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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

#521

Post by artk42 »

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…

Thanks, this is an amazing historical note! Will learn in detail. My intuition advises that efficient antimonopoly is the battle we are losing..

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

#522

Post by riemannzeta »

chaseadam17 wrote: post #491
riemannzeta wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What ways? I'm curious. Have you written anything about this? I'd be interested in reading more of what you see as possible.

If we think about stability from first principles, then when you're talking about aggregating up billions and trillions of transactions, each of which occurs with some characteristic frequency, then the primary factors are coupling strength (how correlated or uncorrelated are those frequencies?) and bandwidth (how wide is the spread of their characteristic frequencies).

It's very popular right now to look down on the central banks for the inflationary influence of monetary policy. Less well appreciated is their role in damping volatility through decoupling (by calming herding behavior -- e.g., stopping bank runs) and increasing bandwidth (by offering the longest terms of credit and the ultimate put).

I believe you have to look all the way back to how market panics were resolved by J.P. Morgan (the person) to get a sense of how volatility in a internet-native stable coin might be addressed. I love crypto, but I don't see that crypto has fundamentally changed human nature, which means that ultimately some crypto holder will have to serve as the liquidity provider of last resort. This, in turn, raises all the same questions about centralization vs. decentralization and democratic values that we have with respect to the central banks in terms of how they handle monetary policy.

But maybe there's a way I haven't seen yet.

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

#523

Post by thegrimmest »

antonvs wrote: post #450
thegrimmest wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm perfectly happy for some folks to have trillion dollar net worth. I'm glad to negotiate with these folks and their organizations to provide value in exchange for a comfortable living.

> just buy the government they want

The idea of a constitution and separation of powers is to constrain the types of government that can legitimately exist. This does work to some degree. No matter how wealthy you are, you can't kill people in public. Money is to buy goods and services in a free exchange. When government agents acting in their official capacity accept money or the promise thereof in exchange for official action, this is called corruption. All human systems are corrupt, and no solution to corruption is perfect, but ours is pretty good compared to others.

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

#524

Post by azemetre »

999900000999 wrote: post #285
azemetre wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently finished Tribe by Sebastian Junger. I highly recommend it as well.

I have the audiobook. From start to finish it's fantastic. It's not a highly scientific work though, it's more of an observation mixed with some autobiographical touches.

Gonna sound lame but the passages that really moved me were those in the beginning talking about the Native American interactions with European colonists, how some colonist couldn't stand their lifestyles and found a home with the Native Americans.

Also the section on war, how British officials thought the blitz would dissolve the people into barbarism when the opposite happened.

Couple this with declining third spaces and a government that increasingly does not care about people's mental health, something has to change and it's not like it would be hard to start public jobs programs again or encourage more civic engagement via workplace democracy.

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

#525

Post by prewett »

jfengel wrote: post #357
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.

China is efficient but largely because they don't actually have to obey the State. They are capitalist; they compete in the global market and follow market signals. The CCP does put a heavy thumb on some scales, but so does every country. Perfect efficiency is not optimal when circumstances change, so states always enforce some redundancy. There are many differences, of course, but just don't get the idea that China…

To be pedantic, it's "socialism with Chinese characteristics". The idea is to save face by renaming "capitalism" as "Chinese characteristics".

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

#526

Post by mgfist »

Sharlin wrote: post #503
mgfist wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ridden in a Waymo? I'd sell my car if/when they become ubiquitous enough.

Self-driving EVs are not a solution to most of the externalities of personal automobiles. No means of transport is that requires twenty square meters of space and 2000 kg of matter to move 1.4 persons at a time on average. It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society, even if they ever become viable in climates that aren’t always sunny.

> Self-driving EVs are not a solution to most of the externalities of personal automobiles.

Why do you think self-driving cars are meant to solve automobile externalities? I don't view them in that way. I view them as solving personal problems with driving - attention, safety, comfort, utilization rate, cost, etc..

> It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society

Why not? Personal automobiles have a utilization rate of around 5%. If Waymo can get that to even 40% that means you can reduce the number of vehicles by 8x (let's be conservative and say 4x to account for potentially higher use of them a la Jevon's Paradox). They're also infinitely safer and it's likely that they'll get to the point where there are no automobile related deaths. They'll replace the likes of Uber and taxis which have been known to be sources of assaults and other crimes. They'll unlock other opportunities too but regardless of how conservative you want to be with their effects, if they roll out to the point where one can forgo buying a personal automobile, it's very very hard to argue it won't be a huge net positive to society.

I bet your reason against it is that you believe something like trains and metros and bikes are better. And to an extent they are, I live in a city and prefer to ride the metro when I can. But it's pure hopium thinking they can ever fully obviate cars.

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

#527

Post by bccdee »

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…

> Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government itself, as if this wasn't an organization.

The comment you're responding to specifically indicates private organizations. Public organizations are publicly accountable.

> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters

Accountability, not legitimacy, is what's at stake here. If the local mining company is polluting the river, there's nothing you do anything about it. What, are you going to take hostile action & organize a global aluminum boycott? No. But if the local government is polluting the river, you can vote them out, at least in theory. Not every democracy is healthy, and failed democratic states are certainly little better than private organizations. But a healthy democracy is substantially different from any other institutional framework, and democratic governance is the only real alternative to private oligarchy.

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

#528

Post by ezst »

ux266478 wrote: post #183
ezst wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people in Europe don't want the EU Those things Americans say about the rest of the world...

Nothing of what you quoted is incorrect.

You are the best kind of correct since "many" can refer to some large number that is also insignificant. The pro-European sentiment is vastly dominant, though, and that's what matters.

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

#529

Post by CalRobert »

Tomis02 wrote: post #517
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.

> Kicking kids out to play There's cars everywhere, cities are optimised for them. There's nowhere to kick the kids out to play without the risk of them being run over by a car.

This is why we moved to https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w , where we kick our kids out to play routinely. Sadly it’s the last bastion of sanity in a carbrained world

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

#530

Post by hudon »

pessimizer wrote: post #337
999900000999 wrote: post #206

Tribe is a fantastic book that goes into this, fundamentally most humans exist best when they have some form of status in their community. This could be as simple as a small community club where your assigned a role like treasurer or something, my grandmother did this when she was young. People actually know you and care about your problems . For various reasons, these groups just aren't as significant anymore. There…

There was an explosion of these little groups in the US after the 1st edition of Robert's Rules of Order was published, which incidentally was also heavily adopted by churches (and women's suffrage groups, who helped him with the Newly Revised.) I'd say this fulmination culminated in FDR and strong unions, aspects of both made illegal afterwards - term limits to limit democracy, striking made into a kabuki ritual by…

I don't know if it's intentional, isn't this the ultimate form of liberalism? To give the individual full autonomy, unshackled from the dependencies of family, neighbors, community, and any other local associations individuals are "born in". Seems like we are exactly where we've been aiming at for a couple hundred years.
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