Could we perhaps remove "Terence Tao" from the title? It feels somewhat disingenuous to lean on their name to bolster the argument. While someone in this thread is criticized for an ad hominem attack, this risks being the opposite, a kind of pro hominem. The arguments should stand on their own merit without invoking authority in the title, no?
Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
51–60 of 592 posts
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#52This 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).
> I don't see a move back to a "smaller" world any time soon
I do! Unironically: AI assisted software development – and please, we can call that anything else, we do not need to confuse it with Serious software development.
Just the amount of super simple software (Apps Script, Office Script) that baseline tech savy people can now/soon build to enhance what they think their business needs are, without the impossible constraint of having to pay a dev to find it out for/with them (because that is really not how you can find that out, while you find out everything else about your super small business) gives me a lot of hope here.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
- 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 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. :-)
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it a "bad idea" for him to post his take? I guess your concern must be that people will give it too much weight due to him being a mathematician.
This is currently #1 on HN. I suspect that a lot of people will read this and decide not to look into relevant scholarship because the text here is packaged nicely and it is presented by somebody that this community (rightly) respects very deeply. In other contexts I've seen Tao cite scholarship outside of his field when engaging with it. I wish he'd done that here.
Citing scholarship would be good. Personally this has only piqued my curiosity and has probably only increased the chance I look into the relevant scholarship.
Do you have any links?
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#55Great 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…
This is also just a consequence of globalization. A small company cannot compete globally, which means less power for the US government abroad. So it's not in the interest of the US government to break up Apple or Google or Microsoft. Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#56Great 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…
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."
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
- 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 companie…
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Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#58Families are still the most common small organization and I think they need to be considered as a distinct category rather than being grouped with other small organizations.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#59Great 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…
The Bell breakup was stupid. If you have some competing companies, but they meet up, and agree to divide the country into regions,
and then choose to not compete with each other, that's not at all free market capitalism. Capitalism requires competition in the market in order for market forces to actually work! Cars is another example where, in the modern framing, the dealership model is bullshit and manufacturers should be able to sell direct to consumers. And it does make a certain amount of sense. But if the argument is for smaller organizations, the fact is that local dealerships are smaller than, say, Ford, and so if the argument is that the dealership model sucks because the car dealerships have too much power and are abusing it, taking power away from them and ceeding it to an even bigger organization doesn't make a lick of sense.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#60Earlier 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. :-)
Yes of course