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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

#381

Post by astrange »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #118
woah wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want a trad farming lifestyle without technology but they get mad when you tell them that they have to work 4am-10pm in the summer and one child dies per winter

A secure lifestyle and a good lifestyle are not mutually exclusive. We have the tech to enable something which at least somewhat approximates, and even if we didn’t, it’s easy to imagine a world in which the trillions of dollars spent on wasteful garbage like surveillance, ads, engagement-farming, etc were instead redirected towards research and development of technology which enables a secure _and_ good lifestyle.

> enables a secure _and_ good lifestyle

This (socalled "luxury space communism") is impossible insofar as a good lifestyle includes positional goods and social status. Demand is infinite, even your own demand, and you have to be able to outrun it.

The best technology I know for this is Ozempic. If there was a way to ban yourself from getting loans that would also help, but you wouldn't like it.

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

#382

Post by rawgabbit »

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…

The US actually had a working system with the McCain Feingold legislation that prohibited “dark” or unregulated money in election campaigns.

The legislation limited the power of wealth which made government more willing to police corporations bad behavior.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United, we are now in a free for all. Wealth now translates to political power. We are seeing not only de-regulation but the active collusion of the current administration and favored corporations.

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

#383

Post by riemannzeta »

Terry seems to have recovered a key feature of the theory expressed by North, Wallis, and Weingast in Violence and Social Orders. On their view, industrialization depended upon a handful of nation states achieving what they call "door step conditions", which include the ability for citizens to freely form legitimate political parties or for-profit corporations without an affirmative act of government.

According to North, Wallis, and Weingast, the "double balance" of open political and economic competition — between incumbent large organizations and what we might call "startups" — is what allowed a handful of countries to transcend the "natural state" or "limited access order" in which an oligarchy of elites control the economy and government (including access to violence).

It seems like his posts represent an independent reproduction of a key piece of their theory.

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

#384

Post by astrange »

bluecheese452 wrote: post #358
avmich wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Much of that was due to foreign aid and lend-lease from the US.

Of course, we also destroyed Russia and made it an oligarchy by giving them bad advice ("shock therapy") after it collapsed. Like basically everything else (including the existence of Facebook) this is Larry Summers' fault.

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

#385

Post by astrange »

latexr wrote: post #137
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…

All of the things you mentioned serve the primary purpose of making the rich and powerful more rich and powerful, not improving the lives of the majority. We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary when we’re using them to waste away watching six hours of ten seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue,…

Much of the world has, and our part of the world had, self-driving cars called horses.

> LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue

That's because Google forced theirs to summarize its search results and search results don't work anymore because we only have one website left.

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

#386

Post by rtpg »

I think COVID did a number on a lot of the informal groups. These things take _so long_ to build up, and almost all existing ones suffered.

It's only like 5 years later that a lot of informal meetup groups that didn't get destroyed entirely seemed to have crawled back to their former size.

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

#387

Post by riemannzeta »

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…

Antitrust and competition law certainly play an important role, but the examples you cite have not impacted the ability of what we have since the 1970s called "startups" to enter the market in competition with monopolies. The more recent attempts to block "predatory acquisitions" might be an example of antitrust/competition policy that is aimed at achieving the balance between small and large that Terry has in mind here, but I believe it's worth asking: Was the ability for groups to form startups to compete with the incumbents ever really harmed by these so-called "predatory acquisitions"?

Personally, I see the economic efficiency argument for having a relatively small number (say 2 or 3) large organizations that maintain key "distribution platforms". We don't need twenty different social media websites. Antitrust/competition law can play an important role in ensuring that everybody gets access to these platforms on the same basic terms — no favoritism. But I don't know that we need to prevent acquisitions of new apps that can then be bundled into services offered by one or more of those platforms -- at least not to achieve the balance between "small" and "large" that Terry seems to have in mind here.

Rather, I think what we need to aggressively protect is the incentive that small groups have to form and fund startups. In general, I think we're doing fine on the economic side right now. An exception might be the recent acquisitions of founders independent of their coworkers — this presents a profound threat to the startup ecosystem. But by and large the system seems to be working fine.

But is that true of political "startups" — i.e., new interest groups that form to pursue specific policy agendas, which might then be able to syndicate eventually even into new political parties? Of that I'm less certain. It sure seems like the last year or two have been trending toward less political freedom.

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

#388

Post by rangestransform »

latexr wrote: post #137
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…

All of the things you mentioned serve the primary purpose of making the rich and powerful more rich and powerful, not improving the lives of the majority. We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary when we’re using them to waste away watching six hours of ten seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue,…

They all fulfill individual desires better than the next best alternative, and that's reason enough to have anything

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

#389

Post by blibble »

talbo888 wrote: post #221
chaseadam17 wrote: post #176

Great post. One lesser known factor that's contributing to this problem is bank consolidation in the US. * Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans. * Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not con…

It’s almost certainly more profitable to make to make 1,000 $100k loans from a banks point of view as the single loan will be much riskier (effectively not benefiting from the law of large numbers). Not to say there are benefits of dealing large loans such as cross selling other financial products to the large business. Your second point is totally correct, but it is exacerbated as a result of (broadly good) governme…

they won't hold the risk for very long at all

because the bank will immediately sell the loan on

(but they will have collected a fee on both sides...)

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

#390

Post by astrange »

jmyeet wrote: post #232
chermi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A farmer's market is socialism." Lolwut? Here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism . Are you thinking of farming collectives? Also, farmers markets (today, in the West) are basically luxuries for wealthy people. In the real world, we try to feed as many people as possible for as cheaply as possible. But sure, let's grow everything locally and let people starve, because farmers markets give us fuzzy warm feeling…

> Lolwut? This is why I used this example because you've just demonstrated that you don't know what socialism is. There is a myth that capitalism is "free markets". First, there's no such thing as a free market. All markets require regulation to function. Second, markets exist in every organization of the economy and existed long before capitalism existed. We have records of such from Sumeria from 4000+ years ago. In…

> Walmart is one of the most heavily subsidized businesses on Earth. Directly you have agricultural subsidies but another is food stamps paid to Walmart employees [1] as well as Medicaid. Why? Because Walmart pays below a living wage.

No, food stamps are a subsidy /against/ Walmart, not for it. They're paid to the worker and increase the worker's negotiating power. An example of a subsidy to Walmart would be wage supplements used to get businesses to hire low-functioning disabled people.

Although if you're also arguing Medicaid is a subsidy for Walmart you might just be fedposting (as leftists call it now) or a wrecker (as they used to call it). Do you think any good thing in the world is a subsidy for Walmart simply because it's not being forced to pay for all of it? Because you're arguing against food stamps and Medicaid here, two good things.

> If you buy from Walmart, you're paying the Walton family, Blackstone, Vanguard and all the other shareholders (or capital owners).

BlackRock[0] and Vanguard don't "own capital", they manage retirement funds. The people who own the retirement funds own the capital. That would be you.

[0] not Blackstone. People on social media seem to confuse these two a lot, like with that totally false claim that houses are expensive because BlackRock bought them all.

> Also, Walmart is known for setting up in a town, selling their products at below cost to kill all local businesses and then jacking up the prices, if not leaving outright, creating a new food desert.

The evidence is fairly strong that food deserts are mainly caused by a confusing definition of "food deserts".

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1cpp9yp/comme...

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