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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

#301

Post by GeoAtreides »

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…

>things we rely on like Amazon are actually a lot of tiny businesses that have ideas

I mean sure, that's one way to describe dropshipping from huge chinese manufactories

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

#302

Post by leafmeal »

I'm reading The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs right now. One of the main theses of the book is that small "inefficient" enterprises are actually the engines of economic grown. Large efficient organizations often lead to stagnation.

It's interesting how this intersects with Tao's point, about the social benefits.

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

#303

Post by jongjong »

hansvm wrote: post #184
vmg12 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but who decides how those resources are deployed The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate. > We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massi…

"Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.

Yes exactly. Also, we should stop pretending that the money supply is fixed and that everyone exists on the same monetary playing field.

Arguments about efficient allocation are laughable when you consider that someone who is socially 6 steps removed from an institutional 'money printer' lives in a monetary environment where money is 10 times more scarce than it is at the source (due to taxation between each hop). Few people are so far removed in practice but the effects are still very powerful even with less distance. Taxation brings all economic activities closer to the government and banking sector.

In competitive industries were profits are paper thin, monetary asymmetry can fully determine business outcomes. The company receiving government contracts on the side has a massive upper hand over its competitors during a monetary contraction. Same can be said about companies which operate in environments where their customers have access to large amounts of credit by virtue of their highly valued collateral. Their success has little to do with optimal allocation and a lot to do with socio-economic positioning and monetary system design.

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

#304

Post by aleph_minus_one »

radlad wrote: post #236
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen. In a democratic country, only the people who have citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote. You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.

Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote. > You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting. Maybe - depending on your jurisdiction. Just like whether you have citizenship or not.

> Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote.

Historically, there did exist experiments that not each person has the same voting power (for example the Prussian "Dreiklassenwahlrecht" [three-class franchise]):

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreiklassenwahlrecht

Depending on the amount of taxes you paid, you were assigned to one of three classes. The sizes of each of these classes were chosen so that each class paid 1/3 of the whole tax volume. The votes in each class elected representants for this class.

The idea is obvious: those who pay a lot more taxes should have more influence.

Thus: each citizen has the same voting power is just the "currently fashionable" implementation of democracy.

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

#305

Post by mensetmanusman »

Too wrote: post #215
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…

Like rock paper scissors, there are multiple dimensions to power and the state doesn’t always possess all of them. Media being the most obvious one (fourth estate). Federal bank another. As the split of government and parliament.

The media has died though, ‘no one’ watches the MSM under 30, everyone is online in their safe space.

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

#306

Post by ponector »

nostrademons wrote: post #28

Matches my experience. Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year; their actual preschool got bought by private equity and is struggling to survive. Longtime neighbors say the spirit of volunteerism in the upper schools is suffering. And institutions that were big civic centers when I grew up - freemasons, Boy/Girl/Cub/Brownie Scouts, 4-H, YMCA/YWCA, local bowling/skating rinks, etc - are now shadows of…

>> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good

By almost any metric, life in western society is better than ever, you cannot say now times are not good.

From my perspective one of the main reason is the modern internet: people are glued to screens instead of participation in local community.

Why bother to go somewhere if you have everything in your pocket and also on the enormously big tv screen in your room?

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

#307

Post by GeoAtreides »

UncleMeat wrote: post #5

I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like these without sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes. I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the scholarship on the history of communication networks is extremely deep . Why would there be so much work if things were actually explained so easily? If you are…

>His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes.

oh man, your mind will be blown when you find out about essayists. or completely horrified, can go either way. A whole field, a respected field, completely devoted to vibes.

Empiricism is not the only right way to interrogate the universe y'know

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

#308

Post by grogenaut »

nostrademons wrote: post #28

Matches my experience. Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year; their actual preschool got bought by private equity and is struggling to survive. Longtime neighbors say the spirit of volunteerism in the upper schools is suffering. And institutions that were big civic centers when I grew up - freemasons, Boy/Girl/Cub/Brownie Scouts, 4-H, YMCA/YWCA, local bowling/skating rinks, etc - are now shadows of…

I spent 4 years during and after covid looking for volunteer opportunities. People just weren't using anything. I'll agree with you that many of these groups may be dysfunctional. They seemed to want money (the ones I talked to) not actual people.

Freemasons: what do they even do? I just know a few secretive fat white guys who belong. They're serious about it. They don't talk about it. Why would I join? I have no idea what they do. Not obviously recruiting in my area.

Boy/Girl scouts: I wasn't able to have a kid and so couldn't volunteer here or sports. It's kinda creepy to do so without a kid. Not obviously recruiting in my area.

YMCA/YWCA: this seems like a straight up company these days. Do they even take volunteers? I don't see any recruiting for it.

Kids who code / other code bootcamps: sent multiple emails. All I got back was marketing asking for donations if I even got that. They did like 2 events a year.

I do volunteer EMS/Fire/Ski Patrol... That requires actual training. Groups were obviously recruiting once I had the skills. They need people to help run large events / medical.

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

#309

Post by softwaredoug »

xmprt wrote: post #278
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.

But are these reflective of the communities themselves? Or the tools used to organize community? If slack disappeared tomorrow wouldn’t many just move to another tool?

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

#310

Post by aleph_minus_one »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #293
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.

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...

> 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...

Indeed I see the evidence on the side that these ideas were some temporary fads that might get out of fashion in the foreseeable future. This is clearly not a suggestion, I just see the signs on the horizon that this is indeed plausibly to happen.

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