Tanner Greer has a good piece on how the American tradition of bottom-up self-organization has been supplanted by top-down bureaucracy: https://palladiummag.com/2023/03/30/a-school-of-strength-and...
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
#282I know something is worth reading when I see a wall of people being defensive of whatever the author presented.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 defect…
It's interesting to wonder about why norms degrade at scale. Intuition tells me it's because stink-eye doesn't scale. Defectors in a small org pay a price external to the game, aka "reputational damage". But members of large organizations rarely suffer this, because they are strangers, and because "they are just doing their job". A half-formed thought, but perhaps it's half-useful.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#284Earlier 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.
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Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#285Tribe 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.
I have the audiobook.
From start to finish it's fantastic. It's not a highly scientific work though, it's more of an observation mixed with some autobiographical touches.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#286Great 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 find both sides of this discourse have value: the federal loss of regulatory powers WRT corporations, and getting grassroots going again. I feel like my neighborhood streets are not places anymore, they're entirely liminal. Nothing happens in these spaces, no playing or working, except as strictly necessary.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#287Earlier 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…
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Speaking of vibe checks, the vibes in this post are worse than what you've replied to. "something something", "I'll meet you at your level", "Do you see?", "you got it 200% wrong.", are all very dismissive and hostile.
There are better ways to get your message across.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 f…
> They work crazy amounts (multiple jobs even!) just to get to the upper rungs of society.
It does happen, as recognized before, but what suggests this is any kind of norm?
1. The median worker in the USA doesn't even make it to 40 hours of work in a week, only 34. What you say certainly doesn't hold true when dividing the latter in half.
2. Only 21% of the workforce normally puts in more than 40 hours per week. That could represent the lowest rungs, I suppose, but...
3. The data also suggests that those working long hours are more likely to be highly educated, high-wage, salaried, and older men. Does that really fit the profile of someone in the lower runs? Stereotypically, that is who most of us imagine is in the highest rung.
4. The upward mobility of which you speak is not typical. Most people will either stay on the same rung or find themselves heading lower.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#289Earlier 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…
> for the greater good of all or advancement of society
I'm not sure we agree enough on the definitions of these things to justify a democratic redistribution of resources towards them. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny after all. The nice part about private enterprise is that it's hard to argue they didn't earn their money. Google, Apple, et al provided some value to some folks who volunteered to pay for it in a free exchange. Their claim to use their earned wealth as they see fit is much easier to substantiate than a government intervention which is neither voluntary nor obviously providing value to the people who pay for it.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#290I’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…
> Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators
Right, but you don't know these people. You're not in a community with them. Tao points to Dunbar's number as a rough boundary between small and large communities; how many of these "tiny" creators have fewer than 150 followers, and how many of them foster close social ties among those followers in ways that couldn't scale to a larger audience?
Before the era of ~2k subscriber youtube passion project channels, people were forced to find people in their area with shared interests and establish social clubs. This necessarily meant a smaller audience, but it also meant actually being friends with the people you were communicating with. Youtube is definitely a different kind of thing.
That said, I do think there's an argument to be made that the Discord- and groupchat-ification of the social media ecosystem is a backswing toward smaller groups.