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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

#461

Post by grues-dinner »

AppleBananaPie wrote: post #453
grues-dinner wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, children are expected and virtually required to be supervised 24/7 for the first 14-ish years. Kicking kids out to play like Just William while Mrs Brown goes to the Women's Institute all afternoon is now called neglect and child abuse.

Part of it was older kids looking after younger ones which just isn't a thing anymore as far as I can tell.

You have to have at least two kids for that, and with a big enough age difference for it to work.

And if it goes wrong you can get prosecuted for that and/or dragged through public infamy. In fact even if it doesn't go wrong you can probably still be reported for it.

Which is presumably a very good thing for child safety, but obviously there are these downstream effects.

Another similar thought was the theory that car seat laws act to cap more families at two children because with three, you can't legally fit both parents and the children into a normal car.

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

#462

Post by littlestymaar »

dolmen wrote: post #413
BlueTemplar wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube has gone mainstream.

As youtubers are getting more and more attention than the old medias, that may be an area where small groups are striving against large ones (so going against Terence's theory).

What small groups though? YouTube is owned and moderated by a trillion dollar company which heavily editorialize the user feed.

And more an more YouTube channels are owned by PE funds.

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

#463

Post by GeoAtreides »

shiandow wrote: post #451
GeoAtreides wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is there some zero-sum pie of power Yes, that's exactly how power works. You can dilute power (in non-hierarchical organizations) or you can concentrate it (in rigidly hierarchical societies), but there's a finite amount of it and it's deeply coveted by all

That is a symplistic view, two people can achieve a lot more together than individually and today's society can achieve a lot more than prehistoric humanity. I can get fruit and spices delivered to me that a Roman emperor would barely be aware of, and I can do so without leaving my bed.

The issue was power, not cooperation.

Not sure where modern logistic chains come into play when talking about power.

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

#464

Post by reyqn »

seu wrote: post #456

> An individual human without any of the support provided by larger organized groups is only able to exist at quite primitive levels, as any number of pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction can portray. This guy may be a math genius, but he should at least pay minimal respect to the thousands of people who have studied human cultures, societies and civilizations, and to their findings, before coming up with a post about…

Maybe he wanted his point to be conveyed easily and used "post-apocaliptic fiction" as a shortcut, but probably knows it's not so trivial. I think people not versed in a particular domain can still have interesting (even if wrong) ideas, that are worth reading and thinking about.

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

#465

Post by modo_mario »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #53
thewebguyd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)

Might I note that we're building down nation states at a rapid rate at least in the west trough migration. The vast majority of my capital is not comprised of belgian ethnicities for example and the same will start to hold trough for a number of the other biggest cities.

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

#466

Post by modo_mario »

AppleBananaPie wrote: post #453
grues-dinner wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, children are expected and virtually required to be supervised 24/7 for the first 14-ish years. Kicking kids out to play like Just William while Mrs Brown goes to the Women's Institute all afternoon is now called neglect and child abuse.

Part of it was older kids looking after younger ones which just isn't a thing anymore as far as I can tell.

Also the elderly further amplified by the fact that those elderly were younger.

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

#467

Post by piva00 »

psunavy03 wrote: post #322
roughly wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The state holds the guns, and if it doesn't hold the guns, it's not the thing I'm referring to as the state - fundamentally, the power of the state is the power of violence. Other actors may possess other types of power and other types of coercion, but those either leverage or are constrained by the state power of violence.

One could make an argument that the state does not hold a monopoly on violence. It holds a monopoly on the legitimization of violence. You're allowed to use deadly force to protect yourself from death or serious bodily harm in the majority of jurisdictions, provided it is not disproportionate. What matters is that the state declines to prosecute this, but does prosecute the person who hypothetically shoots someone on…

That's just semantics, for all intents and purposes the monopoly on violence is exactly that: the monopoly on the legitimisation of violence, only the state allows violence, you can only perform a violent act under the provisions the state allows, hence it's de facto and de jure holding the monopoly on violence.

Stating this because I'm not sure what differentiation you are trying to achieve with the semantics game, the meaning is the same for any interpretation.

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

#468

Post by Cubre »

seu wrote: post #456

> An individual human without any of the support provided by larger organized groups is only able to exist at quite primitive levels, as any number of pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction can portray. This guy may be a math genius, but he should at least pay minimal respect to the thousands of people who have studied human cultures, societies and civilizations, and to their findings, before coming up with a post about…

I agree that his opinion should be taken with a grain of salt since the topic is far from his field of expertise, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect someone to do literature review before posting an opinion to a social media website.

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

#469

Post by piva00 »

ponector wrote: post #306
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…

>> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good By almost any metric, life in western society is better than ever, you cannot say now times are not good. From my perspective one of the main reason is the modern internet: people are glued to screens instead of participation in local community. Why bother to go somewhere if you have everything in your pocket and also on the enormously big tv screen in your room?

> By almost any metric, life in western society is better than ever, you cannot say now times are not good.

Is there a metric for community-oriented participation? It touches exactly on your point, people aren't doing communal things because screens and the internet exist, wouldn't that impact a metric of "good life"?

I feel there are a lot of focus on economy metrics: consumption (prices, assortment of products, etc.), wages, employment but social metrics are lacking. How can we quantify other aspects of life that aren't immediately (or by proxy) measured on economics ones?

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

#470

Post by m101 »

The causes for this, in my mind, are largely because of:

1) regulatory frameworks (which work to protect vested interests in my world view), mean that costs of doing business are higher, defending incumbents from competition. Banking regulation policy, for instance, has explicitly favoured larger institutions.

2) financialisation of basically everything (market values increasing to their discounted cost of capital), means that significant capital is required for many businesses. By this I mean the normal interpretation of capital for a business, but also the precursors such as high residential real estate + mortgages reducing the incentives to take risk in a new business, pushing people to already established businesses.

3) weird incentives around work and welfare distort the labour market, and hence the propensity for people to take on low wage jobs in smaller businesses. See high numbers of disabilities for instance.

4) globalisation generally means that the businesses that remain are probably bigger (I hypothesize)

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