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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

#271

Post by chaseadam17 »

talbo888 wrote: post #221
chaseadam17 wrote: post #176

Great post. One lesser known factor that's contributing to this problem is bank consolidation in the US. * 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 con…

It’s almost certainly more profitable to make to make 1,000 $100k loans from a banks point of view as the single loan will be much riskier (effectively not benefiting from the law of large numbers). Not to say there are benefits of dealing large loans such as cross selling other financial products to the large business. Your second point is totally correct, but it is exacerbated as a result of (broadly good) governme…

Yes, one $100M loan in isolation is risky (I was just giving an example), but my point was that a portfolio of a small number of large loans to big businesses is much more profitable than a portfolio of many more smaller loans to small businesses. Large companies are much less likely to go bankrupt and the overhead of making the loan relative to the profit from interest is much lower. 50% of small businesses go bankrupt in the first 5 years. It's simply less profitable to lend to them...

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

#272

Post by porridgeraisin »

lupire wrote: post #244
woah wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Self driving cars are also clearly a demonstration of military might.

Autonomous ground vehicles were funded by the DARPA grand challenge, and the motivation was explicitly military[1]

[1] Rational subsection of the Background section (section I) in this pdf: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20...

The whole thing is worth a read too, it explains all the other military use tech that will arise from the self driving car ecosystem, further justifying the investment.

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

#273

Post by tjs8rj »

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…

In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils?

The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.

A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US

The meta as a state today is to cultivate as much wealth and power as possible by encouraging super corporations

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

#275

Post by tbirdny »

Muromec wrote: post #258
tbirdny wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One could argue the opposite: that the mass entry of women into the paid workforce expanded the labor supply, contributing to wage stagnation and, eventually, the erosion of the middle class. But that wasn’t the only cause. Globalization, declining unions, automation, and regressive taxes were also factors.

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

#276

Post by porridgeraisin »

9rx wrote: post #266
porridgeraisin wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Depressi…

Lower rungs are definitely not content working 40 hours a week. They work crazy amounts (multiple jobs even!) just to get to the upper rungs of society.

I support the labour laws limiting an employer to 40hrs a week of a man's labour. This is important for people who really just want some employment and don't want to die. But the vast majority of people work two such jobs and try to get into the higher rungs of the financial ladder. Heck, even SDE3s in software companies work off-hours to become IC's and such, and I'm sure it's similar once you go down the executive route.

> "That's what you do"

That is definitely true, a lot of social fabric erodes when providing labour is turned into a psychotic thing. I'm not entirely convinced the labour laws we have today are enough to prevent this. My opinion is that we need to also have policies on the other side of the coin - i.e encourage family/extended family/communal/what have you living. Not "one child policy" level forced policies, but instead in the form of a good complement to strong labour laws.

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

#277

Post by nostrademons »

simpaticoder wrote: post #211
nostrademons wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 star…

I like this framing. There is an analogy with industrialization and pollution, in that the side-effects of industrial production can be safely ignored, unless those effects are cumulative. Social norms function in the same way. There is little harm in a professor kindly giving a passing grade to one undeserving student; when this becomes common, the cumulative effect undermines the value of a college education itself…

Game theory is exactly it. A bunch of simulations have shown that in a repeated prisoner's dilemma, the optimal strategy is tit-for-tat, sometimes adding forgiveness. The fact that you will play again incentivizes players to cooperate. But as soon as the game becomes finite (i.e. you can see the end in sight), the optimal strategy becomes "defect", because your opponent also has the same incentives and whoever defects first gets the payoff.

Incidentally this also points to the path from a bad to good equilibrium. You have to throw away the big system and start with a system small enough that the participants will interact repeatedly. This rebuilds trust. Then you have to defend that system from outside influences, or at least carefully control them so they play by the same rules as existing participants. The act of defending your local community also builds trust - arguably [1] post-WW2 U.S. social cohesion was actually generated by the experience of defeating the Axis powers and then getting enmeshed in the Cold War. Finally you can gradually expand the system through carefully controlled immigration and naturalization.

Unfortunately, this probably means that the Internet, globalization, and likely large states like the US/China/Russia are all toast. And as Terence Tao's post here points out, large organizations are usually more efficient than small organizations. That means that as large organizations have outcompeted small organizations, the transition as those large organizations themselves become dysfunctional and disintegrate is going to be wrenching. We're going to lose access to several material conveniences that we take for granted.

[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/re.html

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

#278

Post by xmprt »

softwaredoug wrote: post #261

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 adv…

I think this is what Tao is saying that large organizations are filling the niche that was previously served by smaller organizations. eg. Discord, Slack, and other online platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Fortnite, Roblox, etc., are being used instead of smaller forums and local communities.

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

#279

Post by stonogo »

Maro wrote: post #97

I don't understand mastodon or whatever the blogging software is. Why is it breaking the article into multiple pieces and showing the rest as comments, in smaller font? This is not Twitter, so why follow some archaic silly microblog format? I stopped reading at 1/5, the text after is too small on my phone. I run a cheap dedicated server for $25/mo and run a blog on it, and it just shows my fuxxing writings like a reg…

>This is not Twitter

only just. Mastodon is basically a twitter clone.

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

#280

Post by drivers99 »

daft_pink wrote: post #2

I’m not sure if that’s true. As a counterpoint, things we rely on like Amazon are actually a lot of tiny businesses that have ideas and now we are able to get their more tailored products, whereas two decades ago, I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us. Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators and two decades ago the only thing available was the major tv networks and cable t…

> I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us.

There was a lot of stuff available that was advertised in magazines and stuff as well. To use one niche as an example: I'm thinking of the ads in computer magazines sometimes with hundreds of obscure items crammed into a page.

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