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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

#491

Post by chaseadam17 »

riemannzeta wrote: post #414
chaseadam17 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's part of the reason Bitcoin has been successful - it's a store of value that governments/banks can't inflate away, similar to gold. But crypto has also made US dollar stable coins popular, which are arguably better than holding some hyper inflating currency like the Argentinian Peso, but the holders of those stablecoins are still "taxed" when the US government/banks inflate the currency (and are worse off…

I agree with your first and second sentences completely -- but as to the "holy grail"... Isn't Bitcoin (or Ethereum, or Solana, or whatever your L1 favorite is) itself the "internet-native stable coin" we want, except for their lack of stability? In other words, if we didn't have a need to exchange into local currency, what remaining need would there be except for lower price volatility?

Yeah, those tokens are not stable enough to use as a medium of exchange and I’m arguing that there are likely new ways to achieve stability that are better than how the US dollar is currently managed.

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

#492

Post by solatic »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #299
solatic wrote: post #155

Author posits a causal relationship in a zero-sum game that he provides no evidence for. Paraphrasing, that uncontrollable intangibles like technology gave slightly more power to individuals and much more power to large organizations at the expense of small organizations. Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own? Is there some zero-sum pie of power to be distributed? So if…

>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

No, this isn't how power works. Money/wealth is economic power, which can be grown through the application of renewable resources (e.g. human labor, electricity, resources that can be grown like wood) to build that which is more valuable to the participants of a transaction than the sum of its parts. As more wealth is created, more areas of power are created. If you disband a hierarchy (e.g. a company goes bankrupt/out of business), power hasn't been diluted back down to the individual level, rather power has been destroyed. Hypothetically, if humanity went extinct tomorrow, there would be no power left at all.

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

#493

Post by biztos »

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…

I was so used to my American bank not actively selling me snake oil that I stupidly bought a very expensive snake-oil subscription from my German bank when I was living there. Ended up with a warehouse full of snake oil (metaphorically speaking) and a sunk-cost fallacy before I finally figured out they just had a strategic partnership with Snake Oil GmbH so my account representative got a commission on my stupidity.

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

#494

Post by mensetmanusman »

littlestymaar wrote: post #462
dolmen wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The small groups of influencers. YouTube is the new spectrum and public square. That’s why it was so harmful when Biden censored tens of thousands on it.

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

#495

Post by panick21_ »

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…

Banks being only local was utterly horrible for the economy. You had many small banks completely depended on one region and a local supply shock would kill all the local banks as well.

This regulation didn't happen to prevent monopolies, it was done to create monopolies. Banks didn't want other banks from other regions to compete against their costumers.

Canada had larger branch banks that were much more stable.

> * Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in less concentration in many industries:

Yes and often what was defined as a monopoly and what an oligopoly and what was defined as 'to large' was determined by what industry had a competitor that they couldn't defeat and also had friends in high places.

The original state level anti-trust actually came out of butchers that wanted protection from centralized butchers that could use special railcars to transport frozen meat, instead of doing localized butchering.

So a lot of the history that many idolize is just a different form of companies using state power against each other.

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

#496

Post by Bjartr »

tjs8rj wrote: post #273
roughly wrote: post #181

Earlier 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…

In today’s world is it actually in our best interest to have the government break up large organizations? Or is that the worse of 2 evils? The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporatio…

> only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.

At a glance it seems this would only remain true so long as American interests and the interests of the corporation align. Which they do, up to a point.

The question then becomes where is the "triple point" between "A globally competitive USA", "Corporate oligarchy", and "Power to the people"? If such a balance can when exist

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

#497

Post by panick21_ »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #347
monkeywithdarts wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

Real-life anarchists aren't proposing the naïve "burn it all down" anarchy. Apparently that's just a media thing. (Some claim it's authoritarian propaganda, but I suspect it's just writers going: "we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society, but they need a reason , and we've had too many religious extremists: let's make this one an anarchist!"… though maybe this is a false dichotomy? Someone's probably written a…

The link between anarchists and 'burn everything down' comes from the fact that in reality, many anarchists have very much taken the 'shoot first' and then hopefully build something better later path.

Those anarchists who didn't do that, were just never politically or socially relevant. So they can write nice pamphlets all they like about what 'real anarchism' actually is.

> we need a bad guy who wants to destroy society

Anarchist and Communists very much wanted a fundamentally different society, one so different that its essentially impossible to get there without destroying the existing one first.

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

#498

Post by GeoAtreides »

solatic wrote: post #492
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

No, this isn't how power works. Money/wealth is economic power, which can be grown through the application of renewable resources (e.g. human labor, electricity, resources that can be grown like wood) to build that which is more valuable to the participants of a transaction than the sum of its parts. As more wealth is created, more areas of power are created. If you disband a hierarchy (e.g. a company goes bankrupt/o…

Wealth is not power, but a means through which power is applied. It's not the only one, of course.

Disbanding a hierarchy can be achieved in many ways, the consequences being as varied.

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

#499

Post by panick21_ »

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…

Self Driving cars are very much unproven, and without google people would still be working on them. And so far its not clear that this investment was worth it.

TSMC had many costumers willing to buy new chips.

But I agree, sometimes, larger companies very much do make sense.

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

#500

Post by joz1-k »

mym1990 wrote: post #398
joz1-k wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be an acceptable source for you? Which was the last US mega-corporation that the US government broke up? It certainly wasn't Microsoft or Google. Allowing huge companies to grow even bigger gives them more competitive power in the global market. This wasn't as important before we had super-globalized economies.

I don't think the question is whether monopolies are being allowed to exist, my question is what is the source as to WHY you think it is happening. A source would be any kind of proof that having a monopoly in one country is a strategic advantage over other countries. Data, publications, etc...

> A source would be any kind of proof...

I cannot give you proof for the line of political thinking. :)

> ...having a monopoly in one country is a strategic advantage over other countries.

Having a large, unified domestic market is a strategic advantage because it enables companies to grow to a size that makes them formidable global competitors [0]. The United States and China are examples of this phenomenon. The point isn't whether it's advantageous to allow such companies to become monopolies. Once these companies reach a certain size, politicians are reluctant to break them up because they don't want other global companies to take their place.

[0]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/

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