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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

#351

Post by neves »

joz1-k wrote: post #346
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."

I thought it was Super PAC that rigged American democracy. Now China is the more efficient economy since their companies are must obey the State.

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

#352

Post by heylook »

nostrademons wrote: post #193
simpaticoder wrote: post #124

Earlier 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…

There's a line in one of my kids' Bluey books that says "Do you want to win, or do you want the game to continue? Because sometimes you can't have both." I feel like that's sorta where we are in America. In the glory days of the 50s-70s, people wanted the game to continue - they were willing to sacrifice a little bit of winning for the sake of keeping the system intact. Then starting in the 80s, people gradually star…

This is exactly the main lesson of Finite and Infinite Games. There are finite games, in which the goal is to win, and there are infinite games, in which the goal is to continue playing the game. Using this framing, one can account for quite a large amount of long-term, large-scale problems as breakdowns wherein some participants choose to play formerly infinite games as finite ones, thus crushing their competition but destroying the game itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games

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

#353

Post by roughly »

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 think the roadmap to the anarchist view is simple enough in theory - break up large companies, redistribute large piles of wealth, establish laws enforcing size limits, and, following that, scale government back and delegate decision-making to the affected individuals wherever practical. Ignoring the practical questions of how one breaks up, say, Amazon, the state has the guns, so if the state says Bezos loses his yacht, it is so.

The practical side is substantially harder - the anarchist-communal version of the world requires a citizenry committed to their community, phobic to bigness, and willing to assert that something that is not in the interest of the commons is not allowed to happen. Again, this ignores the practical question - balances of innovation vs unknown potential costs, etc - but the bigger practical concern is building an actual durable social contract that people will uphold and enforce over time, even when that means giving up personal glory.

This was basically the state of most societal groups in the pre-modern era - by and large, most people's day-to-day existence was within local community groups that had a lot of say over what they allowed within their sphere of influence - but the modern world creates the ability to concentrate power in ways which are harder for a smaller group of individuals to combat. A teenager with an AK-47 would've mowed through a squadron of Roman soldiers like they weren't there, and the mechanization of industry allows for more rapid consolidation of wealth than prior means, which renders the whole affair much harder to keep in hand.

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

#354

Post by elevation »

computably wrote: post #197
billy99k wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'. "We've ran high-risk R&D pro…

> Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'. The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for the greater…

> The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated

You've got the cart before the horse; the government would not have a budget at all if people were not individually motivated to generate taxable events.

Profit is the practice of accumulating more resources than you immediately need in the anticipation of their future use and enjoyment. Without a government, a profit makes the bearer a target for anyone who can overpower you. So the essential purpose of a government is the preservation of profit by opposing the forces that would destroy or carry it off: criminals, scammers, foreign militaries.

Governments did not command the invention of penicillin, powered flight, electric light, transistors, the blue LED, or the majority of software products that are essential to society today. But it protected individuals to invent with the knowledge that their work could be rewarded on some timeframe rather than being immediately destroyed by an interloper.

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

#355

Post by nobodyandproud »

Muromec wrote: post #255
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. Is it even possible en masse in a market where you are competing against double income no kids kind households?

What resources are we talking about competing against? What’s the measuring stick?

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

#356

Post by RugnirViking »

vkou wrote: post #145
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…

Better yet, the 7-7-7 rule. > The FCC's 7-7-7 rule was a 1953 regulation that limited a single entity from owning no more than seven AM radio stations, seven FM radio stations, and seven television stations nationwide to promote broadcast diversity. This rule was a response to concerns about media consolidation and was eventually eased, then replaced by the 12-12-12 rule in 1984 and later abolished by the 1996 Teleco…

This. I mean thats just one sector, but its spread across the whole: the whole of modern economic theory is one of competition that causes efficient markets. But when you look into the theory even a little bit, you realise it needs hundreds, even thousands of market players to reach an equilibrium thats worthwhile, and the existence of a large player even at like 10% market size can distort everything beyond usefulness. We're so far removed from that ideal in pretty much every dang sector that anyone preaching or believing in efficient markets is just foolish.

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

#357

Post by jfengel »

neves wrote: post #351
joz1-k wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I thought it was Super PAC that rigged American democracy. Now China is the more efficient economy since their companies are must obey the State.

China is efficient but largely because they don't actually have to obey the State. They are capitalist; they compete in the global market and follow market signals.

The CCP does put a heavy thumb on some scales, but so does every country. Perfect efficiency is not optimal when circumstances change, so states always enforce some redundancy.

There are many differences, of course, but just don't get the idea that China consists of monopolies in a command economy. They call it "capitalism with Chinese characteristics."

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

#358

Post by bluecheese452 »

avmich wrote: post #253
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…

I would compare "larger businesses" with "socialistic planning system" while "smaller businesses" with "free market economy". There are examples when centralized planning got good results - NASA's Apollo project is an example. There are also examples when market economy - eventually, in the long term, not short - prevailed: the Cold War is an example here. It's also quite possible the analogy is flawed though.

It is also very hard to separate “socialist planning system” from “Russian Empire”. It isn’t like things were going swimmingly in Tsarist Russia and then they reentered a golden age in the 90s.

If anything this socialist system brought them to the height of their power and influence.

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

#359

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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…

It's not clear to me that anything of value would have been lost in this counterfactual world.

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

#360

Post by RugnirViking »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #136
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, small organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of security in the future. After all, by definition organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction. I think the biggest flowering of organizat…

I agree that I don't think its security. But I do think its worth looking again at the time aspect. per "bowling alone" we have pretty good signs that this decline has been ongoing since the 1980s. I'm reasonably sure that the 455 minutes per day per capita global media consumption has something to do with it. From TV to the internet, you don't need friends when the friendly person on screen has such exciting adventures.

I think something like only turning on the internet and TV for like a single hour each morning and evening would do so much for society, like you wouldn't believe. Not just encouraging better engagement outside of those times, but also causing you to demand better of the hour you do get, avoiding mindless slop.

Have you ever taken a proper break from all media? Like tv, internet, phones, heck even books. You find yourself suddenly with amazing amounts of time. Some people describe being catastrophically bored but for me I just find that all those little tasks that rack up that seem like too much effort suddenly become approachable and you can check off like 6 and still have time for relaxing in some grass and just kinda chatting with passers by. I really think its that simple.

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