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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

#331

Post by wizzwizz4 »

monkeywithdarts wrote: post #316
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…

I really like the direction this thread is going. I've wondered if Left and Right in the US only see half the problem: one side fears corporate/wealthy/majoritarian power, the other fears government power. If you allow two assumptions: (1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money (2) Government and corporate/wealthy power are a revolving door (regulatory capture, pay-to-play politics, etc). ... then som…

Don't the anarchists think they have ways to check both state and government power, while promoting human welfare? (I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with anarchist philosophy, so I don't know what their proposals are.)

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

#332

Post by missinglugnut »

pnathan wrote: post #269
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 ho…

I'll add that there are some feedback loops making it worse. When these organizations aren't available kids are more dependent on their parents for something to do, which makes the already strained parents even less likely to take on volunteer work.

And then kids who grew up without mentors are less likely to try to be that for someone else.

Basically the orgs don't have enough volunteers to do important things, and the people don't volunteer because the org isn't important to them.

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

#333

Post by bluecheese452 »

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.

It is classic circular reasoning. Why should they have all money? Well because they are the best ones at allocating the resources. How do we know they are best at allocating resources? Because they have all the money.

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

#334

Post by pants2 »

grues-dinner wrote: post #326
grogenaut wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ide…

I guess the biggest one is "church". But to get into that requires accepting (or pretending to accept, I suppose) the horizontal memetic transfer of the specific denomination.

I go to church every Sunday despite having zero belief in Jesus or God as they describe him. The sermons are socially relevant and thought-provoking, the congregation is caring and fun with cool social events, and the good that they're doing in our community is inspiring.

I encourage HNers to try it! Just mentally replace "God" with "Nature" and "Jesus" with "Me" in every line and you have a good framework for self-reflection and appreciation of the natural world.

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

#335

Post by biotinker »

grogenaut wrote: post #308
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 ide…

The neat thing is that it it doesn't actually take much money to start up a new small organization if you want to. You can accomplish a remarkable amount with relatively little money.

Some friends and I just started a tool library in Central Oregon: https://cotool.org/

There some quite generous community donations of tools (not money) to get started. Startup costs were small, and now a couple weeks after opening we have dozens of members.

It scales nicely because we can just buy more or less new tools. It's very impactful to some people, and once started there's very little recurring expenses.

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

#337

Post by pessimizer »

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…

There was an explosion of these little groups in the US after the 1st edition of Robert's Rules of Order was published, which incidentally was also heavily adopted by churches (and women's suffrage groups, who helped him with the Newly Revised.) I'd say this fulmination culminated in FDR and strong unions, aspects of both made illegal afterwards - term limits to limit democracy, striking made into a kabuki ritual by the NLRB, unions being forbidden from offering their members health insurance (they're the ones who started doing this), but employers offering insurance being subsidized. Elites were so terrified that they got close to pulling a coup and installing a dictator with the Business Plot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot).

They got everything tight again with WWII, McCarthy and the Cold War, though. Lucky, right?

I think there has been an intentional effort to isolate people from each other, and to destroy communities, and even make them look suspicious or evil in some way. Isolated, atomized people are more easily controlled. I think the encouragement of labor mobility and the trashing of small towns and small business in favor of the internet has also been an intentional effort in that regard. I also think there has been an intentional effort to consolidate media and merge it with government, which reached a frenzy during the Biden administration. Oracle's nepo baby is going to have Paramount, CBS, Tiktok, and who knows what else.

An evil antidemocratic streak has been encouraged among the "left," who now love benevolent dictators, credentialism, and decision by "consent" which immediately devolves into rule by the loudest and the whiniest cluster B personality or sociopath. Votes mean that you don't get your way a lot, but you get stuff done. If you don't get your way too much, you can just leave and join a group that works for you. Monopoly, and rule by anointment take that away from us, and that's what's happening.

It's been devastating for black Americans. Our media used to be vibrant and exciting, now it doesn't exist at all. This is the fate of all minorities under cultural consolidation. Alone, getting your directions from a screen, with the screen listening to any conversation you manage to have and reporting it to your rulers.

They'll eventually go after the churches, too, or consolidate them. I'm sorry, they'll go after the "christofascists."

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

#338

Post by Aeolun »

vmg12 wrote: post #156
thewebguyd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.

The current system rather heavily optimizes the ability to make resources into more resources for the shareholders. See e.g. Uber.

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

#339

Post by monkeywithdarts »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #331
monkeywithdarts wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the direction this thread is going. I've wondered if Left and Right in the US only see half the problem: one side fears corporate/wealthy/majoritarian power, the other fears government power. If you allow two assumptions: (1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money (2) Government and corporate/wealthy power are a revolving door (regulatory capture, pay-to-play politics, etc). ... then som…

Don't the anarchists think they have ways to check both state and government power, while promoting human welfare? (I'm unfortunately unfamiliar with anarchist philosophy, so I don't know what their proposals are.)

I also don't know much about anarchist philosophy; would love some insight here if anyone can speak to that.

But if the US (same applies to other countries) became an anarchy today, then entities like Goldman Sachs and Constellis (formerly Blackwater) are going to fare much better than most. So a naive "burn it all down" anarchy doesn't seem an answer.

UPDATE: I remembered Noam Chomsky is sometimes called an anarcho-syndicalist but never looked up what meant. Turns out that is exactly the kind of "anarchism" that answers my question. (New concept to me, so not sure in what sense this might be called anarchism. No central government?)

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

#340

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Does this vary between political systems, and how would you test it.

I suppose analysis of existence of smaller NGOs in societies and how they are distributed, but not any real idea as to what the analysis should look like.

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