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

341–350 of 592 posts

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

#341

Post by bluecheese452 »

ls612 wrote: post #115
tavavex wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothi…

If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th century it is that societies that gave more private control over how resources were used did better than those that had more state control over how resources were used. Perhaps in the 21st century that has changed, but for me that falls under the "extraordinary claims" category with the corresponding evidence requirements.

That is an incredibly broad claim. There are a ton of examples of failed/failing states that basically have no government control over anything.

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

#342

Post by ToucanLoucan »

tjs8rj wrote: post #273
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…

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 corporatio…

> In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations?

I genuinely struggle to think of a social ill we're currently facing that isn't down in one way or another to some mega-entity acting against the public interest with no fears of reprisal because it is "too big to fail."

> 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 US has demonstrated thoroughly it cannot and is not interested in preventing the ascent of a Chinese superpower, simply from the fact that, if you believe them at face value, the current ruling party and administration are absolutely ripping the walls out from the U.S. Government largely to prevent that exact phenomenon, and have utterly failed to do so. And, in their ineptitude, have in fact both made the United States a global embarrassment and left tons of soft power just sitting on the damn table for China to pick up.

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

... but we have a lot of these supposed super-corporations. The problem is the United States, contrary to the ramblings of numerous chronically online people, does not actually use it's authority. Those corporations are in fact far more worried about accessing China's market than ours, because we don't regulate and they do, and there's far more Chinese consumers than American ones.

Add to it America's consumers are already strip-mined to the studs and China's middle class is growing... I mean. It's just full steam ahead on American irrelevance.

I think the real lesson is that when you're the big player already benefiting from global free trade in virtually every single way, laying tariffs on everything and sabotaging foreign investment in your own country is... well. Fucking stupid?

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

#343

Post by [deleted] »

thewebguyd wrote: post #48
rangestransform wrote: post #37

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

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

#344

Post by aianus »

tavavex wrote: post #168
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).

1. Not all companies are publicly traded, and they don't have to be 2. The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money. The value of your 'vote' is proportional to how much money you have. This isn't a democracy or some sort of equal system that will converge on serving people, it will converge on serving money. I'm genuinely baffled at how "you get one vote per person" and "your va…

> The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money.

It is not, eg. Zuck didn't control Facebook because he was a priori rich, he became rich because he controlled Facebook in a successful way. He gained those shares and that control with his skill and labor (and maybe one symbolic dollar or something).

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

#345

Post by ckemere »

rangestransform wrote: post #37
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…

- 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…

I think the key problem with this idea is taught in basic Microeconomics. A competitive market should have zero profit.

The choice of the government to allow a non competitive market is a choice to transfer consumer surplus to producers, which is effectively a tax-by-regulatory choice. So the counter argument to “what about Bell Labs” would be that the democratically elected government (in theory) can more efficiently gather that tax and pay for research.

Recognizing counter arguments about effective allocation of resources to useful research. But also recognizing that much R&D goes to future profits for the company rather than just societal benefit.

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

#346

Post by joz1-k »

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…

The reason governments no longer fight huge corporations or even clear monopolies is also due to heavy globalization. If one government destroys a monopoly (a global mega-corporation) in its country, it may strengthen the monopoly (and the global mega-corporation) in another country. So the line of thinking is, "We don't like this nasty monopoly, but at least it's our monopoly."

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

#347

Post by wizzwizz4 »

monkeywithdarts wrote: post #339
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Real-life anarchists aren't proposing the naïve "burn it all down" anarchy. Apparently that's just a media thing. (Some claim it's authoritarian propaganda, but I suspect it's just writers going: "we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society, but they need a reason, and we've had too many religious extremists: let's make this one an anarchist!"… though maybe this is a false dichotomy? Someone's probably written a book about it.)

Oh, hey, the first text I picked from the Anarchist Library answers the question in my previous comment! https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alex-stefanescu-rela...

> A revolution would be necessary to topple a political regime. But, if your starting point is the rejection of authority, if you don’t need “permission”, you don’t need the revolution either. Anarchy starts not with a bang, but with a whimper — not with an announcement on public television that it is the time to dismantle hierarchies, but with our collective work to slowly build something on the lack of the hierarchies themselves.

I'm not sure I understand the rest of this document, but this bit seems straightforward.

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

#348

Post by twothreeone »

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…

> (1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money

At least when applied to Government in the form of "Representative Democracies" I think this overly simplistic view is not useful to analyze what's happening in the real world.

The assumption behind electing representatives is precisely that they will advocate and advance agendas on behalf of the majority - no matter their social status. However, for this to work it requires a populace that is sufficiently informed, educated, and intelligent to understand what sensible solutions look like.

Unfortunately, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant and many others were wrong and even after 300 years of putting young homo sapiens through 10 years of public education and teaching them rational thinking this assumption turns out to be false.

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

#349

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

If you read between the lines of what Terence Tao is saying - which, by the way, the most charitable summary is, "Isn't Dunbar's number interesting?" - he is really saying, "It is hard to make friends as an adult." Extra so if your day to day is something esoteric like academic theoretical math (read between the lines: really boring to most people), and if you are right leaning or libertarian (read between the lines: unfriendly as a matter of policy).

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

#350

Post by andrepd »

> My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly, with many small organizations either weakening in influence or transitioning to (or absorbed by) large organizations. While this imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges.

I call your attention to an earlier, 19th century German philosopher...

> The theoretical basis of alienation is that a worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of these actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour.

Post reply on HN