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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

#61

Post by biophysboy »

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…

Don't agree - just as an example, the poorest Irish immigrants in NYC were part of Tammany Hall wards. I think technology has reduced the need for economic/political actors to organize via hyper-local blocks.

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

#62

Post by CalRobert »

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’d imagine the death of volunteering and civic life has a lot to do with two income households becoming the default. A family that works forty or fifty hours a week has a lot more time to give than one that works eighty to one hundred (don’t forget commuting!)

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

#63

Post by prasadjoglekar »

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…

Sure, as long as they're not too big to fail. Those big banks should've gone bankrupt in 2008. They didn't because the taxpayer backstopped it.

That is precisely the moral hazard we're now living with. Become so big that you can't fail and can't be disciplined.

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

#64

Post by bluGill »

raincole wrote: post #56
rangestransform wrote: post #37

Earlier 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…

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."

They say that, but when you point out that they could have that if they accept a lower standard of living they lose interest (and if possiple downvote or otherwise try to shout you down)

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

#65

Post by ghaff »

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. :-)

Though two of your examples (not really Manhattan Project) had very significant private sector participants.

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

#66

Post by radlad »

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. :-)

I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.)

On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.

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

#67

Post by bluefirebrand »

jstummbillig wrote: post #52
rglover wrote: post #11

This 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…

> Unironically: AI assisted software development

Downstream reliance AI companies is not "smaller" in any sensible manner

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

#68

Post by danlugo92 »

renewiltord wrote: post #42

Realistically, everyone online is constantly complaining about the lack of friends, the lack of community, and so on. Meanwhile, I live in a high rise in SF and have no shortage of any of these. People borrow spoons of yogurt, tools, devices; share parenting, food, and home advice; and there's a bunch who play board games and the like. My friends are nearby. We go to the gym together, play basketball together, go to…

> This is very obviously a "smell shit everywhere you go" situation.

I don't know man, lots of big cities smell of shit so to speak. Had been in 3 big cities I had to move to a small "3rd world" beach town to stop smelling shit. Life (people) is great here.

Me I don't care about nice looking sidewalks slick looking buildings when everyone is either miserable or closed off or simply sizing you up and discarding you because they don't have nothing more to gain from you than "simply" friendship.

Maybe SF is an exception, never been.

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

#69

Post by afiori »

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…

Then at worst progress on those would be slower.

At best we would have less monopolistic global powers trying to rent us everyone of our freedoms

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

#70

Post by cs702 »

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…

Great response. Yes, in some cases concentration may be desirable.

However, I'm not persuaded it was necessary in the specific cases you mention:

* Waymo: EVs were repeatedly killed by corporations highly in concentrated industries that would suffer disruption by EVs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

* TSMC: Wouldn't we all be better off if the entire world weren't so dependent on a single company, located in a such a geopolitically sensitive territory?

* 10B-param LLMs: Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance? I'd add that the model that launched the deep learning craze (AlexNet) and the model that launched the LLM craze and (the Transformer) were developed by tiny teams on the cheap.

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