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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

#41

Post by TimorousBestie »

UncleMeat wrote: post #20
iambateman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ad hominem. He presents meaningful ideas and we would all benefit from you responding to the ideas.

I do not think that it is unreasonable to say that a layperson providing a extremely high level analysis of a topic that spans entire academic fields is likely not terribly insightful. The history of communications networks (just one of the many enormous topics he covers here) is a whole field with piles of academics publishing constantly.

It’s not “extremely high level analysis.” It’s a brief philosophical excursion, and he appropriately disclaims that his opinions aren’t rigorous or even all that informed.

The idea that Tao can’t be insightful while microblogging outside of his field of expertise is silly. We here at HN allow plenty of nonexperts a wide latitude to pretend like they know something of which they have no real knowledge. The result is, I’m sure you’ll agree, occasionally insightful.

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

#42

Post by renewiltord »

Realistically, everyone online is constantly complaining about the lack of friends, the lack of community, and so on. Meanwhile, I live in a high rise in SF and have no shortage of any of these.

People borrow spoons of yogurt, tools, devices; share parenting, food, and home advice; and there's a bunch who play board games and the like.

My friends are nearby. We go to the gym together, play basketball together, go to the same kids' birthday parties.

This is very obviously a "smell shit everywhere you go" situation.

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

#44

Post by femiagbabiaka »

rglover wrote: post #11

This general direction of things is quite disheartening. The move away from small to large orgs dominating is exactly why modern life feels like war. Corporate, impersonal, manufactured, dead. I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon, but I'm glad people are talking about this (and the downsides of your only options rapidly being conglomerates or big institutions).

The centralization of power also means the leaders of those large organizations have disproportionate power. Everyone is looking for the singular strongman at the head of an organization with nation-level power to save them from current turmoil.

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

#45

Post by pama »

Although I totally agree with this analysis, I also feel optimistic that this moment in time provides the first real opportunity in over 40 years for smaller organizations to start to affect societal change again. The existing efficiencies due to reduced (human-to-human) communication and fast decision-making processes in small organizations combine very nicely with the reduction in the barrier to entry with the help of AI and the accelerated pace of change in society due to AI. I hope that once a main driver of scalability and societal change becomes access to computation, rather than human headcount, we will see a reversal of the ongoing trend.

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

#46

Post by rck »

Pope Pius XI wrote about _subsidiarity_ as a guiding social principle:

"Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them."

Tao is observing the consequences of a society that increasingly has abandoned subsidiarity as an operating principle. (I had hoped that crypto might be able to bring subsidiarity back, but so far the opposite has happened in practice.)

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

#47

Post by mediaman »

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…

The reduction of volunteer organizations started long before COVID: "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000, and documents much of the same changes.

The trend has been resistant to any particular link to localized economic ups or downs. Characterizing the 2023-2025 era (at least in the US) as "a time of scarcity" is divorced from any sort of factual reality; there is no quantitative data to support this idea and it seems to mostly be based on social media vibes (hence the oft-commented "vibecession").

One could make a much stronger argument exactly to the opposite: wealthier societies tend to become more individualistic and separated, people choose to live on their own if possible, and in bigger places; large companies have such attractive economics and pay people so much more than small companies do that it is difficult for small organizations to compete for talent.

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

#48

Post by thewebguyd »

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…

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 companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc.

Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project and the societal benefit would be broader and not tied to a single company's market dominance.

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

#49

Post by dingnuts »

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'm not convinced LLMs are a net positive. They've been compared to railroads. Show me the new commerce brought about by LLM trains.

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

#50

Post by fraserharris »

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 product.
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