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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

#261

Post by softwaredoug »

Is there data to back this up? I'm skeptical.

I see all kinds of "small organizations" forming in Slack communities, subreddits, and other online spaces. Some might be described as influencer driven communities like substack. Or audiences of a specific podcast. And so on. It's almost never been easier to participate in one of these "organizations".

Even locally, where I live, the school board, city council, local advocacy groups, etc are heavily attended. We have a local group advocating for immigrant rights. Another YIMBY group. Another group that argues against the YIMBYs. PTA meetings. Another group that advocates for the homeless.

I'd say its true that many are in the "universe" of one political sphere (in my case left-leaning). But that does not mean they have been wholly subsumed by "The Left", they often disagree and fight against "Left" politicians. And often "The Left" is not a uniform thing in a city with differing interests and stakeholders.

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

#262

Post by azemetre »

999900000999 wrote: post #206

Tribe is a fantastic book that goes into this, fundamentally most humans exist best when they have some form of status in their community. This could be as simple as a small community club where your assigned a role like treasurer or something, my grandmother did this when she was young. People actually know you and care about your problems . For various reasons, these groups just aren't as significant anymore. There…

I've recently finished Tribe by Sebastian Junger. I highly recommend it as well.

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

#263

Post by thegrimmest »

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…

> The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors

I'm not sure this is a universal definition. Some of us just want a state that maintains a monopoly on violence, and otherwise does not constrain peaceful actors. An administration of peaceful coexistence rather than a mandate for cooperation. While administrating the peace does require some absolute power, it is required narrowly, to prosecute true crime, defend from outside threats, and resolve disputes.

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

#264

Post by marris »

ls612 wrote: post #115
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…

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.

Not sure why this obvious fact is being down-voted. The comments above don't mention that the killer feature of private orgs is the ease of exit, and therefore, the enormous risk of failure. This remains the dominant feature of private orgs, even if we can argue about certain orgs on the margin. For every example of "users are locked into either the Apple or the Android phone platform", I can think of several crappy Google and Apple products which failed and were withdrawn from the market (e.g. Google Wave).

It is much easier to exit from or steer a private org. For example, it is very possible to run a company which caters to 10 percent of a consumer base by providing niche products which may be slightly more expensive. Those 10 percent will simply consume less of some other good. It is very difficult to do an analogous thing at the state level, because we generally don't get individual "ticket books" which we can "spend" on more of one state service vs. another. The democratic model is that you first get 50+ percent support and then your coalition decides how resources are allocated for almost everyone.

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

#265

Post by chermi »

cs702 wrote: post #250
chermi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance?" Notice how it was massive private spending that uncovered the power of scale in the first place. Would've been hard to say, get a federal grant for that. Would've probably happened gradually, with some gains from moderate scale justifying slightly larger grant…

The cost of developing GPT-2 and GPT-3 was on the order of millions of dollars, well within the budget of most tech organizations. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 for the total compute invested in them. OpenAI had raised only a few tens of millions in donations at the time, as a non-profit organization. The increase in performance of computation has been happening for so many decades now that it's been given nam…

Fair point, the first few gens weren't that expensive. And like I said I'm certain the scaling would've been discovered soon with some time lag. But the transformer paper was 2017, right? Just from a benefit -to- society perspective, assuming LLMs are a net positive in terms of productivity, perhaps reducing time to drug approval or improving government efficiency (1).. Isn't getting there just one year earlier worth it, if the gains really are that big? We could be talking lives saved via faster approvals or more efficient spending. My point is that a private company made it happen faster, as evidenced by them doing it first. A good thing sooner is valuable.

(1) I'm convinced at the very least LLMs can feasibly speed up paperwork.

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

#266

Post by 9rx »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #225
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? An easy comparison would be a world where the both partners work 20hrs/wk each, for a total of 40hrs, with the rest devoted towards, eg, childcare. That addresses the reason for working (eg, pursuit of interests outside family-raising), while also eschewing the need for full time childcare.

You're basically talking about the shift system. A works for 20hrs a week, B works for 20hrs a week. A spends more time with spouse(A), who does the same at their workplace, and B spends more time with spouse(B), who does the same at their workplace. Sounds great. But, it falls apart to the same logic GP proposed, that the reason you have dual income households is that they are richer than single income ones. Househo…

> But looking at reality, it seems like that limit is very high!

Is it? 40hrs is quite low by historical standards. 100 hours per week was the norm in the pre-industrial era, and 60+ hours per week was still typical during the Industrial Revolution.

Labour advocacy groups were promoting 40hrs, much like the four day workweek is today, for a long time, but 40hrs didn't actually became the norm until the Great Depression, where capping hours was a tool used to try and spread the work out amongst more workers to try and resolve the high unemployment problem.

> But if you go down to the lower rungs, people are more inclined to compare themselves with peers and tradeoff double hours for the next rung

While that certainly happens, it seems most people in the lower rungs are quite content to work 40 hours per week, even though working more would put them in a much better position. I dare say you even alluded to that when you chose 40 hours in your example.

It is not like 40hrs is the perfect tradeoff or something. As mentioned before, labour advocacy groups have already decided that 32hrs is even better. I expect many people end up working 40 hours just because "that's what you do" and never give it another thought.

> the reason you have dual income households is that they are richer than single income ones.

If we assume both participants work 40 hours per week then it is true that the same household would have less income if one party stopped accruing an income and all else remained equal. But that doesn't necessarily hold true once you start playing with other variables. A higher income party, for example, may enable the household to have a higher income if they work 60 hours per week while the other party takes care of other life responsibilities to enable those longer hours.

A dual income household isn't necessarily the most fruitful option. In fact, marriage — which, while declining, is still the case in most non-single households — assumes that a single income is the ideal option. It seems that "that's what you do" without any further thought is still the primary driving force.

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

#267

Post by Ifkaluva »

fraserharris wrote: post #127
dh2022 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting take. What is the market-serving product you mentioned?

Whatever fills the void for people. ie: instead of bowling leagues, people watch TV or play video games. It's arguably a worse product because it doesn't fulfill the socialization or exercise needs of people, but it does fill the same block of time.

I guess it’s worse in the sense of providing health benefits, but it’s better in the sense that more people would freely choose it if given the choice.

It’s the same as junk food, people will freely choose it over healthier options.

Basically, products on the free market optimize for what people prefer to buy, and people’s preferences are shaped by evolution to a world in which physical rest and high-calorie foods were scarce. This makes us mismatched to the modern landscape.

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

#268

Post by huijzer »

kadushka wrote: post #227
huijzer wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government actively made efforts to keep private organizations from becoming too dominant. They seem to do the opposite now because small businesses can expect little support from the government (and surely no big subsidies like the large players are getting in for example the Stargate joint venture). Especially COVID was seen by many small business owners are extremely to…

What subsidies is Stargate project getting from US government?

I remembered incorrectly. They are getting "emergency declarations" support:

> Donald Trump called it "the largest AI infrastructure project in history", and he indicated that he would use emergency declarations to expedite the project's development, particularly regarding energy infrastructure.

So it might not be strictly a subsidy, but it surely is taxpayer-support.

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

#269

Post by pnathan »

fraserharris wrote: post #50

Small organizations exist largely because volunteers will them to exist by donating their time. From our elementary school, it's clear the people who have time to volunteer are the stay-at-home parents. The dominance of two-income households eroded the small organizations, which created a market (distributing the costs over many more people) for large organizations to fill the void with a worse but market-serving pro…

I would concur. It's my observation from 20 years of watching and participating - the volunteers are the retired, the wealthy, the underemployed, and the stay at home parent. "Normal" working people are not volunteering and handling the complexity of doing these things, they are at their work. I can only imagine that prior generations had the working parent participate through the free time freed up by the stay at home parent.

It suggests to me that there is a long running flaw. I believe Bowling Alone pegs the inflection point in the late 50s or early 60s, ('57?) and the substantative issues came about with the generation hitting the workforce in something like 1960. So the kids born in the 1935-1945 era had something in their culture materially different than prior eras that kept on spreading.

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