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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

#371

Post by SchemaLoad »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #349
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:…

It's extremely expensive to get a physical space these days, there are no old warehouses or cheap community centers where you can just run a community event. They cost thousands of dollars to rent for a day, so anything short of a ticketed event or selling lots of alcohol is not viable.

The places that do still have a physical location are often almost grandfathered in where the organisation bought the land decades ago and now pulls in enough from investments to continue perpetually, but could not afford to buy or rent the space at market rate today.

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

#372

Post by elliotto »

If a multi-agent game is played in which each agent grows proportionally to its current size, isn't the end result that small agents are eaten by big agents, and at the end you have one big agent? Ie the end state of Monopoly? In practice, systems crack apart by the time there's only a few agents left.

But it must be a wild ride to live while these cracks start to show. It probably looks like the greatest living mathematician making stream of thought tweets about how there aren't any small agents left.

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

#373

Post by detreatsie »

bluecheese452 wrote: post #333
hansvm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

This reminds me of the old dusty adage:

"To him that hath, more shall be given and to him that hath not, more shall be taken away"

I suppose it was more popular in seemingly simpler times when the playing field was more even and the players more evenly matched and distributed. But here we are in the future, and that game seems to have been concluded.

I myself rather preferred the view from the shoulders of giants than the undersides of their feet.

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

#374

Post by joz1-k »

mym1990 wrote: post #367
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."

Any source for this? My hunch is that there is so much money sloshing around that government interests are easily swayed and conflicts of interest are relatively common now.

What would be an acceptable source for you? Which was the last US mega-corporation that the US government broke up? It certainly wasn't Microsoft or Google. Allowing huge companies to grow even bigger gives them more competitive power in the global market. This wasn't as important before we had super-globalized economies.

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

#375

Post by elliotto »

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…

Your example of firms setting up in the desert or wilderness assumes there is some desert or wilderness left to expand into. This is Marx's concepts of the expansion of capital. Marx argues that with nowhere to expand it begins to eat itself.

You posit that the situation has a political cause, but I think this is just what happens when a system requiring exponential growth reaches the limits of its bounding box.

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

#376

Post by astrange »

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…

> or being controlled, by nation-state private companies

You don't need to publicly fund something to "control" it. You can pass laws about it, you're the government!

I always find this kind of rhetoric from Western socialists strange, it's like they've forgotten they aren't libertarians.

The other issue being that they've forgotten there are downsides to owning something, because you don't always want to own all the risk. eg if you're a tech employee and paid in your employers' shares, you own some of your means of production. But you /shouldn't/, it's way too risky! You should sell it as soon as you get it and put it in an index fund.

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

#377

Post by xyzzy123 »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #365
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 don't really buy this. The government still has the ability to just ban or tax the foreign monopoly. And seemingly the EU has the ability to fine foreign businesses for being monopolies too. China being a good example. Google being a monopoly in the rest of the world doesn't really impact them much since they just block the foreign products.

Then people accuse you of being "protectionist" or "mercantilist". Your companies aren't internationally competitive. This cripples your exports unless you can convince other countries to also block the goods that are undercutting you.

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

#378

Post by joz1-k »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #365
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 don't really buy this. The government still has the ability to just ban or tax the foreign monopoly. And seemingly the EU has the ability to fine foreign businesses for being monopolies too. China being a good example. Google being a monopoly in the rest of the world doesn't really impact them much since they just block the foreign products.

> the EU has the ability to fine foreign businesses for being monopolies too.

Specifically, the EU has no ability to fight foreign monopolies. Though, it has an ability to fine them and extort some pocket money from them. However, this hasn't had a tangible effect on creating more competition in those markets.

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

#379

Post by astrange »

tbirdny wrote: post #180
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.

Before WWII, middle-class married women were strongly discouraged from working for pay outside the home. If their husbands could provide, "respectable" women were expected to stay home as homemakers.

Claudia Goldin won a Nobel Prize for showing this isn't true.

See page 3 on https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2023/12/goldin-lecture-sl... for an illustration.

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

#380

Post by astrange »

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?

That's the wrong question. The competition is a family with one earner vs the counterfactual /same/ family with two earners.

The second one will have more money in the modern context so they're better off. At some times in the past, they wouldn't have been better off because their expenses would increase more than their income. Basically it's about cost of childcare.

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