Hasn't this been an ongoing process for hundreds of years?
Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
91–100 of 592 posts
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#92Earlier 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 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.
Why would a household with two working parents ever accept a similar living standard as that with one working parent?
People want to have their cake and eat it, too. And that obviously doesn't work.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#93I've joked that mathstodon is effectively Terence's Tao's personal blog, with some occasional guest bloggers
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#94Great 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…
Bell labs also sat on a lot of tech that didn't align w/ their business
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#95Matches 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 worry that theres a cyclical nature to it all. When society has smaller organizations, people saw what community organizing looked like, and folks were far more likely to have a hand being leaders simply by virtue of there being so many businesses when they were smaller and more distributed.
What terrifies me is a pocket thesis I have that the local leadership—the local activating & bringing people to a purpose— vanishing is a symptom or symptoms directly coupled to Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Capital swallowing up all the wealth & managing the world from the top down means there are way less people with Buck Stops Here responsibility, and that they tend to be in much loftier offices, far more remote and detached from the loved experiences of the business. Capital manages the world from afar now, exacts it's wants and desires via a very long arm of the invisible hand, and it doesn't involve us, doesn't involve humanity anymore.
We humanity don't see the world working before us, and are thrown into the world without much chance to carve a meaningful space out for ourselves. It's all very efficient and the scale of capital enables great things, but it deprived us of the human effort of stumbling through, deprives us of ingenuity's energizing reward of seeing things around us change and improve, seeing people connect through and around our actions. Society at a distance isn't social media & it's parasocial relationships: it's the new megacongolmerated world that left us Bowling Alone in 2000.
MBA-ification of our professional lives erodes the social animal. The less social animal, lacking experience, does not build social and business organizations around themselves. The social environment degraded further, the center cannot hold, we are moored less and less to purpose and each other.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#96Great 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 democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters, I'd be hard pressed to say that the state is sufficiently different from any other large organization. We can certainly see this now in the US in highly polarized times where the State bears opposition from half the country depending on who is in power.
I think this "anti-monopoly" framing is a bit dangerous as it smuggles a political position into a much more complicated situation. There is an overall decline in the West of small association groups. More and more of these groups happen on Discord voice chats and are divorced from the real life constraints that offer a more "grounded" character. And I think this issue has been written about much less than the "anti-monopoly" one. Even if you fervently believe that the State needs to play an aggressive role in policing private organizations, I think it's more thought-provoking to think about ways to encourage more grassroots organizing.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#97I don't understand mastodon or whatever the blogging software is. Why is it breaking the article into multiple pieces and showing the rest as comments, in smaller font? This is not Twitter, so why follow some archaic silly microblog format?
I stopped reading at 1/5, the text after is too small on my phone.
I run a cheap dedicated server for $25/mo and run a blog on it, and it just shows my fuxxing writings like a regular article. Surely TT can get someone to host a blog on his University's servers. Someone help this man!
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#98Earlier 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."
It’s naive either in the way you put it or at the very least in your eyes. There is a lot to be said about the narcissism of innovators radically rethinking anything and everything traditional just because we think we can do better by our current metrics. If things continue to be advanced haphazardly just because these companies have budget capacity what’s to say that in a hundred years the bulk of humanity will have…
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Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) You can also vote in the shareholders meeting.
You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.
Re: Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly
#100Earlier 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)
They want a trad farming lifestyle without technology but they get mad when you tell them that they have to work 4am-10pm in the summer and one child dies per winter