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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

#81

Post by fmbb »

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…

Reading your first three bullet points I thought you were dreaming about how much better the world could have been.

But your main paragraph following them reads to me like you want Waymo, a powerful TSMC, and huge LLMs.

If there is one thing concentrating power and wealth does it is preferring shorttermism. Growth in the next quarter trumps anything else. Humanity’s ecological niche is suffering long term. Civilization suffers as wealth inequality increases (which concentration of power makes happen).

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

#82

Post by raincole »

bluGill wrote: post #64
raincole wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I think most people are actually okay if everyone agrees to accept a lower standard of living.

What's not okay is that only they have to accept the short end of the stick and the others can profit from that.

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

#83

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by lotsofpulp »

radlad wrote: post #71
bluGill wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I think the problem is that you are proposing a false dichotomy: that if they do not want one consequence of the current system, they should eschew the entire system. But in actuality, I like some parts of how society is organized, and dislike some other parts. I don't want to leave society - I want society to be better.

Except this is impossible:

>They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids

If society also wants women to be able to have the same income earning opportunities as men and hence have financial freedom.

Animals compete and compare themselves to others, and so everywhere, dual earning households will outcompete single earning households, and so most market participants will be incentivized to be dual earning households.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

mediaman wrote: post #47
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…

The reduction of volunteer organizations started long before COVID: "Bowling Alone" was written in 2000, and documents much of the same changes. The trend has been resistant to any particular link to localized economic ups or downs. Characterizing the 2023-2025 era (at least in the US) as "a time of scarcity" is divorced from any sort of factual reality; there is no quantitative data to support this idea and it seems…

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by Workaccount2 »

Part of the appeal of software is that it's so low friction that you actually can be a small team and take on giants.

I love hardware but I have basically abandoned any hope of bringing products to market. Just to get compliance certifications can cost upwards of $250k for a basic product, nevermind needing to wrangle with supply lines, manufacturing, and physical distribution. Forget it. You all have seen the graveyard of Kickstarters.

At my day job though, these huge costs can be readily absorbed and amount to a small fraction of the total cost.

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

#87

Post by dh2022 »

fraserharris wrote: post #50

Small organizations exist largely because volunteers will them to exist by donating their time. From our elementary school, it's clear the people who have time to volunteer are the stay-at-home parents. The dominance of two-income households eroded the small organizations, which created a market (distributing the costs over many more people) for large organizations to fill the void with a worse but market-serving pro…

Interesting take. What is the market-serving product you mentioned?

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

#88

Post by aleph_minus_one »

tavavex wrote: post #74
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. :-)

Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothi…

> Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent.

Stock corporation, even if flawed, are accountable to their stock holders at least to an extent; thus your point

> Private companies are accountable to no one

clearly does not hold. Corporations, of course, can also be steered and course-corrected (shareholders meetings).

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

#89

Post by serf »

woah wrote: post #79
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…

> Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding. I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we…

automating logistics lines does have military potential -- a waymo doesn't have to be holding bob and sara on the way to mcdonalds, it could also be long-hauling thousands of pounds of troop equipment and logistics needs.

the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.

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