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

Post by rainingmonkey » Tue, Sep 30, 2025, 10:22 AM UTC

grues-dinner wrote: post #326

grogenaut wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent 4 years during and after covid looking for volunteer opportunities. People just weren't using anything. I'll agree with you that many of these groups may be dysfunctional. They seemed to want money (the ones I talked to) not actual people. Freemasons: what do they even do? I just know a few secretive fat white guys who belong. They're serious about it. They don't talk about it. Why would I join? I have no ide…

I guess the biggest one is "church". But to get into that requires accepting (or pretending to accept, I suppose) the horizontal memetic transfer of the specific denomination.

Quakers don't demand a belief in the supernatural

Post by at_compile_time » Thu, Oct 02, 2025, 11:46 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #427

at_compile_time wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must be working from different definitions of efficient. Yes, the CCP can say jump and expect their corporations to do so, but when everyone in a modern economy jumps at the same time, massive oversupply is the result. More market-based economies are also prone to similar overproduction when everyone gets caught up in the same mania (see AI datacenters), but investors will eventually stop lighting their money on f…

> Their feedback loop has things like social stability and global competitiveness as competing goals to actually doing productive work. Sounds like you're making the case for their system here!

When I say they prioritize social stability, I mean that they won't stop producing cars regardless of how little economic sense it makes because they need to keep people employed to stave of massive civil unrest. And global competitiveness counts for little when the countries they want to export to implement anti-dumping policies to protect their own industries from government-subsidized Chinese exports.

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

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