected from my national government as I will from the workings of Google as a small shareholder as I will from the NBA as someone that plays pick-up on a basketball court. The experience of going to a minor league baseball game is much more personal than going to a major MLB game.

To me the important issue is: the US specifically and the Anglophone West more broadly is seeing a decrease in its small institutions. This decrease predates the modern internet and social media landscape (see Bowling Alone.) I have many, many questions around this. Why is this happening? What is its effect on society? How can we reverse this? Is this something we can reverse?

It's an important issue to me because this trajectory is very different outside of the Anglophone West. Japan for example is not seeing the same decline in its small organizations as the US is, despite population reduction. If anything Japanese life is dominated much more by huge conglomerates than US life.

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