Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

mathstodon.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 592 posts

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

#291

Post by roughly »

thegrimmest wrote: post #263
roughly wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

How is an entity with a monopoly on violence not the most powerful actor in the room? And in what way is administering the peace not constraining other actors?

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

#292

Post by sally_glance »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #104
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Corporations are in principle and practice accountable to those with more money. For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote.

It seems to me none of this is as clear cut as it seems. Government entities may hold shares in private companies, companies may act on voter's demands by accepting government grants. For some companies, government contracts are actually a main revenue stream - shareholders can jump up and down, if their supporters are voted out they will falter.

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

#293

Post by GeoAtreides »

com2kid wrote: post #110
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."

>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.

And equal rights for minorities, sexual or not, were achieved in a handful of countries for the past 40 years.

Surely you're not suggesting...

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

#294

Post by Animats »

So here we are on Mastodon. There are three columns. One is an ad for the site, one is an ad for Mastodon, and the one in the middle has some content. The article is part 1 of 5, because there's some severe limit on article length. The rest of the article is comments in small type. There are no examples.

Is this LLM output?

And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed "junk" food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above)

This is a real issue, but a poor posting. The classic on this is "Bowling Alone" (2000) [1] That book predates most social media. The author bemoans the decline of local organizations such as Rotary International, local Chambers of Commerce, Odd Fellows - all those organizations that have little signs on the outskirts of medium-sized towns. (In Silicon Valley, both Redwood City and Half Moon Bay have such signs.)

Here's a useful question for Americans: do you belong to any organization where the members can, by voting, fire the leadership? Small organizations used to have elected leaders. Today, they tend to be run by self-perpetuating boards. Being involved in such organizations is where people learned how to make democracy work.

When was the last time you went to a non-government meeting run by Roberts Rules of Order? Do you even know what that is, or, more important, why it is? The whole point of Roberts Rules of Order is that the group is in charge and the result is a decision to be acted upon. The Rules are intended to keep the loudest voice in the room from running over everyone else.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

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

#295

Post by gbjw »

Oarch wrote: post #24
rglover wrote: post #11

This general direction of things is quite disheartening. The move away from small to large orgs dominating is exactly why modern life feels like war. Corporate, impersonal, manufactured, dead. I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).

I'm reminded of the sixties idea of "the man" a lot recently. The man definitely won.

Because we all sold out to the man. Culturally, we have chosen the lavish life promised under the man's umbrella, to doing the work of trying to go our own way. We now reap what we've sown.

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

#296

Post by impossiblefork »

vondur wrote: post #151
radlad wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.

I think California's system is a mess. It's been overrun with private interests bankrolling ballot initiatives and steamrolling them through. Add to that the Government itself sponsoring ballet initiatives that sale bonds to finance things that people don't understand really loans and it turns into a mess. I do like the ability to remove politicians from office via ballot though.

One idea that I think is reasonable is to use some kind of actual meetings.

Dividing people into groups of 50 or 100. Initiatives are voted on in these groups, if they are passed they go to the next level, 1000 people.

Sort of like that idea in the Yes, Minister episode about 'genuinely democratic local government'. The idea here is the tree structure is to prevent people to push initiatives other than as individuals.

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

#297

Post by bluGill »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #118
woah wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want a trad farming lifestyle without technology but they get mad when you tell them that they have to work 4am-10pm in the summer and one child dies per winter

A secure lifestyle and a good lifestyle are not mutually exclusive. We have the tech to enable something which at least somewhat approximates, and even if we didn’t, it’s easy to imagine a world in which the trillions of dollars spent on wasteful garbage like surveillance, ads, engagement-farming, etc were instead redirected towards research and development of technology which enables a secure _and_ good lifestyle.

Define secure and good.

What you really need to live, and the luxury you want can be very different. I've lived in a one bathroom house, I'm willing to pay for more. I can eat "beans and rice", but I want more (not just meat, there are vegetables that are more expensive). Most people are not willing to live without a lot of luxury and honestly would choose both parents working a full time job to get more luxury.

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

#298

Post by bccdee »

UncleMeat wrote: post #36
furyofantares wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a "bad idea" for him to post his take? I guess your concern must be that people will give it too much weight due to him being a mathematician.

This is currently #1 on HN. I suspect that a lot of people will read this and decide not to look into relevant scholarship because the text here is packaged nicely and it is presented by somebody that this community (rightly) respects very deeply. In other contexts I've seen Tao cite scholarship outside of his field when engaging with it. I wish he'd done that here.

I don't think being an expert in one field means you need to constantly engage in an academic level of discourse. It's extremely normal for blog posts featuring vibes-based hot takes to hit #1 on HN. I think that's fine, if the take is good.

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

#299

Post by GeoAtreides »

solatic wrote: post #155

Author posits a causal relationship in a zero-sum game that he provides no evidence for. Paraphrasing, that uncontrollable intangibles like technology gave slightly more power to individuals and much more power to large organizations at the expense of small organizations. Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own? Is there some zero-sum pie of power to be distributed? So if…

>Is there some zero-sum pie of power

Yes, that's exactly how power works. You can dilute power (in non-hierarchical organizations) or you can concentrate it (in rigidly hierarchical societies), but there's a finite amount of it and it's deeply coveted by all

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

#300

Post by griffzhowl »

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…

When you put it that way, the US constitution itself is about limiting the power of the federal government against the states (and individuals, in the bill of rights)

Nevertheless, state-level power, for a state government or business, is still far above the kind of sub-Dunbar number (~120 people) organisations that Tao is talking about, where everyone might know each other and the network can be organised by reputation and trust rather than through state-level laws or contracts (and the attendant forms of impersonal bureaucratic enforcement that come with those).

Edit: I don't mean to object to the general theme of your comment which is that power has become increasingly concentrated and unchecked, just to point out that even if those limitations that you mention had been retained it would still represent a society where the role of immediate trust-based relationships is diminished or eroded relative to the previous situation where these were the primary aspects of people's livelihoods and security

Post reply on HN