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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

#251

Post by TehCorwiz »

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).

No, a corp is only accountable to their board and the LARGEST shareholder. A single person can control an otherwise publicly traded company. Zuckerberg, for example. And not everyone can afford to spend their earnings owning companies. So what you get with a democracy is that power is spread out by default rather than concentrated in a single element. Default enfranchisement rather than the polar opposite. One at least nods politely at the idea of upward social mobility in passing while the other eschews all pretense as to the status of its party invitation.

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

#252

Post by balamatom »

rangestransform wrote: post #37
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…

- 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…

>- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all?

Would anyone even be calling for those, if their core purpose wasn't to facilitate the concentration of capital?

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

#253

Post by avmich »

rangestransform wrote: post #37
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…

- 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…

I would compare "larger businesses" with "socialistic planning system" while "smaller businesses" with "free market economy". There are examples when centralized planning got good results - NASA's Apollo project is an example. There are also examples when market economy - eventually, in the long term, not short - prevailed: the Cold War is an example here.

It's also quite possible the analogy is flawed though.

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

#254

Post by hibikir »

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…

It's the natural result of tech gaining value, and a lot of it staying closed source: Once you are scaling, scaling very high isn't that difficult once you have the best offering, and when you are big you can do optimizations that would be seen as wasteful at a small scale. streaming service that has wide reach isn't that different when it is dealing with 10 million or 100 million subscribers, but dedicating a guy for 3 months to save 2% of your costs through some arcane fiddling is much more profitable when you have 100 million, and then your costs per subscriber can be lower.

We also have plenty of problems that are natural monopolies. Take, for instance, credit card fraud detection. High level detection involves giving a risk score to a transaction. I sure can give a better fraud score if I see almost every transaction this card makes, and I have a very high percentage of visibility of all transactions in the world, than if I had to do the calculation by just knowing what, say, my boardgaming website has seen. The smaller contender has to be so much better algorithmically to be able to compete with a massive advantage in data quantity and quality.

And that's the real problem we have with monopolies right now: The bigger company often doesn't have a huge advantage because they are making extra shady deals, or they have to compete less, but because being bigger makes them more efficient in some ways that are completely above board.

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

#255

Post by Muromec »

raincole wrote: post #56
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…

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.

Is it even possible en masse in a market where you are competing against double income no kids kind households?

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

#256

Post by cs702 »

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…

I'd agree that too much concentration of power in any single organization, public or private, without any checks or balances, is a bad idea. As the saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Historically, the executive branch of the US federal government has been kept more or less in check by (a) the legislative and judicial branches, and (b) voters.

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

#258

Post by Muromec »

tbirdny wrote: post #180
com2kid wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Before WWII, middle-class married women were strongly discouraged from working for pay outside the home. If their husbands could provide, "respectable" women were expected to stay home as homemakers.

>middle-class

right here is the problem

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

#259

Post by chermi »

jmyeet wrote: post #232
chermi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 feeling…

> Lolwut? This is why I used this example because you've just demonstrated that you don't know what socialism is. There is a myth that capitalism is "free markets". First, there's no such thing as a free market. All markets require regulation to function. Second, markets exist in every organization of the economy and existed long before capitalism existed. We have records of such from Sumeria from 4000+ years ago. In…

Oh boy you got me good! How could I have fallen for such a clever ruse. This actually isn't complicated. Who owns the farm + stand? Again, maybe you meant farming collective, one last chance.

I don't really know who you think you're arguing against, but free markets can exist as a theoretical idealization, you know, like some other systems I'm guessing you're fond of.

Btw, if a farmers stand is socialism, then certainly I can say Walmart with subsidization via food stamps most definitely isn't capitalism.

Every actual fact you state I agree with. As for your theories and straw men, I'll leave to you.

Just as an exercise, try to run through the mental trajectory that got you to your rant on free markets and Sumeria and shit. What is going on there? You have some enemy in your head your imagining you're dunking on?

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

#260

Post by porridgeraisin »

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…

> war, moon

You cannot be serious, the whole thing was called the space race for a reason. Space tech has always always been primarily a military venture, and it remains so to this day.

> Malaria

Glad you asked, chloroquine was developed during WW2 for soldiers, and chloroquine resistance of soldiers in Vietnam drove the creation of mefloquine and artemisinin.

> Social safety nets

Not a science breakthrough

> To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch

I 100% agree. It's not "everything ever created was because of war". It is rather that "a lot of difficult amazingly unimaginable things i.e 'root node science' would have never been created had it not been for war, and this is what unlocked an exponential number of amazing things we have today". We would certainly have scientific advancement even without war, just exponentially less.

Also, we need to count derivative works of these works as primarily existing because of war reasons too.

This is not an American specific or 20th century specific phenomenon either. Science and war have always been friends, and to my point, with reciprocal benefits, not just war benefiting from science. For example, Fourier was part of napoleons egypt expedition. Euler worked for the Russian Navy, and even has a direct book "Neue Grundsätze der Artillerie" (“New Principles of Artillery”) (1745). Lagrange similar: a lot of his projectile analyses arose out of problems posed by the Turin artillery school.

Most crucially, Euler and Lagrange and many other household names were entirely funded by the military complex. Ecole polytechnique which employed Lagrange was a military engineering school[1], and St. petersburg academy which employed euler[2] was heavily supported by the navy and army.

That said, there are also examples of people creating science for purely fun -- most of gauss' work, galileo's work and a lot of 1300-1600 era indian mathematics arose purely out of astronomy studies, and, I suppose, rolling random crap down a slope for the funsies(galileo) and visions from a goddess (ramanujan). I'm sure there are a gajillion other examples too, of "root node" science being created for non-war reasons. But it's also true that a massively larger number of insanely cool things we have today only ever existed because of war.

[1] and it remains under the French defense ministry [whatever it's called] to this day!

[2] fun story, he was employed by both Frederick the great in berlin and by Catherine I in St. petersburg at different points in his life. He was even accused of espionage.

Multiple edits: looked through my notes and edited some inaccuracies.

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