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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

#421

Post by protocolture »

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-…

Most anarchist tendencies would tear Goldman Sachs to shreds.

Even Rothbard wrote a pamphlet, I think he later disendorsed, justifying the breakup of any entity that contributes to war or state violence. I dont need to look up Goldman Sachs but I reckon I could justify them being in that box.

>anarchism

Anarchy the leftist tendency is the removal of Hierarchy. It can be debated into how you categorise that, but ultimately they all want corporations gone.

Its the right wing anarchists that are solely focused on the government

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

#422

Post by joegibbs »

com2kid wrote: post #110
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. 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.

And it wasn't as good as it's often mythologised to be. Back in the 60s (in Australia) people weren't going on holidays overseas, they lived in houses under half the size of modern builds, they had worse healthcare and lived 13 years less, they had relatively monotonous diets (growing up, my mother's staple food was bread with dripping), they weren't buying new clothes, furniture, knickknacks all the time.

And my grandfather, as a farmer, was up early in the morning and worked all day, never got weekends off. My grandmother was also working all the time - cooking, cleaning, sewing things, gardening. She wasn't employed but that didn't mean she was idle. The kids had to work when they were old enough too.

That was also a pretty decent income for time as well, there were a lot of urban poor living in tiny, crowded little houses.

It's not to say that it's never going to be possible for the mythical postwar boomer lifestyle of leisure (with modern standards of living) to actually available to the bulk of the population but it's going to need a lot more automation and productivity increases (like AI and self-driving cars) to get there, there's no "just tax the billionaires" one-simple-trick or policy that will immediately bring it in.

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

#423

Post by defgeneric »

Tao is great in lots of ways--obviously as a first-rate mathematician, but also as an educator and an ambassador of mathematics to the general public. It's cool to see him thinking along these lines, but if anyone is really interested in where this line of thinking goes, it's basically the problem of modernity. Just about everyone in the humanities is fully aware of this already. It emerged vaguely around the 1830s and basically became the major subject of the humanities--in one way or another--ever since. Marshall Berman's book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is good intro. I would expect that if you take Tao's specific line of thinking here (society beginning gas-like, interacting particles, then clumping together at various levels of abstraction, and interacting up and down the levels, etc) you get into all sorts of issues that were debated endlessly a very long time ago. But as a quick, temporary prism for looking at the world it's fine I guess. As a symptom, it makes one think something else might be going on when a very famous mathematician is suddenly now rediscovering modernity--perhaps things become more clear the more they break apart. One might even go so far as to say Tao's apparent ignorance of the issue of modernity has something to do with specialization, i.e. is a symptom of modernity itself.

PS--to add one thing as a criticism, the "retreat" into "grassroots groups" has also long been viewed as a false solution to the problem. Politically, this "solution" emerged in various forms: the 19th century's utopian socialism (especially in the US!), late 19th-early 20th century syndicalism, 1960s communes and "turn-on, tune-in, drop-out," up to now with the stubborn idea that communal living is somehow "revolutionary" and various other guises. It's there in less "radical" forms too, like when liberals say we just need to restart the bowling leagues. It's fine as an individual respite, but will never really get at the problem, not least because there are many other (and better!) ways of getting some "relief".

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

#424

Post by [deleted] »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #96
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…

> 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…

[deleted]

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

#425

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #96
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…

> 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…

> 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.

That isn't necessarily the case.

Suppose there was only one federal law: It's illegal for any entity to have more than 15% market share in any market. If you do you have 30 days to figure out how to break yourself up so that isn't the case, e.g. by putting half your factories into a separate company and selling it off. You get to figure out how to do it, it's just that if you have more than 15% market share on two days more than 30 days apart in the same 5 year period, you get unconditionally fined into oblivion. You don't even need government prosecutors, just make it a strict liability offense that gives customers the right to sue for 100% of revenue. Companies can start planning to break themselves up ahead of time once they're getting close to the market share threshold if they feel like they want more time to do something about it.

Then the government isn't really doing any kind of central planning, it's just a strict unconditional ban on market concentration and nothing else.

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

#426

Post by cullenking »

gnulinux996 wrote: post #364
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…

> Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year The fact that schools can go "out of business" is incredible. The more I get in contact with everything American, the more left I lean.

Preschool is just daycare with structure, so it costs more. Optional, privately owned. Nice to do 2-3 days a week for young kids to give them more social and learning opportunites. But it’s not public school, it’s usually just a small locally owned business.

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

#427

Post by eli_gottlieb »

at_compile_time wrote: post #370
neves wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We must be working from different definitions of efficient. Yes, the CCP can say jump and expect their corporations to do so, but when everyone in a modern economy jumps at the same time, massive oversupply is the result. More market-based economies are also prone to similar overproduction when everyone gets caught up in the same mania (see AI datacenters), but investors will eventually stop lighting their money on f…

> Their feedback loop has things like social stability and global competitiveness as competing goals to actually doing productive work.

Sounds like you're making the case for their system here!

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

#428

Post by themafia »

walleeee wrote: post #407
themafia wrote: post #330

> Large organized groups can offer substantially more economies of scale, and so can outcompete small organizations based on the economic goods they offer. This premise ignores the existence of the Internet. Wherein small groups of distributed actors can combine their efforts through a nearly instantaneous communications mechanism to match that of the larger groups. The federal government was conceived when horses we…

Who built it? The answer illuminates your final paragraph, although it does suggest maybe rethinking "replacement"

The people who made it popular and paid for it's massive expansion out of universities and into homes.

The protocols are not particularly significant. Jon Postel never worked for the US Government.

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

#429

Post by defgeneric »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #319

He should look up Roald Coase - mid 20C who tried o answer the question of why have firms at all - big or small. The “market” ought to be able to supply services (secretary, welding etc) - but his “Theory of the firm” suggests that there are complex processes inside a firm that are pretty easy to employ someone and teach them, and pretty hard to write a contract for. So there is a natural size of a firm that is a tug…

Why would software be qualitatively different from all other forms of automation that came before? And suppose, for the sake of argument, that software is fully automated at some point--what then happens to the firm?

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

#430

Post by ipdashc »

joegibbs wrote: post #422
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.

And it wasn't as good as it's often mythologised to be. Back in the 60s (in Australia) people weren't going on holidays overseas, they lived in houses under half the size of modern builds, they had worse healthcare and lived 13 years less, they had relatively monotonous diets (growing up, my mother's staple food was bread with dripping), they weren't buying new clothes, furniture, knickknacks all the time. And my gra…

While rose-tinted glasses are a huge factor, I feel like a big part of what people dream of when looking back on the last century is not just leisure, but stability and dignity.

Stability in that you had jobs that lasted a lifetime and paid a pension once you retired, not layoffs every couple years. Dignity in that anyone could get a real, important, meaningful (and very rough, once you take off said rose-tinted glasses) job as a factory worker, farmer, coal miner, whatever, instead of what, working at Walmart or 7-11?

I do agree with you though, especially your last paragraph.

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