Anyone interested in this sort of thinking from the economic side should give The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim wu a read. It's a call to action in favor of the neo-Brandeis movement, which is trying to change how we think of antitrust in the United States. Key to neo-Brandeisian anti-trust is a shift away from consumer welfare, and a shift towards a focus on a firms size and power
Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
441–450 of 592 posts
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
Game theory is exactly it. A bunch of simulations have shown that in a repeated prisoner's dilemma, the optimal strategy is tit-for-tat, sometimes adding forgiveness. The fact that you will play again incentivizes players to cooperate. But as soon as the game becomes finite (i.e. you can see the end in sight), the optimal strategy becomes "defect", because your opponent also has the same incentives and whoever defect…
It's interesting to wonder about why norms degrade at scale. Intuition tells me it's because stink-eye doesn't scale. Defectors in a small org pay a price external to the game, aka "reputational damage". But members of large organizations rarely suffer this, because they are strangers, and because "they are just doing their job". A half-formed thought, but perhaps it's half-useful.
In the book "The Logic of Collective Action" that's recognized as one of the reasons for why large organizations are unable to produce public goods without setting up some separate, selective incentives for the individuals. When society is composed of mostly large organizations, nothing can be done without either forcing people to do it (government) or using money as an incentive (corporations). In small groups it's possible for the group to act in the best interest of everyone (produce public good) without having any other incentives for the individual, and a part of the reason is the effect on reputation for non-participants.
Maybe this transition to large groups means that it's harder to produce public goods, since producing them now always requires setting up a separate system of incentives, which is hard and can be gamed.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#443Great 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…
> think it's more thought-provoking to think about ways to encourage more grassroots organizing.
You could start with a shorter standard work week.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#444We need personal relationships - but we also prefer impersonal relationships - because it frees us from the social calculations about what is fair.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#445Great 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…
And the reasons for this are increasingly clear. In a globalized world, you need large-scale organizations to compete. Smaller nations are increasingly forced to become highly specialized in a few specific industries, often where companies are sold to major firms from allied countries (large parts of europe or israel, singapore), or you end up with individual companies constituting a significant portion of the national GDP (korea).
The way in which the US is able to weld such power on the world stage, especially with the rise of China is we don't constantly break up every rising business.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#446It is true that larger organizations have economies of scale but smaller groups and individuals have more flexibility and can pivot easily.
I dont think access to tech is any different (significantly that is) at the top than itnis at the bottom. Feature sets are more austere (8 out of the 10 functions maybe that they really need) for individuals and small groups, but less wasteful, at the top they're richer but more wasteful (hundreds of features maybe but you only really need 10). The bigger you are the worst value for money because you pay for a lot of stuff you dont need which cancels out the economies of scale in my opinion because you have to pay so much for such a small edge.
Getting more out of less is better than getting less out of more.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost of developing GPT-2 and GPT-3 was on the order of millions of dollars, well within the budget of most tech organizations. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 for the total compute invested in them. OpenAI had raised only a few tens of millions in donations at the time, as a non-profit organization. The increase in performance of computation has been happening for so many decades now that it's been given nam…
Fair point, the first few gens weren't that expensive. And like I said I'm certain the scaling would've been discovered soon with some time lag. But the transformer paper was 2017, right? Just from a benefit -to- society perspective, assuming LLMs are a net positive in terms of productivity, perhaps reducing time to drug approval or improving government efficiency (1).. Isn't getting there just one year earlier worth…
I believe that LLMs are detrimental to government efficiency, because they distract from solving the underlying problems (such as porkishly complex laws or a lack of unique identifiers).
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#448Great 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…
These actions were a direct consequence of the situation at the end of the 19th century. People here often forget that the Sherman act was a regulation against trusts, large integrated companies, and not monopolies.
We knew from the start that large companies were bad for democracy and the civil society. The issue is just that the elite decided in the 80s that their economic interests trumped the public interested and the democrat kept doing what Reagan started.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
but now it's on HN and people are discussing this idea that's been thrown out and some people agree and some don't and some bring up how it's similar to Bertrand de Jouvenal and others start thinking of de Tocqueville or Robert Putnam (I'm sure you could draw a connection to James C. Scott too) and before you know it you've got the beginnings of a bibliography right here in these threads
Sure but why start this discussion from first principles when you can read a text that covers the same ground in 10 pages?
Do you have any recommendations?
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters This is exactly the key core distinction. The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors. It’s imperative, therefore, that it be democratic and representative. Notably, part of the instinct to break up other large organizations is to prevent them f…
> The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors I'm not sure this is a universal definition. Some of us just want a state that maintains a monopoly on violence, and otherwise does not constrain peaceful actors. An administration of peaceful coexistence rather than a mandate for cooperation. While administrating the peace does require some absolute power, it i…
> otherwise does not constrain peaceful actors.
Leading to individuals with net worths heading towards a trillion dollars who can just buy the government they want.
What you say you “want” is against your own interests.