[HN Gopher] Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in soci...
___________________________________________________________________
Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk
significantly
Author : bertman
Score : 612 points
Date : 2025-09-24 16:32 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mathstodon.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (mathstodon.xyz)
| daft_pink wrote:
| I'm not sure if that's true.
|
| As a counterpoint, things we rely on like Amazon are actually a
| lot of tiny businesses that have ideas and now we are able to get
| their more tailored products, whereas two decades ago, I just got
| to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to sell us.
|
| Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators and two
| decades ago the only thing available was the major tv networks
| and cable tv.
|
| It may be true that big organizations deliver these things, but
| big organizations delivered them before and it's definitely more
| possible for small organizations to have big impacts now than it
| was before.
| yifanl wrote:
| Those tiny businesses are reasonably well-coordinated, so its
| not really the same type of "small organization" as what Tao is
| talking about.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| I'm sorry, but you are very incorrect.
|
| In Amazon... You'd be surprised to know how many brands sell
| 90% of the products availabile there.
|
| The same applies to Youtube, you'd be surprised to know how
| many channels per country gets 90% of the views.
|
| It's an illusion. We have billion of people...
| gertlex wrote:
| I think your comment and claims would be much better if you
| at least gave some example spitball numbers.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| There is nuance here. What you say is true but big
| organizations have grown as well.
|
| I think in the big picture I would say overall it's the big
| organizations that have grown dominant. The inductive reason is
| because it is the goal for small organizations to become big so
| that's where things head logically speaking.
|
| From an evidence based standpoint, in the end, look at YouTube
| and Amazon. In the end the big organizations are in control.
| YouTube for example can cut off their creator and it's pretty
| much over for them no matter how popular they once were.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Many big corps launch small brands to fake authenticity
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I think there's a difference between tiny and small. There are
| a ton of tiny companies that essentially buy services from
| fortune 50s and lease from big real estate firms.
|
| Businesses with 50-100 people are pretty rare compared to the
| past
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Two decades ago department stores were not making products.
| They were and still are leasing shelf space. The only
| difference between them and modern amazon is that their shelves
| are finite, so some level of quality control was done to ensure
| the shelves would be stocked with things people are actually
| interested in and wouldn't fall apart and jam up the returns
| department too badly.
| drivers99 wrote:
| > I just got to buy whatever walmart or bestbuy was willing to
| sell us.
|
| There was a lot of stuff available that was advertised in
| magazines and stuff as well. To use one niche as an example:
| I'm thinking of the ads in computer magazines sometimes with
| hundreds of obscure items crammed into a page.
| bccdee wrote:
| > Also consider youtube, I watch a lot of tiny creators
|
| Right, but you don't know these people. You're not in a
| community with them. Tao points to Dunbar's number as a rough
| boundary between small and large communities; how many of these
| "tiny" creators have fewer than 150 followers, and how many of
| them foster close social ties among those followers in ways
| that couldn't scale to a larger audience?
|
| Before the era of ~2k subscriber youtube passion project
| channels, people were forced to find people in their area with
| shared interests and establish social clubs. This necessarily
| meant a smaller audience, but it also meant actually being
| friends with the people you were communicating with. Youtube is
| definitely a different kind of thing.
|
| That said, I do think there's an argument to be made that the
| Discord- and groupchat-ification of the social media ecosystem
| is a backswing toward smaller groups.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| >things we rely on like Amazon are actually a lot of tiny
| businesses that have ideas
|
| I mean sure, that's one way to describe dropshipping from huge
| chinese manufactories
| mmmore wrote:
| I think by most objective measures the size and power of large
| organizations has increased since WWII. For example, the size
| and scope of Western governments, consolidation in many
| industries, the portion of the stock market that is
| representated by the n-biggest companies, increased
| income/wealth inequality. If you debating the "large
| organizations have grown in power relative to small ones" part
| of the thesis I would be interested in what exactly you think
| would capture that.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I dunno. Tao is a very smart person but it seems like a bad idea
| for a mathematician to be making claims like these without
| sources. His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's
| vibes.
|
| I'm not familiar with all of these subfields, but I know that the
| scholarship on the history of communication networks is
| _extremely deep_. Why would there be so much work if things were
| actually explained so easily? If you are interested in these
| topics, go read the scholarship!
|
| EDIT: With a little more clarity, I guess what I'm trying to say
| is that this is #1 on HN right now and I'd encourage people who
| are interested in this topic to read the mountains of scholarship
| on these topics written by experts and I wish that Tao had used
| his visibility to point readers at these experts. You may find
| that it complicates things.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Yeah but this doesn't invalidate his take. You're just saying
| his take is as good as anyone's which can still be 1000%
| correct.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Sure, but the take is huge (it covers all dimensions of
| society) and is two takes in one: the claim that the role of
| small organizations is diminishing and the reason for this.
| I'd be _stunned_ if such an effect could be meaningfully
| explained in so few paragraphs.
|
| When the topics are entire subfields (the development of
| multinational corporations, the development of states, the
| development of communication networks) it makes sense to
| build takes off of actual research.
| iambateman wrote:
| This is ad hominem. He presents meaningful ideas and we would
| all benefit from you responding to the ideas.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I do not think that it is unreasonable to say that a
| layperson providing a extremely high level analysis of a
| topic that spans entire academic fields is likely not
| terribly insightful.
|
| The history of communications networks (just one of the many
| enormous topics he covers here) is a whole field with piles
| of academics publishing constantly.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Do you have any interesting info to share from these
| enormous piles of academic publishing?
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| It's not "extremely high level analysis." It's a brief
| philosophical excursion, and he appropriately disclaims
| that his opinions aren't rigorous or even all that
| informed.
|
| The idea that Tao can't be insightful while microblogging
| outside of his field of expertise is silly. We here at HN
| allow plenty of nonexperts a wide latitude to pretend like
| they know something of which they have no real knowledge.
| The result is, I'm sure you'll agree, occasionally
| insightful.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Why is it a "bad idea" for him to post his take? I guess your
| concern must be that people will give it too much weight due to
| him being a mathematician.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is currently #1 on HN. I suspect that a lot of people
| will read this and decide _not_ to look into relevant
| scholarship because the text here is packaged nicely and it
| is presented by somebody that this community (rightly)
| respects very deeply.
|
| In other contexts I've seen Tao cite scholarship outside of
| his field when engaging with it. I wish he'd done that here.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Citing scholarship would be good. Personally this has only
| piqued my curiosity and has probably only increased the
| chance I look into the relevant scholarship.
|
| Do you have any links?
| bccdee wrote:
| I don't think being an expert in one field means you need
| to constantly engage in an academic level of discourse.
| It's extremely normal for blog posts featuring vibes-based
| hot takes to hit #1 on HN. I think that's fine, if the take
| is good.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I don't think he was making claims in the context of a
| professional mathematician. I think he's a popular guy (because
| of his status) and he's discussing his own thoughts on modern
| nihilistic thinking while calling for 3rd spaces on his own
| social media. Seems...fine? For an individual to that, we don't
| have to ascribe some degree of reverence to his thoughts
| anymore than I would yours. That extra reverence is all user-
| added
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I'm not saying he shouldn't share it. I guess what I'm trying
| to say is that this is #1 on HN right now and I'd encourage
| people who are interested in this topic to read the
| _mountains_ of scholarship on these topics written by
| experts.
| inerte wrote:
| I came here to say the same thing... he's eloquently
| stating something, and kinda makes sense, but I bet we have
| actual real data around this. It's a fun mental exercise
| but if you REALLY want to know, there should be good
| sources.
|
| Heck, ChatGPT should be able to answer that.
| haunter wrote:
| The so called Halo effect
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
| morkalork wrote:
| If it didn't already have a name I'd call it the Noam Chomsky
| effect. No offense to Tao, it's just the first person that
| comes to mind
| smokel wrote:
| He sort of counters his own argument by having so much
| influence as an individual :)
| paulpauper wrote:
| _like a bad idea for a mathematician to be making claims like
| these without sources._
|
| So this is 99% of the internet and a lot of what passes for
| journalism too. If you want official sources, you're limited to
| published papers. People typically don't have sources at hand
| when making opinions.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| To add to this, I think a lot of people are reading this post
| to be some sort of reflection of economic organization when I
| (and others I suspect) think it's a post on social
| organization. There's always overlap but, as you say, it's a
| very dense field.
|
| I do think there's a dearth of scholarship in the _decline_ of
| social organizing in the US. There 's studies that show the
| decline but other than Bowling Alone every subsequent book I've
| read or skimmed on the topic uses this decline to rail off
| against their boogeyman of choice, more set dressing than
| problem to consider.
| internet_points wrote:
| but now it's on HN and people are discussing this idea that's
| been thrown out and some people agree and some don't and some
| bring up how it's similar to Bertrand de Jouvenal and others
| start thinking of de Tocqueville or Robert Putnam (I'm sure you
| could draw a connection to James C. Scott too) and before you
| know it you've got the beginnings of a bibliography right here
| in these threads
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Sure but why start this discussion from first principles when
| you can read a text that covers the same ground in 10 pages?
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| >His vibes are no more meaningful than anybody else's vibes.
|
| oh man, your mind will be blown when you find out about
| essayists. or completely horrified, can go either way. A whole
| field, a respected field, completely devoted to vibes.
|
| Empiricism is not the only right way to interrogate the
| universe y'know
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| OT question: if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me
| access to a preference that disables dark mode? I would like to
| read this post and others by Tao, but I can't stand light-on-
| black text.
|
| It's insane to enforce something like that by default when every
| study since the 1990s has shown that it impairs readability on a
| computer screen.
| barrenko wrote:
| You can add a ".rss" to mastodon profile account page to follow
| or read it through something that can process rss feeds for a
| "better" reading experience.
|
| E.g. https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao.rss
| apsurd wrote:
| how about reader mode in your browser?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| No good in Firefox, unfortunately. Yes, I can use hacks to
| force reader mode, add CSS to the page, and so forth, but I
| would prefer a simple checkbox.
| latexr wrote:
| > if I create a Mastodon account, will it give me access to a
| preference that disables dark mode?
|
| Yes. But note that if your account is on another instance, that
| wouldn't immediately help you when you open the page; you'd
| still see the default theme for that instance. However, you
| could simply copy the link and paste it on the search box of
| your own instance to see the post with your chosen theme
| (including font and colour).
| iambateman wrote:
| This is the best thing I'll read today. Things I want to
| remember:
|
| 1. small organizations have been carved out by a move toward the
| individual and a move toward large organizations. 2. This
| provides some comfort in the form of cheap goods while
| contributing to a sense of meaninglessness or being
| undifferentiated. 3. Tao thinks we would benefit by seeking and
| participating in grassroots groups.
| rglover wrote:
| 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).
| Oarch wrote:
| I'm reminded of the sixties idea of "the man" a lot recently.
| The man definitely won.
| gbjw wrote:
| Because we all sold out to the man. Culturally, we have
| chosen the lavish life promised under the man's umbrella, to
| doing the work of trying to go our own way. We now reap what
| we've sown.
| zwnow wrote:
| I recently moved away from as much big tech as possible.
| Canceled Spotify, won't order anything from Amazon, deleted
| Instagram, trying not to watch as much YouTube Videos etc.
| Sadly cant move away from WhatsApp and Google yet...
|
| Instead, I am sitting here right now working on a blogging
| engine so I can create personal blogs to let my friends keep up
| to date with my shenanigans. Basically give them a chance to
| participate in my life without enabling them to doom scroll.
|
| I really hope its not only me growing tired of all these
| addictive unhealthy apps and subscriptions that sneaked into
| most peoples everyday life. I can only recommend boycotting big
| tech with CEOs only caring about their own enrichment.
|
| Its only the internet part of life, but this is where I spend
| most of my time. In real life I try to buy from the local
| stores as much as possible. However, I do not participate in
| many other smaller organizations...
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| The centralization of power also means the leaders of those
| large organizations have disproportionate power. Everyone is
| looking for the singular strongman at the head of an
| organization with nation-level power to save them from current
| turmoil.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > 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 constraint of having to pay a dev to find it out
| for/with them (because that is _really_ not how you can find
| that out, while you find out everything else about your super
| small business) gives me a lot of hope here.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Unironically: AI assisted software development
|
| Downstream reliance AI companies is not "smaller" in any
| sensible manner
| monknomo wrote:
| There is a chance that local models get good enough and
| efficient enough that we won't need the large companies, so
| much as a reasonable graphics card.
| tmaly wrote:
| In terms of collaboration and contributions, I think the
| contextual search offered by LLMs is significantly underrated.
|
| Recall the second Highlander film that Connor MacLeod was given
| the gift of telepathic empathy. He is able to hear people's
| thoughts and feel what they feel. He uses that to help scientists
| collaborate.
|
| We don't have telepathic empathy in reality, but image using the
| LLM's contextual search across research projects? We could
| potentially have some type of approximation.
|
| This would then allow smaller groups to make a significant
| contribution to society. It would go against the idea in the
| Mythical Man Month of adding more people, what we see in larger
| orgs.
| alberth wrote:
| Is this a surprise though?
|
| 50-years ago, if you wanted to:
|
| - read the news (local paper),
|
| - get coffee (local coffee shop)
|
| - get groceries (local grocery)
|
| - buy tires (local tire dealer)
|
| You'd get this from your local small business ... and this
| created local small community groups.
|
| But now between the internet and national distribution of
| goods/services - all those small local companies are gone (or has
| a much reduced role as Tao would say) ... because CNN, Starbucks,
| Kroger, Discount Tire has replaced the need for those small local
| businesses.
| cs702 wrote:
| 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 could not cross state lines, resulting in a
| geographically distributed financial system:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McFadden_Act : Your bank was always
| local.
|
| * Banks were prohibited from entering riskier businesses,
| resulting in a compartmentalized system:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_legisla... :
| Your bank did not try to sell you investments.
|
| * Monopolies and oligopolies were routinely busted, resulting in
| less concentration in many industries:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_... .
|
| The companies you dealt with every day were typically smaller,
| more local, more subject to competition, and less able to yield
| economic and political power, particularly at the national level.
|
| Nowadays, power and resources seem to be far more concentrated.
| rangestransform wrote:
| - 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 later. The same could be said for all
| the tech that came out of Bell Labs or PARC. Advocating for
| smaller businesses is advocating for shorttermism to some
| degree; even startups today are funded based on the premise
| that they could potentially capture an entire market in a few
| years.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| 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 companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects
| successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project,
| the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc.
|
| Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded
| project and the societal benefit would be broader and not
| tied to a single company's market dominance.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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. :-)
| mstipetic wrote:
| Yes of course
| ghaff wrote:
| Though two of your examples (not really Manhattan
| Project) had very significant private sector
| participants.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I think that's unavoidable, but also not a bad thing. If
| we were to undertake any similar large scale public
| projects today, it would also have significant private
| sector participation. But, that drives job creation and
| positive effects on the economy (i.e., new deal).
|
| The main difference is, ideally, the project was voted on
| by the public, and is being steered as such. A public-
| private collaboration, with the public driving it rather
| than it being entirely the domain of a single private
| entity for their own profit.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| 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.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In
| a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder.
| In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.
|
| In a democratic country, only the people who have
| citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders
| meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote.
|
| You _sometimes_ cam buy your way into citizenship. As a
| shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a
| shareholders meeting.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| Even if you think there's no qualitative difference
| between the 2 (which I think is a deeply immature idea,
| but whatever), there's an obvious quantitative
| difference: In practice democratic voting power is much
| more socioeconomically spread and shared than shareholder
| voting power.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying
| power. Citizens get a single vote.
|
| > You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a
| shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a
| shareholders meeting.
|
| Maybe - depending on your jurisdiction. Just like whether
| you have citizenship or not.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Shareholders receive power proportionate to their
| buying power. Citizens get a single vote.
|
| Historically, there did exist experiments that not each
| person has the same voting power (for example the
| Prussian "Dreiklassenwahlrecht" [three-class franchise]):
|
| > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreiklassenwahlrecht
|
| Depending on the amount of taxes you paid, you were
| assigned to one of three classes. The sizes of each of
| these classes were chosen so that each class paid 1/3 of
| the whole tax volume. The votes in each class elected
| representants for this class.
|
| The idea is obvious: those who pay a lot more taxes
| should have more influence.
|
| Thus: each citizen has the same voting power is just the
| "currently fashionable" implementation of democracy.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You also have a "vote" as a consumer. The market could be
| much more responsive than a "democratic" system.
|
| For instance, say you think pesticides are a bad thing.
| You can get 49% of the population to vote to the ban them
| and what do you accomplish? _Nothing_
|
| No wonder people look at politics with despair.
|
| If you can get 5% of the population to eat organic food
| on the other hand, _you 've reduced pesticide use by 5%._
| You create trade associations, the idea of organic food
| spreads more widely and maybe someday you get enough
| support that you can change the law.
|
| That's hope.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| If you have money. And the more you have the more vote
| matters both in practice and within the rules of the
| system.
| vondur wrote:
| I think California's system is a mess. It's been overrun
| with private interests bankrolling ballot initiatives and
| steamrolling them through. Add to that the Government
| itself sponsoring ballet initiatives that sale bonds to
| finance things that people don't understand really loans
| and it turns into a mess. I do like the ability to remove
| politicians from office via ballot though.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| One idea that I think is reasonable is to use some kind
| of actual meetings.
|
| Dividing people into groups of 50 or 100. Initiatives are
| voted on in these groups, if they are passed they go to
| the next level, 1000 people.
|
| Sort of like that idea in the Yes, Minister episode about
| 'genuinely democratic local government'. The idea here is
| the tree structure is to prevent people to push
| initiatives other than as individuals.
| tavavex wrote:
| 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 nothing to stop their inevitable
| abuse for the sake of value extraction.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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).
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Corporations are in principle and practice accountable to
| those with more money. For all its flaws our democracy is
| still one person one vote.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one
| vote.
|
| Which seems to just devolve to "the lizards listen to
| whoever/whatever has money" at the high levels where the
| number of voters is very high.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Some governments restrict the extent to which "lizards"
| can use their money to gain air time, etc.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Lizards must not obstructed in any way! Consume! Obey!
| HPsquared wrote:
| Corporations are still subject to law and ultimately
| under the control of the government. The current set of
| rules just gives them a fair amount of freedom to
| operate.
| tavavex wrote:
| This only makes sense in a spherical-cow-in-vacuum world
| where government and business are somehow barred from
| communicating with one another. In reality, the "current
| set of rules" in many countries is a result of companies
| relentlessly trying to and succeeding in finding ways of
| influencing government. Political advertisements,
| campaign funding, lobbying, corruption, underhanded
| favoritism, countless other methods that are an amazing
| RoI for any business large enough to engage in it. Large
| enough corporations are resembling governments more and
| more in terms of value and power, and they use all of
| that power to endlessly try to bend the rest of society
| into serving their profit motive.
| sally_glance wrote:
| It seems to me none of this is as clear cut as it seems.
| Government entities may hold shares in private companies,
| companies may act on voter's demands by accepting
| government grants. For some companies, government
| contracts are actually a main revenue stream -
| shareholders can jump up and down, if their supporters
| are voted out they will falter.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| The unit of power in stock corporations is dollars, while
| in democracies it is personhood. In the former, one
| person can acquire multiple units, while in the latter
| they cannot. There is an obvious difference.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _while in democracies it is personhood_
|
| Suffrage*. Not personhood.
| tavavex wrote:
| 1. Not all companies are publicly traded, and they don't
| have to be
|
| 2. The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also
| completely dependent on money. The value of your 'vote'
| is proportional to how much money you have. This isn't a
| democracy or some sort of equal system that will converge
| on serving people, it will converge on serving money. I'm
| genuinely baffled at how "you get one vote per person"
| and "your value and voting power is directly tied to your
| net worth" are in any way comparable. You and I have zero
| effective power over them, and always will.
| aianus wrote:
| > The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also
| completely dependent on money.
|
| It is not, eg. Zuck didn't control Facebook because he
| was a priori rich, he became rich because he controlled
| Facebook in a successful way. He gained those shares and
| that control with his skill and labor (and maybe one
| symbolic dollar or something).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem is, when the majority is held by pension
| funds, ETFs and Blackrock... there isn't much governance
| in practice, particularly from the low-fee purely passive
| ETFs. And since government run pension schemes are on
| their way to the gutter in favor of stonk market private
| pensions, the share of such dumb passive capital will
| only grow.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| No, a corp is only accountable to their board and the
| LARGEST shareholder. A single person can control an
| otherwise publicly traded company. Zuckerberg, for
| example. And not everyone can afford to spend their
| earnings owning companies. So what you get with a
| democracy is that power is spread out by default rather
| than concentrated in a single element. Default
| enfranchisement rather than the polar opposite. One at
| least nods politely at the idea of upward social mobility
| in passing while the other eschews all pretense as to the
| status of its party invitation.
| XorNot wrote:
| Corporations only have any accountability in so far as
| the law of the nation-state they're incorporated in
| grants it.
|
| Corporations only exist as a legal construct of other
| entities. Absent government, they wouldn't be
| corporations since there'd be no law to create them.
| ls612 wrote:
| If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th
| century it is that societies that gave more private
| control over how resources were used did better than
| those that had more state control over how resources were
| used. Perhaps in the 21st century that has changed, but
| for me that falls under the "extraordinary claims"
| category with the corresponding evidence requirements.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > If there is one thing that we learned from the 20th
| century it is that societies that gave more private
| control over how resources were used did better than
| those that had more state control over how resources were
| used.
|
| In some metrics (such as GDP), yes. And in other metrics
| (such as wealth inequality and health care), the answer
| is less clear-cut.
| ls612 wrote:
| The Soviet bloc did not have better healthcare than the
| West lol. Soviet life expectancy never crossed above 70
| years.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| The West encompasses a wide gradient of private vs. state
| control over resources, and there are states which aren't
| typically considered Soviet or Western (e.g. Nordic
| states.)
| sigilis wrote:
| The structure of giant corporations today is like those
| centralized societies that were so inefficient in your
| example. The mandates to put AI in everything are one
| example of out of touch leadership throwing money and
| effort blindly towards things of dubious value. The
| sycophantic managers, afraid that they will be eliminated
| for insufficient fervor for the board's latest
| fascination, will seize upon anything to prove themselves
| loyal and useful to those above them.
|
| By moving the locus of control, whether it be considered
| the ceo or shareholders, so far from the actual business
| and implementing mandates based on whatever the current
| fancy is and meaningless targets of growth on such a
| giant scale you get the same sort of excesses.
|
| The current system is marked by irrationality and
| uninformed and ill considered decision making. With
| smaller organizations and actual business competition
| they would be held to account by their competitors or
| just by running out of money before something
| catastrophic for the greater economy happened.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| This is an excellent point. Thank you for posting it.
|
| Large monopolistic mega-corporations do tend to have the
| same issues that one would see in the old 20th century
| planned economies like the Soviet Union.
| marris wrote:
| Not sure why this obvious fact is being down-voted. The
| comments above don't mention that the killer feature of
| private orgs is the ease of exit, and therefore, the
| enormous risk of failure. This remains the dominant
| feature of private orgs, even if we can argue about
| certain orgs on the margin. For every example of "users
| are locked into either the Apple or the Android phone
| platform", I can think of several crappy Google and Apple
| products which failed and were withdrawn from the market
| (e.g. Google Wave).
|
| It is much easier to exit from or steer a private org.
| For example, it is very possible to run a company which
| caters to 10 percent of a consumer base by providing
| niche products which may be slightly more expensive.
| Those 10 percent will simply consume less of some other
| good. It is very difficult to do an analogous thing at
| the state level, because we generally don't get
| individual "ticket books" which we can "spend" on more of
| one state service vs. another. The democratic model is
| that you first get 50+ percent support and then your
| coalition decides how resources are allocated for almost
| everyone.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| That is an incredibly broad claim. There are a ton of
| examples of failed/failing states that basically have no
| government control over anything.
| woah wrote:
| > 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 wouldn't have it today.
| serf wrote:
| 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.
| philipkglass wrote:
| As I see it, the lineage of modern automated cars started
| with public funding from DARPA, with the first signs of
| success appearing in 2005:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
|
| After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought
| that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5
| years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to
| offer services to the public, and just in one city to
| start:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo
|
| That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable
| technology. I don't know how to maintain government
| funding for that long in a democratic system. No
| president, senator, or representative goes that long
| without fighting for re-election. Any technology that
| still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be
| considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive
| government projects of the 20th century delivered results
| faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We
| choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually
| landing on the moon.
|
| Companies with large resources can behave more like
| "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term
| whims of the electorate. Of course they can _also_
| exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious
| "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.
| overfeed wrote:
| > I don't know how to maintain government funding for
| that long in a democratic system
|
| See how the DoD funds the development of the multitude of
| platforms on it depends on (land, air, sea or space), for
| decades at a time.
| paddleon wrote:
| Wait, could you remind me what war was going on when NASA
| took us to the moon?
|
| Could you remind me what war was going on when the CDC
| eradicated malaria from the United States?
|
| Could you remind me what war was going on when FDR build
| our basic social safety nets?
|
| Broadly speaking, people have 3 ways to organize large
| groups: business, government, and (organized) religion.
| Each has strengths and weakness. To say that only one can
| produce social good is a bit of a stretch.
| woah wrote:
| > Wait, could you remind me what war was going on when
| NASA took us to the moon?
|
| The cold war. Putting a man on the moon was meant to
| demonstrate how easily we could put a nuke on Moscow.
| lupire wrote:
| Self driving cars are also clearly a demonstration of
| military might.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Autonomous ground vehicles were funded by the DARPA grand
| challenge, and the motivation was explicitly military[1]
|
| [1] Rational subsection of the Background section
| (section I) in this pdf: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/
| 54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20...
|
| The whole thing is worth a read too, it explains all the
| other military use tech that will arise from the self
| driving car ecosystem, further justifying the investment.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| > war, moon
|
| You cannot be serious, the whole thing was called the
| space race for a reason. Space tech has always always
| been primarily a military venture, and it remains so to
| this day.
|
| > Malaria
|
| Glad you asked, chloroquine was developed during WW2 for
| soldiers, and chloroquine resistance of soldiers in
| Vietnam drove the creation of mefloquine and artemisinin.
|
| > Social safety nets
|
| Not a science breakthrough
|
| > To say that only one can produce social good is a bit
| of a stretch
|
| I 100% agree. It's not "everything ever created was
| because of war". It is rather that "a lot of difficult
| amazingly unimaginable things i.e 'root node science'
| would have never been created had it not been for war,
| and this is what unlocked an exponential number of
| amazing things we have today". We would certainly have
| scientific advancement even without war, just
| exponentially less.
|
| Also, we need to count derivative works of these works as
| primarily existing because of war reasons too.
|
| This is not an American specific or 20th century specific
| phenomenon either. Science and war have always been
| friends, and to my point, with _reciprocal_ benefits, not
| just war benefiting from science. For example, Fourier
| was part of napoleons egypt expedition. Euler worked for
| the Russian Navy, and even has a direct book "Neue
| Grundsatze der Artillerie" ("New Principles of
| Artillery") (1745). Lagrange similar: a lot of his
| projectile analyses arose out of problems posed by the
| Turin artillery school.
|
| Most crucially, Euler and Lagrange and many other
| household names were entirely funded by the military
| complex. Ecole polytechnique which employed Lagrange was
| a military engineering school[1], and St. petersburg
| academy which employed euler[2] was heavily supported by
| the navy and army.
|
| That said, there are also examples of people creating
| science for purely fun -- most of gauss' work, galileo's
| work and a lot of 1300-1600 era indian mathematics arose
| purely out of astronomy studies, and, I suppose, rolling
| random crap down a slope for the funsies(galileo) and
| visions from a goddess (ramanujan). I'm sure there are a
| gajillion other examples too, of "root node" science
| being created for non-war reasons. But it's also true
| that a massively larger number of insanely cool things we
| have today only ever existed because of war.
|
| [1] and it remains under the French defense ministry
| [whatever it's called] to this day!
|
| [2] fun story, he was employed by both Frederick the
| great in berlin and by Catherine I in St. petersburg at
| different points in his life. He was even accused of
| espionage.
|
| Multiple edits: looked through my notes and edited some
| inaccuracies.
| billy99k wrote:
| "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."
|
| Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades
| behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely
| afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I
| seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for
| the 'greater good'.
|
| "We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as
| public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon
| landing, ARPANET, etc."
|
| Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much
| beyond this.
|
| Even big pharma supplies the world. The rest of the world
| with socialized medicine create knock-offs at a fraction of
| the cost, because they didn't have to spend decades going
| through testing and billions of dollars developing it.
| computably wrote:
| > Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades
| behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely
| afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I
| seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for
| the 'greater good'.
|
| The reason that governments have such a restrictive
| budget in the first place is people are individually
| profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for
| the greater good - you yourself note "big pharma"
| research, and in fact historically the US gov provided
| more than half the funding of _all_ basic research
| nationally.
|
| > Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not
| much beyond this.
|
| Shinkansen.
|
| Anyways, governments across the world are driven by
| incentives that do recognize long-term economic/strategic
| interests. You can see it with AI, with climate change,
| even with the broad desire to create a "homegrown"
| Silicon Valley.
| elevation wrote:
| > The reason that governments have such a restrictive
| budget in the first place is people are individually
| profit-motivated
|
| You've got the cart before the horse; the government
| would not have a budget at all if people were not
| individually motivated to generate taxable events.
|
| Profit is the practice of accumulating more resources
| than you immediately need in the anticipation of their
| future use and enjoyment. Without a government, a profit
| makes the bearer a target for anyone who can overpower
| you. So the essential purpose of a government is the
| preservation of profit by opposing the forces that would
| destroy or carry it off: criminals, scammers, foreign
| militaries.
|
| Governments did not command the invention of penicillin,
| powered flight, electric light, transistors, the blue
| LED, or the majority of software products that are
| essential to society today. But it protected individuals
| to invent with the knowledge that their work could be
| rewarded on some timeframe rather than being immediately
| destroyed by an interloper.
| vmg12 wrote:
| > but who decides how those resources are deployed
|
| The current system selects people that have allocated
| resources effectively in the past by providing them more
| resources to allocate.
|
| > We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as
| public projects
|
| And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This
| isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist,
| there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are
| the sole source of innovations but for some reason people
| treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up
| projects from decades ago but are there any modern
| examples?
|
| Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown
| success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money
| from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.
| Daishiman wrote:
| > The current system selects people that have allocated
| resources effectively in the past by providing them more
| resources to allocate.
|
| The current system selected people that have maximized
| shareholder value and financially engineered it into
| other financial assets that provide power under the
| capitalist system. This includes private equity services
| that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no
| increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to
| avoid the consequences of the externalities of their
| economic activity.
|
| > And what is stopping countries from doing this today?
| This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still
| exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive
| companies are the sole source of innovations but for some
| reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive.
| You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any
| modern examples?
|
| Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a
| profit motive behind every large government initiative
| when the profit motive substracts value away from society
| at large.
| hansvm wrote:
| "Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy
| lifting in your description. The current system also
| rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the
| political power to do more of the same.
| jongjong wrote:
| Yes exactly. Also, we should stop pretending that the
| money supply is fixed and that everyone exists on the
| same monetary playing field.
|
| Arguments about efficient allocation are laughable when
| you consider that someone who is socially 6 steps removed
| from an institutional 'money printer' lives in a monetary
| environment where money is 10 times more scarce than it
| is at the source (due to taxation between each hop). Few
| people are so far removed in practice but the effects are
| still very powerful even with less distance. Taxation
| brings all economic activities closer to the government
| and banking sector.
|
| In competitive industries were profits are paper thin,
| monetary asymmetry can fully determine business outcomes.
| The company receiving government contracts on the side
| has a massive upper hand over its competitors during a
| monetary contraction. Same can be said about companies
| which operate in environments where their customers have
| access to large amounts of credit by virtue of their
| highly valued collateral. Their success has little to do
| with optimal allocation and a lot to do with socio-
| economic positioning and monetary system design.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| It is classic circular reasoning. Why should they have
| all money? Well because they are the best ones at
| allocating the resources. How do we know they are best at
| allocating resources? Because they have all the money.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > The current system selects people that have allocated
| resources effectively in the past by providing them more
| resources to allocate.
|
| The current system rather heavily optimizes the ability
| to make resources into more resources for the
| shareholders. See e.g. Uber.
| nradov wrote:
| Major weapons development (or dual use) programs --
| especially for weapons of mass destruction -- probably have
| to be government run due to national security concerns. But
| the notion that governments can effectively manage
| technology R&D projects is ludicrous. Look at what happened
| when Japan's MITI tried to run a Fifth Generation Computer
| Systems (FGCS) project: total failure and waste of tax
| money.
|
| In general, economic central planning is a dead end. People
| keep trying to claim that it would be more efficient or
| benefit society but it just doesn't work. Bureaucrats and
| politicians can't be trusted with resource allocation
| decisions.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Greater Good of All is a bit nebulous, and quite often
| translates into rather concentrated good of a few well-
| connected players.
|
| When you mention the space race, you should also add that
| once the Moon landing was over, the government-supported
| part of space activity got mostly bogged down in cost-plus
| boondoggles (see: Space Launch System, also called Senate
| Launch System), and without a vibrant private sector with
| deep pockets, the US would be launching _maybe_ some twenty
| rockets a year now, more likely twelve, each at an extreme
| cost and without much technological progress. And American
| capability of supporting human spaceflight would be tenuous
| at best, or possibly nonexistent.
|
| (NASA is not at fault here. The politicians which command
| it, though... they seem to love giving Boeing et al.
| expensive projects.)
| thegrimmest wrote:
| > _for the greater good of all or advancement of society_
|
| I'm not sure we agree enough on the definitions of these
| things to justify a democratic redistribution of resources
| towards them. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny
| after all. The nice part about private enterprise is that
| it's hard to argue they didn't earn their money. Google,
| Apple, et al provided some value to some folks who
| volunteered to pay for it in a free exchange. Their claim
| to use their earned wealth as they see fit is much easier
| to substantiate than a government intervention which is
| neither voluntary nor obviously providing value to the
| people who pay for it.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I'm not convinced LLMs are a net positive. They've been
| compared to railroads. Show me the new commerce brought about
| by LLM trains.
| raincole wrote:
| 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."
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| johnmaguire wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| First of all, I don't know where this specific example is
| coming from or how it relates to what I said exactly.
|
| Secondly, when you look at the distribution of wealth in
| the US, and realize that the top 50% of Americans own
| 97.5% of the wealth, or that the top 1% owns over 30% of
| the country's wealth, or read a headline about Elon
| Musk's $1T pay package, conversations about "dual-earning
| families" versus "single-earning families" look kind of
| inconsequential.
| bluGill wrote:
| The whole thread is about people who want to have a
| single wage earner lifestyle. That is where this all
| comes from, and how it relates. You too can live a single
| wage earner lifestyle in the US, but it will mean
| significant compromises to your standard of living.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Thanks, I missed the second part of this sentence:
|
| > 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.
|
| I stand by what I wrote above. I agree with you that it
| is possible today at a reduced QoL and I also would like
| to see society distribute wealth more equitably, which
| might also achieve the goal at a higher QoL.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| No? An easy comparison would be a world where the both
| partners work 20hrs/wk each, for a total of 40hrs, with
| the rest devoted towards, eg, childcare.
|
| That addresses the reason for working (eg, pursuit of
| interests outside family-raising), while also eschewing
| the need for full time childcare.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| You're basically talking about the shift system. A works
| for 20hrs a week, B works for 20hrs a week. A spends more
| time with spouse(A), who does the same at their
| workplace, and B spends more time with spouse(B), who
| does the same at their workplace. Sounds great.
|
| But, it falls apart to the same logic GP proposed, that
| the reason you have dual income households is that they
| are richer than single income ones. Households where
| people both work 40hrs = 80hrs will be ahead of those
| that work only 40hrs total. So everyone will descend to
| working 80hrs too.
|
| Of course, taking mine and GPs logic to it's conclusion
| is silly - people will have a point where they stop
| comparing with others and tradeoff less money for less
| hours. But looking at reality, it seems like that limit
| is very high! And it only happens at an already very high
| salary. A 40hrs/week SWE might not go to a high finance
| 70hrs/week job, because they're already comfortably paid.
| However these two are top 1% jobs in the world, and the
| quality of life is probably not too different. But if you
| go down to the lower rungs, people are more inclined to
| compare themselves with peers and tradeoff double hours
| for the next rung, which entails a much better quality of
| life (as a % increase)
| 9rx wrote:
| _> But looking at reality, it seems like that limit is
| very high!_
|
| Is it? 40hrs is quite low by historical standards. 100
| hours per week was the norm in the pre-industrial era,
| and 60+ hours per week was still typical during the
| Industrial Revolution.
|
| Labour advocacy groups were promoting 40hrs, much like
| the four day workweek is today, for a long time, but
| 40hrs didn't actually became the norm until the Great
| Depression, where capping hours was a tool used to try
| and spread the work out amongst more workers to try and
| resolve the high unemployment problem.
|
| _> But if you go down to the lower rungs, people are
| more inclined to compare themselves with peers and
| tradeoff double hours for the next rung_
|
| While that certainly happens, it seems most people in the
| lower rungs are quite content to work 40 hours per week,
| even though working more would put them in a much better
| position. I dare say you even alluded to that when you
| chose 40 hours in your example.
|
| It is not like 40hrs is the perfect tradeoff or
| something. As mentioned before, labour advocacy groups
| have already decided that 32hrs is even better. I expect
| many people end up working 40 hours just because "that's
| what you do" and never give it another thought.
|
| _> the reason you have dual income households is that
| they are richer than single income ones._
|
| If we assume both participants work 40 hours per week
| then it is true that the same household would have less
| income if one party stopped accruing an income and all
| else remained equal. But that doesn't necessarily hold
| true once you start playing with other variables. A
| higher income party, for example, may enable the
| household to have a higher income if they work 60 hours
| per week while the other party takes care of other life
| responsibilities to enable those longer hours.
|
| A dual income household isn't necessarily the most
| fruitful option. In fact, marriage -- which, while
| declining, is still the case in most non-single
| households -- assumes that a single income is the ideal
| option. It seems that "that's what you do" without any
| further thought is still the primary driving force.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Lower rungs are definitely not content working 40 hours a
| week. They work crazy amounts (multiple jobs even!) just
| to get to the upper rungs of society.
|
| I support the labour laws limiting an employer to 40hrs a
| week of a man's labour. This is important for people who
| really just want some employment and don't want to die.
| But the vast majority of people work two such jobs and
| try to get into the higher rungs of the financial ladder.
| Heck, even SDE3s in software companies work off-hours to
| become IC's and such, and I'm sure it's similar once you
| go down the executive route.
|
| > "That's what you do"
|
| That is definitely true, a lot of social fabric erodes
| when providing labour is turned into a psychotic thing.
| I'm not entirely convinced the labour laws we have today
| are enough to prevent this. My opinion is that we need to
| also have policies on the other side of the coin - i.e
| encourage family/extended family/communal/what have you
| living. Not "one child policy" level forced policies, but
| instead in the form of a good complement to strong labour
| laws.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> They work crazy amounts (multiple jobs even!) just to
| get to the upper rungs of society._
|
| It does happen, as recognized before, but what suggests
| this is any kind of norm?
|
| 1. The median worker in the USA doesn't even make it to
| 40 hours of work in a week, only 34. What you say
| certainly doesn't hold true when dividing the latter in
| half.
|
| 2. Only 21% of the workforce normally puts in more than
| 40 hours per week. That could represent the lowest rungs,
| I suppose, but...
|
| 3. The data also suggests that those working long hours
| are more likely to be highly educated, high-wage,
| salaried, and older men. Does that really fit the profile
| of someone in the lower runs? Stereotypically, that is
| who most of us imagine is in the highest rung.
|
| 4. The upward mobility of which you speak is not typical.
| Most people will either stay on the same rung or find
| themselves heading lower.
| raincole wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| woah wrote:
| 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
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| A secure lifestyle and a good lifestyle are not mutually
| exclusive. We have the tech to enable something which at
| least somewhat approximates, and even if we didn't, it's
| easy to imagine a world in which the trillions of dollars
| spent on wasteful garbage like surveillance, ads,
| engagement-farming, etc were instead redirected towards
| research and development of technology which enables a
| secure _and_ good lifestyle.
| bluGill wrote:
| Define secure and good.
|
| What you really need to live, and the luxury you want can
| be very different. I've lived in a one bathroom house,
| I'm willing to pay for more. I can eat "beans and rice",
| but I want more (not just meat, there are vegetables that
| are more expensive). Most people are not willing to live
| without a lot of luxury and honestly would choose both
| parents working a full time job to get more luxury.
| bluGill wrote:
| They also don't value "women's work" at all even though
| the women were working hard while watching those kids.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| You'd be a useful guy to have around on my trad farm. A
| strawman for every field
| DSingularity wrote:
| 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 lost
| capacity for independent critical thought? Is that really
| the world you want to create?
|
| It's not just a "ChatGPT will replace you". Our humanity is
| potentially at stake if we don't deliberately evolve this
| tech.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Our humanity is potentially at stake if we don't
| deliberately evolve this tech.
|
| Username checks out.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Our humanity is at stake no matter how we evolve this
| tech, because the tech evolves our humanity. It's not a
| one-way street. Culture, not genetics, is the dominant
| human evolutionary force today:
|
| https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article-
| abstract...
| DSingularity wrote:
| Exactly -- hence the need to deliberately evolve it.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Have you never read any of the many Frankenstein myths?
| What makes you think we can "evolve" a superintelligence
| and then keep it bottled up?
| com2kid wrote:
| >They want a job market where one single breadwinner can
| support their house, spouse and kids.
|
| That job market only existed in a handful of countries for
| a ~40 year period on all of human history.
|
| Saying that should be the norm ignores that historically it
| wasn't and it may very well be that it isn't a sustainable
| basis for a society.
| ViktorRay wrote:
| Good point.
|
| Also worth mentioning that in that time period the rest
| of the world was recovering from devastation. Either the
| devastation of two world wars or the devastation of
| imperialism.
| ezst wrote:
| Following your argument we should just outright reject
| progress because, for the most part, humanity has been
| really really shitty. Also, how much thought did you put
| into it before writing that this type of society isn't
| sustainable? Can't the things that happened since
| (mostly, a massive wealth consolidation) be undone? Why?
| tbirdny wrote:
| Before WWII, middle-class married women were strongly
| discouraged from working for pay outside the home. If
| their husbands could provide, "respectable" women were
| expected to stay home as homemakers.
| Muromec wrote:
| >middle-class
|
| right here is the problem
| tbirdny wrote:
| One could argue the opposite: that the mass entry of
| women into the paid workforce expanded the labor supply,
| contributing to wage stagnation and, eventually, the
| erosion of the middle class. But that wasn't the only
| cause. Globalization, declining unions, automation, and
| regressive taxes were also factors.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Reverting to the norm means most of us die as infants and
| toddlers or in childbirth, while a wealthy handful live
| lives of immense privilege.
|
| I'll take the parent commenter's option, thanks.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| And equal rights for minorities, sexual or not, were
| achieved in a handful of countries for the past 40 years.
|
| Surely you're not suggesting...
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > And equal rights for minorities, sexual or not, were
| achieved in a handful of countries for the past 40 years.
|
| > Surely you're not suggesting...
|
| Indeed I see the evidence on the side that these ideas
| were some temporary fads that might get out of fashion in
| the foreseeable future. This is clearly not a suggestion,
| I just see the signs on the horizon that this is indeed
| plausibly to happen.
| Muromec wrote:
| >They want a job market where one single breadwinner can
| support their house, spouse and kids.
|
| Is it even possible en masse in a market where you are
| competing against double income no kids kind households?
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| What resources are we talking about competing against?
| What's the measuring stick?
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| 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.
| afiori wrote:
| 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
| cs702 wrote:
| _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.
| chermi wrote:
| "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?" Notice
| how it was massive private spending that uncovered the
| power of scale in the first place. Would've been hard to
| say, get a federal grant for that. Would've probably
| happened gradually, with some gains from moderate scale
| justifying slightly larger grants for successively larger
| scale.
|
| As for TSMC, the counterfactual assumes such technology
| would've happened regardless. Just because technology seems
| to happen inevitably, doesn't make it so. We have evidence
| of one approach (private) giving incredible results. And
| also some examples of public (in wartime) giving incredible
| results. I don't know the evidence for peacetime public
| incredible results. Maybe warpspeed?
| cs702 wrote:
| The cost of developing GPT-2 and GPT-3 was on the order
| of millions of dollars, well within the budget of most
| tech organizations. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165
| for the total compute invested in them. OpenAI had raised
| only a few tens of millions in donations at the time, as
| a non-profit organization.
|
| The increase in performance of computation has been
| happening for so many decades now that it's been given
| names like "Moore's Law." People like Hans Moravec
| predicted way back in the 1980's that the cost of compute
| would continue to decline and become cheap enough for AGI
| by the 2020's or 2030's. That's _half a century ago_!
| chermi wrote:
| Fair point, the first few gens weren't that expensive.
| And like I said I'm certain the scaling would've been
| discovered soon with some time lag. But the transformer
| paper was 2017, right? Just from a benefit -to- society
| perspective, assuming LLMs are a net positive in terms of
| productivity, perhaps reducing time to drug approval or
| improving government efficiency (1).. Isn't getting there
| just one year earlier worth it, if the gains really are
| that big? We could be talking lives saved via faster
| approvals or more efficient spending. My point is that a
| private company made it happen faster, as evidenced by
| them doing it first. A good thing sooner is valuable.
|
| (1) I'm convinced at the very least LLMs can feasibly
| speed up paperwork.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| About TSMC, maybe not.
|
| The reason the world is so dependent on a single company is
| because it costs country-breaking amounts of money to keep-
| up with the semiconductor manufacturing technology. You can
| only have cheap semiconductors if there are very few
| entites building them.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > - 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?
|
| TSMC would have had other customers. And if not them, then
| e.g. Samsung or Intel would have something to offer.
|
| Sure, without this investment the pace of development
| wouldn't be as fast, but are chips from e.g. a decade ago
| already utterly useless? Of course not. Life would be largely
| the same, only somewhat slower.
|
| Perhaps without hardware updates we would finally start
| thinking long and hard about performance optimisations?
| fmbb wrote:
| 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).
| biophysboy wrote:
| Bell labs also sat on a lot of tech that didn't align w/
| their business
| badpun wrote:
| All those things could still happen if private enterprises
| pooled their resources and did R&D together. This is already
| routinely happening in the car industry, where companies band
| together to develop new engines, to make the R&D expense hurt
| less.
| deelowe wrote:
| I would gladly accept a bit of a slow down on progress if it
| meant my contributions to society were more meaningful.
| Additionally, I strongly believe this continuous dwindling of
| small organizations has resulted in an overall loss of
| community and a sense of belonging. In my opinion, this is
| what's causing the overall decline in health that we're
| seeing in developed nations.
|
| For many, life seems aimless. Your future is to simply
| contribute what you're told to some faceless multinational
| for which after 20 years your only recognition will be a
| small piece of canvas with a mass produced screen printed
| design.
| latexr wrote:
| All of the things you mentioned serve the primary purpose of
| making the rich and powerful more rich and powerful, not
| improving the lives of the majority.
|
| We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the
| world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary
| when we're using them to waste away watching six hours of ten
| seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally
| telling people to eat glue, convincing people to kill
| themselves, making cocky ignorant assholes more sure of
| themselves, and increasing the spread of lies and
| misinformation.
|
| Humanity would probably benefit from moving slower, not
| faster.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I'm really not sure the answer to any of these is "we would
| be worse off", let alone would someone be able to raise the
| funds.
|
| Did we have more telecom innovation when Bell was huge or
| after that?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Probably the best statement for "biggering up", at least in
| the case of Africa, was made in a recent editorial in _The
| Economist_
|
| https://www.economist.com/special-
| report/2025/01/06/africa-h...
|
| https://archive.ph/j5CJY
| tempestn wrote:
| That's sort of the problem, right? Large organizations have
| become dominant precisely because of reasons like this, and
| there are indeed huge benefits. But if the hypothesis is
| correct that the crowding out of smaller organizations is
| fraying the fabric of society, that's a pretty significant
| drawback.
| balamatom wrote:
| >- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all?
|
| Would anyone even be calling for those, if their core purpose
| wasn't to facilitate the concentration of capital?
| avmich wrote:
| I would compare "larger businesses" with "socialistic
| planning system" while "smaller businesses" with "free market
| economy". There are examples when centralized planning got
| good results - NASA's Apollo project is an example. There are
| also examples when market economy - eventually, in the long
| term, not short - prevailed: the Cold War is an example here.
|
| It's also quite possible the analogy is flawed though.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| It is also very hard to separate "socialist planning
| system" from "Russian Empire". It isn't like things were
| going swimmingly in Tsarist Russia and then they reentered
| a golden age in the 90s.
|
| If anything this socialist system brought them to the
| height of their power and influence.
| rpcope1 wrote:
| You ask your questions rhetorically as though the answer
| would be bad if they didn't. None of those really have had a
| profound good impact on the population at large and it's not
| clear that they're all that truly impactful in a good way to
| the population at large. I think we wouldn't notice or care
| by and large, and it's just because some nerd somewhere is
| excited for next product is not a good reason for
| centraliZation.
| mgfist wrote:
| Have you ridden in a Waymo? I'd sell my car if/when they
| become ubiquitous enough.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Not a single one of those projects is preferable to a more
| equitable society. Maybe self driving, yes, but the impact of
| AI is highly dubious and uncertain at this point in time.
| ckemere wrote:
| I think the key problem with this idea is taught in basic
| Microeconomics. A competitive market should have zero profit.
|
| The choice of the government to allow a non competitive
| market is a choice to transfer consumer surplus to producers,
| which is effectively a tax-by-regulatory choice. So the
| counter argument to "what about Bell Labs" would be that the
| democratically elected government ( _in theory_ ) can more
| efficiently gather that tax and pay for research.
|
| Recognizing counter arguments about effective allocation of
| resources to useful research. But also recognizing that much
| R&D goes to future profits for the company rather than just
| societal benefit.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It's not clear to me that anything of value would have been
| lost in this counterfactual world.
| thevillagechief wrote:
| This is also just a consequence of globalization. A small
| company cannot compete globally, which means less power for the
| US government abroad. So it's not in the interest of the US
| government to break up Apple or Google or Microsoft. Look at
| how both the US and China can just bully Europe.
| ako wrote:
| Agreed, and that is why big countries should also be broken
| up. No more countries over 50m citizens. Many people in
| Europe don't want the EU, but there's really no alternative
| when competing with large countries like China and US.
| ezst wrote:
| > Many people in Europe don't want the EU
|
| Those things Americans say about the rest of the world...
| ux266478 wrote:
| Nothing of what you quoted is incorrect.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > Look at how both the US and China can just bully Europe.
|
| In what way is china "bullying" europe. It's more like the EU
| trying to bully china on the US's behalf and failing
| miserably.
| fragmede wrote:
| The Bell breakup was stupid. If you have some competing
| companies, but they meet up, and agree to divide the country
| into regions, and then _choose to not compete with each other_
| , that's not at all free market capitalism. Capitalism requires
| competition in the market in order for market forces to
| actually work! Cars is another example where, in the modern
| framing, the dealership model is bullshit and manufacturers
| should be able to sell direct to consumers. And it does make a
| certain amount of sense. But if the argument is for smaller
| organizations, the fact is that local dealerships are smaller
| than, say, Ford, and so if the argument is that the dealership
| model sucks because the car dealerships have too much power and
| are abusing it, taking power away from them and ceeding it to
| an even bigger organization doesn't make a lick of sense.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically
| distributed telecom network
|
| For the record, this system where AT&T was broken up between
| long distance and regional local companies (called the Regional
| Bell Operating Companies or RBOCs) was a terrible solution to
| anticompetitive behavior and is one of many examples (some of
| which you also quote) about how the US is terrible at breaking
| up monopolies.
|
| The problem is the RBOCs simply became regional monopolies and
| regional monopolies aren't really any better than national
| monopolies. By the 90s the RBOCs could become long distance
| providers by meeting certain criteria and of course the whole
| system was gamed.
|
| What needed to happen is the exact same thing that needs to
| happen with national ISPs today: municipalities need to own,
| maintain and build last-mile infrastructure.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > 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.
| yannyu wrote:
| Yes, but also we've eroded state and city rights in favor of
| federalism and standardization in the US as well. It's
| arguable that many steps in that direction have been for the
| better, but the consequence still remains that we've eroded
| the power of smaller organizations as a result.
|
| You're correct to note that this phenomenon crosses all
| aspects of life in the US, whether talking about churches,
| PTAs, book clubs, business, forums, fraternities, and
| politics. There is hardly a part of our lives anymore that
| isn't intruded on by national narratives anymore. There is a
| very fundamental question of why that is, why it's allowed,
| and who benefits from it.
| nradov wrote:
| Cities (and other types of local governments) never really
| had any legal rights on their own. They have always been
| creatures of the states.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Federalism is having power divided, so we have gone _away_
| from federalism, not towards it. And I personally believe
| very strongly that it has been disastrous for our nation to
| do so.
| pipo234 wrote:
| > Yes but one can't just ignore the federal government
| itself, as if this wasn't an organization
|
| True, though (at least in principle) a democratic government
| is a very special organization because it (again, in
| principle) exists _only_ because it 's the people's will.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think when we think about our social fabric and the
| empowerment that individuals feel, that this is more of a
| theoretical rather than practical argument. All of the
| disenfranchisement, the feeling that your individual
| participation doesn't matter, the inability to steer the
| goals of the organization around your individual opinions,
| these are all just as present in a large state.
|
| Sure a democratic government derives its legitimacy from
| the people's will but not from _your_ will, and that is the
| role of the small community organization.
| roughly wrote:
| > While a democratic state is different than a private
| organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters
|
| This is exactly the key core distinction. The purpose of the
| state is to be the most powerful organization in the room -
| to constrain other actors. It's imperative, therefore, that
| it be democratic and representative. Notably, part of the
| instinct to break up other large organizations is to prevent
| them from assembling enough resources to have a supersized
| impact on the state - the problem with monopoly is that
| monopolies buy out their competition and neuter regulations,
| the problem with wealth disparity is the ultra wealthy are
| sufficiently powerful to move the state in the direction they
| want it to go.
|
| I agree with you generally regarding reducing the overall
| size of governing bodies and I agree with Terrence about the
| benefits of small organizations and the drawbacks of large
| specifically around the investment and perceived ownership of
| members of those organizations, but having a small state
| fundamentally requires having small organizations everywhere
| - and anti-monopoly, antitrust, and anti-wealth concentration
| - because for the state to be democratic and representative,
| it must be the most powerful organization in the area it
| covers, otherwise it's just a tool for the more powerful to
| use.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I'm actually _not_ advocating for a reduction in the size
| of government bodies and I 'm a bit frustrated about it.
| I'm not advocating anything about the size of government
| bodies (though naturally I have my feelings.) I'm confused
| why people seem to be intuiting this. I'm in fact doubly
| frustrated because I feel that people seem to be injecting
| modern political points into something that I feel predates
| many of our modern problems.
|
| My point is: the social problems of disenfranchisement that
| come from large organizations are a property of their size.
| They may differ in that they're volunteer based, profit
| oriented, non-profit in a capitalist system, democratically
| organized, or several hundred or thousand more
| distinctions. But I'm going to feel just as disconnected
| from my national government as I will from the workings of
| Google as a small shareholder as I will from the NBA as
| someone that plays pick-up on a basketball court. The
| experience of going to a minor league baseball game is
| _much_ more personal than going to a major MLB game.
|
| To me the important issue is: the US specifically and the
| Anglophone West more broadly is seeing a decrease in its
| small institutions. This decrease predates the modern
| internet and social media landscape (see Bowling Alone.) I
| have many, many questions around this. Why is this
| happening? What is its effect on society? How can we
| reverse this? Is this something we can reverse?
|
| It's an important issue to me because this trajectory is
| very different outside of the Anglophone West. Japan for
| example is _not_ seeing the same decline in its small
| organizations as the US is, despite population reduction.
| If anything Japanese life is dominated much more by huge
| conglomerates than US life.
| roughly wrote:
| That's fair. I think a lot of reactions, mine included,
| are because most of the time when someone discusses the
| downsides of a large state, they're advocating for a
| small one from a libertarian lens, so I think I imputed
| motives to your arguments.
|
| You're right about this generally, though. I've got two
| different theories for why this is happening.
|
| First, I think the US is "individually nomadic" in a way
| that many other countries and cultures are not - it is
| unusual, at least in the populous areas, for someone to
| spend their entire life in one area, and doubly so for an
| entire family or community to stay geographically
| colocated long enough to really build durable
| organizations. I think this changes a bit as people get
| older, but it's quite normal for someone to move every 5
| years or so between the age of, say, 20 and 60. Arguably
| this is driven by economics - job availability,
| especially for professionals, is a big reason for these
| moves.
|
| I think there's something self-reinforcing about the
| trend, as well - notably, as, say, the focus in politics
| concentrates on the federal government, it becomes harder
| for people to really see the benefit in local politics.
| The repeal of Roe v. Wade, for example, is a policy made
| at the national level with strong impacts locally;
| similarly the recent change in policy around both trans
| rights and immigration are hard for people to look past
| towards local politics (I think this is a mistake - large
| politics are built on small politics - but I think it's a
| factor).
|
| I'd also suspect impatience plays a part - it's hard to
| build an organization, it's hard to negotiate status and
| relationships, it's hard to keep something viable, and
| we've got a lot of easier routes to dopamine than
| bothering to meet up with other people now.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Hmmm... I would argue the disengagement of citizens and
| the lack of participation is not strictly because of
| organizational size. It is the fact these organizations
| cannot care less about their customers, citizens, or the
| law. These rogue organizations are typically large.
|
| The cause of disengagement is that organizations, large
| or small, are not responsive to customers needs or
| citizens needs. In many cases, they are actively working
| to the detriment of their own customers and the country
| at large.
|
| This is due to regulatory capture. It is that simple.
| Too wrote:
| Like rock paper scissors, there are multiple dimensions to
| power and the state doesn't always possess all of them.
| Media being the most obvious one (fourth estate). Federal
| bank another. As the split of government and parliament.
| roughly wrote:
| The state holds the guns, and if it doesn't hold the
| guns, it's not the thing I'm referring to as the state -
| fundamentally, the power of the state is the power of
| violence. Other actors may possess other types of power
| and other types of coercion, but those either leverage or
| are constrained by the state power of violence.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| One could make an argument that the state does not hold a
| monopoly on violence. It holds a monopoly on the
| legitimization of violence. You're allowed to use deadly
| force to protect yourself from death or serious bodily
| harm in the majority of jurisdictions, provided it is not
| disproportionate. What matters is that the state declines
| to prosecute this, but does prosecute the person who
| hypothetically shoots someone on Fifth Avenue for no
| reason.
| roughly wrote:
| I am specifically not arguing the state has a monopoly on
| violence - as with the GP, people are imputing arguments
| I'm not making. It's the fact that the state cannot have
| a monopoly on violence that forces the state to be
| powerful enough that its threat of violence outweighs
| others (and, bluntly, defines what the state IS, for all
| practical purposes: it is the entity whose threats of
| violence supersede all others.)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The media has died though, 'no one' watches the MSM under
| 30, everyone is online in their safe space.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| > 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 is required narrowly,
| to prosecute true crime, defend from outside threats, and
| resolve disputes.
| roughly wrote:
| How is an entity with a monopoly on violence not the most
| powerful actor in the room? And in what way is
| administering the peace not constraining other actors?
| rightbyte wrote:
| The state is not an entity except in a very abstract
| sense.
| tjs8rj wrote:
| In today's world is it actually in our best interest to
| have the government break up large organizations? Or is
| that the worse of 2 evils?
|
| The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth,
| influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is
| only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at
| promoting American interests in the world because it has
| many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its
| jurisdiction.
|
| A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is
| probably a world where China is far more powerful than the
| US
|
| The meta as a state today is to cultivate as much wealth
| and power as possible by encouraging super corporations
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > In today's world is it actually in our best interest to
| have the government break up large organizations?
|
| I genuinely struggle to think of a social ill we're
| currently facing that _isn 't_ down in one way or another
| to some mega-entity acting against the public interest
| with no fears of reprisal because it is "too big to
| fail."
|
| > A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them
| is probably a world where China is far more powerful than
| the US
|
| The US has demonstrated thoroughly it cannot and is not
| interested in preventing the ascent of a Chinese
| superpower, simply from the fact that, if you believe
| them at face value, the current ruling party and
| administration are absolutely ripping the walls out from
| the U.S. Government largely to prevent that exact
| phenomenon, and have utterly failed to do so. And, in
| their ineptitude, have in fact both made the United
| States a global embarrassment and left tons of soft power
| just sitting on the damn table for China to pick up.
|
| > A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them
| is probably a world where China is far more powerful than
| the US
|
| ... but we have a lot of these supposed super-
| corporations. The problem is the United States, contrary
| to the ramblings of numerous chronically online people,
| does not actually use it's authority. Those corporations
| are in fact far more worried about accessing China's
| market than ours, because we don't regulate and they do,
| and there's far more Chinese consumers than American
| ones.
|
| Add to it America's consumers are already strip-mined to
| the studs and China's middle class is growing... I mean.
| It's just full steam ahead on American irrelevance.
|
| I think the real lesson is that when you're the big
| player already benefiting from global free trade in
| virtually every single way, laying tariffs on everything
| and sabotaging foreign investment in your own country
| is... well. Fucking stupid?
| cs702 wrote:
| I'd agree that too much concentration of power in any single
| organization, public or private, without any checks or
| balances, is a bad idea. As the saying goes, power corrupts,
| and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Historically, the
| executive branch of the US federal government has been kept
| more or less in check by (a) the legislative and judicial
| branches, and (b) voters.
| winkeltripel wrote:
| I find both sides of this discourse have value: the federal
| loss of regulatory powers WRT corporations, and getting
| grassroots going again. I feel like my neighborhood streets
| are not places anymore, they're entirely liminal. Nothing
| happens in these spaces, no playing or working, except as
| strictly necessary.
| monkeywithdarts wrote:
| I really like the direction this thread is going. I've
| wondered if Left and Right in the US only see half the
| problem: one side fears corporate/wealthy/majoritarian power,
| the other fears government power. If you allow two
| assumptions:
|
| (1) Power and money generally lead to more power and money
|
| (2) Government and corporate/wealthy power are a revolving
| door (regulatory capture, pay-to-play politics, etc).
|
| ... then someone who is skeptical of abuses of power should
| be wary of both government and corporate/wealthy power. But
| that seems like an untenable position -- you can't check the
| one without muscling up the other.
|
| Is there a way to maintain a small, decentralized, local-
| oriented government that can still check the power of
| corporate/wealthy/majoritarian impulses and provide a social
| safety net?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Don't the anarchists think they have ways to check both
| state _and_ government power, while promoting human
| welfare? (I 'm unfortunately unfamiliar with anarchist
| philosophy, so I don't know what their proposals are.)
| monkeywithdarts wrote:
| I also don't know much about anarchist philosophy; would
| love some insight here if anyone can speak to that.
|
| But if the US (same applies to other countries) became an
| anarchy today, then entities like Goldman Sachs and
| Constellis (formerly Blackwater) are going to fare much
| better than most. So a naive "burn it all down" anarchy
| doesn't seem an answer.
|
| UPDATE: I remembered Noam Chomsky is sometimes called an
| anarcho-syndicalist but never looked up what meant. Turns
| out that is exactly the kind of "anarchism" that answers
| my question. (New concept to me, so not sure in what
| sense this might be called anarchism. No central
| government?)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Real-life anarchists aren't proposing the naive "burn it
| all down" anarchy. Apparently that's just a media thing.
| (Some claim it's authoritarian propaganda, but I suspect
| it's just writers going: "we need a bad guy who wants to
| destroy society, but they need a _reason_ , and we've had
| too many religious extremists: let's make this one an
| anarchist!"... though maybe this is a false dichotomy?
| Someone's probably written a book about it.)
|
| Oh, hey, the first text I picked from the Anarchist
| Library answers the question in my previous comment!
| https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alex-stefanescu-
| rela...
|
| > A revolution would be necessary to topple a political
| regime. But, if your starting point is the rejection of
| authority, if you don't need "permission", you don't need
| the revolution either. Anarchy starts _not with a bang,
| but with a whimper_ -- not with an announcement on public
| television that it is the time to dismantle hierarchies,
| but with our collective work to slowly build something on
| the lack of the hierarchies themselves.
|
| I'm not sure I understand the rest of this document, but
| _this_ bit seems straightforward.
| roughly wrote:
| I think the roadmap to the anarchist view is simple
| enough in theory - break up large companies, redistribute
| large piles of wealth, establish laws enforcing size
| limits, and, following that, scale government back and
| delegate decision-making to the affected individuals
| wherever practical. Ignoring the practical questions of
| how one breaks up, say, Amazon, the state has the guns,
| so if the state says Bezos loses his yacht, it is so.
|
| The practical side is substantially harder - the
| anarchist-communal version of the world requires a
| citizenry committed to their community, phobic to
| bigness, and willing to assert that something that is not
| in the interest of the commons is not allowed to happen.
| Again, this ignores the practical question - balances of
| innovation vs unknown potential costs, etc - but the
| bigger practical concern is building an actual durable
| social contract that people will uphold and enforce over
| time, even when that means giving up personal glory.
|
| This was basically the state of most societal groups in
| the pre-modern era - by and large, most people's day-to-
| day existence was within local community groups that had
| a lot of say over what they allowed within their sphere
| of influence - but the modern world creates the ability
| to concentrate power in ways which are harder for a
| smaller group of individuals to combat. A teenager with
| an AK-47 would've mowed through a squadron of Roman
| soldiers like they weren't there, and the mechanization
| of industry allows for more rapid consolidation of wealth
| than prior means, which renders the whole affair much
| harder to keep in hand.
| twothreeone wrote:
| > (1) Power and money generally lead to more power and
| money
|
| At least when applied to Government in the form of
| "Representative Democracies" I think this overly simplistic
| view is not useful to analyze what's happening in the real
| world.
|
| The assumption behind electing representatives is precisely
| that they will advocate and advance agendas on behalf of
| the majority - no matter their social status. However, for
| this to work it requires a populace that is sufficiently
| informed, educated, and intelligent to understand what
| sensible solutions look like.
|
| Unfortunately, Rousseau, Voltaire, Kant and many others
| were wrong and even after 300 years of putting young homo
| sapiens through 10 years of public education and teaching
| them rational thinking this assumption turns out to be
| false.
| wenc wrote:
| This is the classic tradeoff. (it's similar to the bias
| variance tradeoff, or fox and hedgehog analogy)
|
| Monolithic systems are scalable and efficient when well-
| governed, but brittle under errors or bad leadership (e.g.
| China closing its ports in the 14th century had centuries-long
| repercussions).
|
| Distributed systems are less efficient but more resilient to
| errors and poor governance.
|
| It's not always one or the other though. American founding
| fathers found a right set of tradeoffs in designing checks and
| balances (like separation of powers) and federalism structures
| that harden the system against bad governance (though this is
| under strain today).
| nextworddev wrote:
| Naive techies like this don't realize crypto is even more
| centralized
| msabalau wrote:
| I dunno. It's not at all clear what "small organizations, whose
| role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk
| significantly" even means, over what time, and in what society.
| The post itself, as a piece of thinking, seems, charitably, a
| vague sentiment that might later turn into something that could
| be analyzed.
|
| In general terms, in the US, in living memory, I'm not sure
| that large organizations occupy more space in people's day to
| day lives than smaller ones.
|
| In the US, since say the 1990s, the percentage of people, say,
| working in small businesses are roughly the same. The number of
| local non-profits has exploded since over that time. The trend
| towards media consolidation that had occurred over the prior
| century would begin to be unwound, and tech consolidation would
| only partially reverse this. We have far more access to diverse
| points of view than most people did for most of the 20th
| century.
|
| If there is there is shift, I suspect, it's not about where
| people work or interact, it seems mostly that businesses, small
| and large, feel free to dominate people, in a way that was
| considered in bad form prior to Reagan/Thatcher and the fall of
| communism as an alternative to the West that would be appealing
| to post-colonial societies.
|
| But that's just a notion as vague as the original post.
| vkou wrote:
| Better yet, the 7-7-7 rule.
|
| > The FCC's 7-7-7 rule was a 1953 regulation that limited a
| single entity from owning no more than seven AM radio stations,
| seven FM radio stations, and seven television stations
| nationwide to promote broadcast diversity. This rule was a
| response to concerns about media consolidation and was
| eventually eased, then replaced by the 12-12-12 rule in 1984
| and later abolished by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
|
| If you're wondering how we got to the universe where every
| piece of mass media that's blasted at you is owned by <5
| entities, look no further.
|
| So much for diversity of speech or a marketplace of opinions.
| Speech is actively being funneled into a single box, and the
| box is owned and operated by a monoculture of media
| billionaires.
|
| This forum in particular wails and gnashes its teeth anytime
| that big tech exercises control over publishing, while turning
| a blind eye to this rot in trad-media - which is a thousand
| times worse.
|
| If I were made king for a day, the first thing I'd do would be
| to break up these conglomerates. You'd either be allowed to be
| a media conglomerate with the GDP of a small country and a
| reach of a hundred million people running an agnostic platform,
| _or_ you 're allowed to exercise editorial control. Pick one, I
| don't care which, _but you have to pick one_.
|
| (That this isn't a popular position among people seeking to
| maximize speech and diversity of ideas is perhaps revealing of
| their real values - the promotion of the monoculture pushed by
| trad-media.)
| RugnirViking wrote:
| This. I mean thats just one sector, but its spread across the
| whole: the whole of modern economic theory is one of
| competition that causes efficient markets. But when you look
| into the theory even a little bit, you realise it needs
| hundreds, even thousands of market players to reach an
| equilibrium thats worthwhile, and the existence of a large
| player even at like 10% market size can distort everything
| beyond usefulness. We're so far removed from that ideal in
| pretty much every dang sector that anyone preaching or
| believing in efficient markets is just foolish.
| roughly wrote:
| Notably all of these choices and policies didn't fall from the
| trees, but were come to after seeing what happened in their
| absence.
| derefr wrote:
| I would point out that, regardless of the US federal
| government's stance on monopolies, any legislation or civil
| action toward that end would be far less applicable today,
| because of globalization.
|
| If your country prevents any domestic tech companies from
| becoming trillion-dollar behemoths, but such things _are_ still
| permitted in at least one other country with a similarly-sized
| economy to yours, then that just means that all your smaller
| domestic tech companies are going to be outcompeted by the
| foreign trillion-dollar behemoth selling into your domestic
| market.
| huijzer wrote:
| > Interestingly, in the past, the US federal government
| actively made efforts to keep private organizations from
| becoming too dominant.
|
| They seem to do the opposite now because small businesses can
| expect little support from the government (and surely no big
| subsidies like the large players are getting in for example the
| Stargate joint venture). Especially COVID was seen by many
| small business owners are extremely tough since larger stores
| were allowed to stay open while the small businesses were not.
| kadushka wrote:
| What subsidies is Stargate project getting from US
| government?
| huijzer wrote:
| I remembered incorrectly. They are getting "emergency
| declarations" support:
|
| > Donald Trump called it "the largest AI infrastructure
| project in history", and he indicated that he would use
| emergency declarations to expedite the project's
| development, particularly regarding energy infrastructure.
|
| So it might not be strictly a subsidy, but it surely is
| taxpayer-support.
| glitchc wrote:
| > * 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.
|
| It's worth noting that Bell's size and reach allowed it to
| create Bell Labs, and the subsequent breakup led to their
| eventual demise.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Bell really really wanted this: It also proposed that it be
| freed from a 1956 antitrust consent decree, then administered
| by Judge Vincent P. Biunno in the United States District Court
| for the District of New Jersey, that barred it from
| participating in the general sale of computers
| hibikir wrote:
| It's the natural result of tech gaining value, and a lot of it
| staying closed source: Once you are scaling, scaling very high
| isn't that difficult once you have the best offering, and when
| you are big you can do optimizations that would be seen as
| wasteful at a small scale. streaming service that has wide
| reach isn't that different when it is dealing with 10 million
| or 100 million subscribers, but dedicating a guy for 3 months
| to save 2% of your costs through some arcane fiddling is much
| more profitable when you have 100 million, and then your costs
| per subscriber can be lower.
|
| We also have plenty of problems that are natural monopolies.
| Take, for instance, credit card fraud detection. High level
| detection involves giving a risk score to a transaction. I sure
| can give a better fraud score if I see almost every transaction
| this card makes, and I have a very high percentage of
| visibility of all transactions in the world, than if I had to
| do the calculation by just knowing what, say, my boardgaming
| website has seen. The smaller contender has to be so much
| better algorithmically to be able to compete with a massive
| advantage in data quantity and quality.
|
| And that's the real problem we have with monopolies right now:
| The bigger company often doesn't have a huge advantage because
| they are making extra shady deals, or they have to compete
| less, but because being bigger makes them more efficient in
| some ways that are completely above board.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| When you put it that way, the US constitution itself is about
| limiting the power of the federal government against the states
| (and individuals, in the bill of rights)
|
| Nevertheless, state-level power, for a state government or
| business, is still far above the kind of sub-Dunbar number
| (~120 people) organisations that Tao is talking about, where
| everyone might know each other and the network can be organised
| by reputation and trust rather than through state-level laws or
| contracts (and the attendant forms of impersonal bureaucratic
| enforcement that come with those).
|
| Edit: I don't mean to object to the general theme of your
| comment which is that power has become increasingly
| concentrated and unchecked, just to point out that even if
| those limitations that you mention had been retained it would
| still represent a society where the role of immediate trust-
| based relationships is diminished or eroded relative to the
| previous situation where these were the primary aspects of
| people's livelihoods and security
| joz1-k wrote:
| The reason governments no longer fight huge corporations or
| even clear monopolies is also due to heavy globalization. If
| one government destroys a monopoly (a global mega-corporation)
| in its country, it may strengthen the monopoly (and the global
| mega-corporation) in another country. So the line of thinking
| is, "We don't like this nasty monopoly, but at least it's _our_
| monopoly. "
| neves wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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 consists of monopolies in a command
| economy. They call it "capitalism with Chinese
| characteristics."
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| I don't really buy this. The government still has the ability
| to just ban or tax the foreign monopoly. And seemingly the EU
| has the ability to fine foreign businesses for being
| monopolies too.
|
| China being a good example. Google being a monopoly in the
| rest of the world doesn't really impact them much since they
| just block the foreign products.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Any source for this? My hunch is that there is so much money
| sloshing around that government interests are easily swayed
| and conflicts of interest are relatively common now.
| intalentive wrote:
| >My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and
| technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the
| individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the
| significant expense of small organizations
|
| This is basically the thesis of Bertrand de Jouvenal's "On Power"
| (1945).
| nostrademons wrote:
| 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 themselves.
|
| I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small organizations
| are born, growing out of people's spare time and sense of
| security in the future. After all, by definition organizations
| start small. And then when times are bad, small organizations are
| the first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and
| financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.
| We've entered a time of scarcity since COVID; that's put severe
| pressure on many smaller organizations, leading to them withering
| and shrinking away.
|
| Interestingly, bad times often lead to large organizations
| becoming _dysfunctional_ , but not dying because they have
| sufficient reserves to weather the storm. We see this with Big
| Tech now; we saw it with American automakers in the 1970s. During
| the next expansion period they often lose competitiveness to new
| startups, and then in the next contraction they die and their
| replacements become large organizations.
| mediaman wrote:
| 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 to mostly be based on social
| media vibes (hence the oft-commented "vibecession").
|
| One could make a much stronger argument exactly to the
| opposite: wealthier societies tend to become more
| individualistic and separated, people choose to live on their
| own if possible, and in bigger places; large companies have
| such attractive economics and pay people so much more than
| small companies do that it is difficult for small organizations
| to compete for talent.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| There are different kinds of scarcity. I remember a time when
| people would "charge what it's worth" instead of "what they
| could get". Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were
| in a position to take advantage of a buyer. It was also the
| tail-end of the American era of employer-employee loyalty
| that went _both ways_. Those who famously violated those
| norms were looked _down_ on, not admired. The American
| medical industry has been most visibly effected by this
| cultural shift, but it 's everywhere. Scarcity isn't always
| about the availability of material goods. By that measure,
| we're doing better than ever!
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Decency imposed self-restraint on those who were in a
| position to take advantage of a buyer... The American
| medical industry has been most visibly effected by this
| cultural shift...
|
| I don't know, something something, Baumol's cost disease.
| You, like the other person who is vamping, aren't talking
| about stuff grounded in hard data.
|
| But I'll meet you at your level:
|
| (1) Do you think serving cheaper customers is _easier_ or
| _harder_?
|
| It's harder. Poorer people will break more things, ask for
| more stuff, require more intensive one-on-one service, as a
| matter of objective reality. I'm not saying this is good or
| bad, or that people don't deserve dignity and decency, but
| you are reaching for this complex, Americana cultural vibe,
| and you know, I can reach for a vibe too, "Man, it sucks to
| deal with people who are broke." Do you see?
|
| (2) What would be the price of a life saving vaccine if
| people would "charge what it's worth"? What about "what
| they could get"?
|
| Okay. So you got it 200% wrong. We charge what we could get
| for life saving vaccines, and for that matter most life
| saving generics, which is very close to $0, even though
| people would probably pay a ton of money for it.
|
| Its this, "I wanna drag every grievance into every
| conversation" that is the problem, it's vibes that are the
| problem.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| I associate the Hacker News forum with authentic,
| reasoned debate and sharing of personal experience and
| perspective. Your comment wants to engage in a kind of
| rhetorical pugilism that is very common in other forums,
| but is uncommon here. It is a style I personally dislike
| and find counter-productive for every topic, inflaming
| emotions and driving division rather than synthesizing a
| variety of perspectives into an interesting whole.
| viridian wrote:
| Speaking of vibe checks, the vibes in this post are worse
| than what you've replied to. "something something", "I'll
| meet you at your level", "Do you see?", "you got it 200%
| wrong.", are all very dismissive and hostile.
|
| There are better ways to get your message across.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Were you born pre-industrial revolution?
| nostrademons wrote:
| There's a line in one of my kids' Bluey books that says "Do
| you want to win, or do you want the game to continue?
| Because sometimes you can't have both."
|
| I feel like that's sorta where we are in America. In the
| glory days of the 50s-70s, people _wanted the game to
| continue_ - they were willing to sacrifice a little bit of
| winning for the sake of keeping the system intact. Then
| starting in the 80s, people gradually started sacrificing
| the _game_ for the _win_ , doing things that they knew
| would eventually lead to the collapse of everything so that
| they could come out on top. This is corrosive. Once it
| starts becoming apparent, _everybody_ will start
| sacrificing the system as a whole for their own personal
| gain, because the system is dead anyway.
|
| I think we're right on the brink of everyone realizing that
| the system is now dead, and bad things will likely come of
| it.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| I like this framing. There is an analogy with
| industrialization and pollution, in that the side-effects
| of industrial production can be safely ignored, unless
| those effects are cumulative. Social norms function in
| the same way. There is little harm in a professor kindly
| giving a passing grade to one undeserving student; when
| this becomes common, the cumulative effect undermines the
| value of a college education itself.
|
| Perhaps a more mathematical framing looks to game theory,
| a la John Nash. In the prisoner's dilemma two equilibrium
| exist, the "good one" where the prisoners cooperate, and
| the "bad one" where they both defect. Good and bad is
| determined by summing the outcome value for both
| prisoners. Social norms help stay in the "good"
| equilibrium despite the occasional defection. Once the
| defectors learn how personally profitable it is to
| defect, it becomes common practice, the norm changes, and
| the society as a whole has switched from one equilibrium
| to the other, and society is, overall, much worse off.
| The path from good to bad equilibrium is incremental,
| cumulative, just like pollution. It's less clear to me
| what the incremental, cumulative path is going the
| opposite direction.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Game theory is exactly it. A bunch of simulations have
| shown that in a repeated prisoner's dilemma, the optimal
| strategy is tit-for-tat, sometimes adding forgiveness.
| The fact that you will play again incentivizes players to
| cooperate. But as soon as the game becomes finite (i.e.
| you can see the end in sight), the optimal strategy
| becomes "defect", because your opponent also has the same
| incentives and whoever defects first gets the payoff.
|
| Incidentally this also points to the path from a bad to
| good equilibrium. You have to throw away the big system
| and start with a system small enough that the
| participants will interact repeatedly. This rebuilds
| trust. Then you have to defend that system from outside
| influences, or at least carefully control them so they
| play by the same rules as existing participants. The act
| of defending your local community also builds trust -
| arguably [1] post-WW2 U.S. social cohesion was actually
| _generated_ by the experience of defeating the Axis
| powers and then getting enmeshed in the Cold War. Finally
| you can gradually expand the system through carefully
| controlled immigration and naturalization.
|
| Unfortunately, this probably means that the Internet,
| globalization, and likely large states like the
| US/China/Russia are all toast. And as Terence Tao's post
| here points out, large organizations are usually more
| efficient than small organizations. That means that as
| large organizations have outcompeted small organizations,
| the transition as those large organizations themselves
| become dysfunctional and disintegrate is going to be
| wrenching. We're going to lose access to several material
| conveniences that we take for granted.
|
| [1] https://www.paulgraham.com/re.html
| simpaticoder wrote:
| It's interesting to wonder about why norms degrade at
| scale. Intuition tells me it's because stink-eye doesn't
| scale. Defectors in a small org pay a price external to
| the game, aka "reputational damage". But members of large
| organizations rarely suffer this, because they are
| strangers, and because "they are just doing their job". A
| half-formed thought, but perhaps it's half-useful.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| When you are the 900 pound gorilla, "reputational damage"
| is no longer an effective check against bad behavior.
| This is the exact motivation for the trust-busting
| movement in the early 20th century. Now the US has
| regressed and we are in another gilded age.
| heylook wrote:
| This is exactly the main lesson of Finite and Infinite
| Games. There are finite games, in which the goal is to
| win, and there are infinite games, in which the goal is
| to continue playing the game. Using this framing, one can
| account for quite a large amount of long-term, large-
| scale problems as breakdowns wherein some participants
| choose to play formerly infinite games as finite ones,
| thus crushing their competition but destroying the game
| itself.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
| biophysboy wrote:
| 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.
| CalRobert wrote:
| 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!)
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| 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.
| masfuerte wrote:
| I mostly agree, but is it cyclical? There doesn't seem to be
| any force pushing back against this social atomization.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Piketty describes at length & with enormous evidence that
| Capital is cyclically heading one way, but while important
| & a core cycle turning up the heat on humanity-slowly-
| boiling-in-the-pot that wasn't really my gist here, which
| is about how the memetics of human connection and
| organization replicate (or not).
|
| I see the cycle as one of: corporatism depriving us of
| organizational experience (power instead trickling top down
| from often far off far above offices), weakening
| organizational muscle & maturation of human agency.
| Resulting in people who don't have the experience to make &
| run orgs, leaving less orgs, which cuts off the remaining
| opportunities to participate & organize.
|
| More simply: the less organizing opportunities we have the
| less people do organize which results in less opportunities
| still. Contrapositively perhaps, to organize is to non-zero
| sum grow & developer human agency.
| sct202 wrote:
| There was a wave of less formal topic based community groups
| when Meetup launched, but COVID + Meetup buyout & price hikes
| has led to most of them shutting down.
| kansface wrote:
| People's time is conserved, so a couple of questions: 1. What
| percentage of decline can be attributed to social media purely
| as a time sink? 2. What percentage of decline can be attributed
| to increased political polarization
| encroaching/claiming/colonizing formerly and nominally neutral
| spaces?
|
| One remarkable counter example in my neck of the woods is the
| Orthodox Church, which has done extraordinarily well since
| covid, picking up tons of converts. Of course, people
| themselves are conserved, too. That growth has come at the
| expense of protestant churches which in my reckoning sorta
| stopped being churches during covid. I'd estimate 1/3 of my
| local congregation is non-Greek converts who seemingly have no
| intention of learning the language (services regularly run 1.5
| to 2 hours, largely in koine Greek)!
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small
| organizations are born, growing out of people's spare time and
| sense of security in the future. After all, by definition
| organizations start small. And then when times are bad, small
| organizations are the first to die, because they lack the
| economies of scale and financial reserves that allow them to
| weather a contraction.
|
| I think the biggest flowering of organizations both small and
| large happened in the post-WWII period. In the US sure that was
| a very hopeful time. But many of the other belligerents were
| reduced to rubble and Germany and Japan were occupied by
| foreign powers. Yet organizations did still sprout in this
| period of, what we modern people would probably think as, utter
| despondency. I think there's more to it than just time and
| security.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| I agree that I don't think its security. But I do think its
| worth looking again at the time aspect. per "bowling alone"
| we have pretty good signs that this decline has been ongoing
| since the 1980s. I'm reasonably sure that the 455 minutes per
| day per capita global media consumption has something to do
| with it. From TV to the internet, you don't need friends when
| the friendly person on screen has such exciting adventures.
|
| I think something like only turning on the internet and TV
| for like a single hour each morning and evening would do so
| much for society, like you wouldn't believe. Not just
| encouraging better engagement outside of those times, but
| also causing you to demand better of the hour you do get,
| avoiding mindless slop.
|
| Have you ever taken a proper break from all media? Like tv,
| internet, phones, heck even books. You find yourself suddenly
| with amazing amounts of time. Some people describe being
| catastrophically bored but for me I just find that all those
| little tasks that rack up that seem like too much effort
| suddenly become approachable and you can check off like 6 and
| still have time for relaxing in some grass and just kinda
| chatting with passers by. I really think its that simple.
| paddleon wrote:
| > And then when times are bad, small organizations are the
| first to die, because they lack the economies of scale and
| financial reserves that allow them to weather a contraction.
|
| Not sure it is bad times which drives this. Plenty of examples
| in human history of the tendency of humans to form small local
| support groups when times get tough.
|
| Volunteerism has been on a massive decline my entire life, good
| decades and bad decades. There is some other force in our
| current social order which is tearing it apart.
| ponector wrote:
| >> I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good
|
| By almost any metric, life in western society is better than
| ever, you cannot say now times are not good.
|
| From my perspective one of the main reason is the modern
| internet: people are glued to screens instead of participation
| in local community.
|
| Why bother to go somewhere if you have everything in your
| pocket and also on the enormously big tv screen in your room?
| grogenaut wrote:
| 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 idea what they do.
| Not obviously recruiting in my area.
|
| Boy/Girl scouts: I wasn't able to have a kid and so couldn't
| volunteer here or sports. It's kinda creepy to do so without a
| kid. Not obviously recruiting in my area.
|
| YMCA/YWCA: this seems like a straight up company these days. Do
| they even take volunteers? I don't see any recruiting for it.
|
| Kids who code / other code bootcamps: sent multiple emails. All
| I got back was marketing asking for donations if I even got
| that. They did like 2 events a year.
|
| I do volunteer EMS/Fire/Ski Patrol... That requires actual
| training. Groups were obviously recruiting once I had the
| skills. They need people to help run large events / medical.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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.
| pants2 wrote:
| I go to church every Sunday despite having zero belief in
| Jesus or God as they describe him. The sermons are socially
| relevant and thought-provoking, the congregation is caring
| and fun with cool social events, and the good that they're
| doing in our community is inspiring.
|
| I encourage HNers to try it! Just mentally replace "God"
| with "Nature" and "Jesus" with "Me" in every line and you
| have a good framework for self-reflection and appreciation
| of the natural world.
| BJones12 wrote:
| > Freemasons: what do they even do? ... Not obviously
| recruiting in my area.
|
| I'm not a mason, but their motto is "to be one, ask one". You
| won't see them recruiting, you have to inquire.
| biotinker wrote:
| The neat thing is that it it doesn't actually take much money
| to start up a new small organization if you want to. You can
| accomplish a remarkable amount with relatively little money.
|
| Some friends and I just started a tool library in Central
| Oregon: https://cotool.org/
|
| There some quite generous community donations of tools (not
| money) to get started. Startup costs were small, and now a
| couple weeks after opening we have dozens of members.
|
| It scales nicely because we can just buy more or less new
| tools. It's very impactful to some people, and once started
| there's very little recurring expenses.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| > I'll posit a mechanism: when times are good, small
| organizations are born
|
| Historically at least I think we can find many examples of the
| opposite, though perhaps these examples I can think are less
| around social activities and more around aiding business and
| society.
|
| Many small organizations appeared due to hard times creating
| real problems that were solved by no one, and they had to step
| into the void. In the Prairies of Canada where times were very
| hard farmers and labourers created coop organizations to spread
| the risk around and help out each other.
|
| For example not too far from me there's a Ukrainian old folks
| home which is associated with the Association of United
| Ukrainian Canadians. At one point pre WW2 prior to there being
| any sort of medicare this organization was a critical part of
| the social safety net for new Canadians and there would have
| been branches all across Canada.
|
| After WW2 it was banned during the red scare but even after
| that when legalized again became much less relevant because its
| need in society has diminished as genuine social safety nets
| were created. Now it appears to focus on teaching Ukrainian
| dance.
| gnulinux996 wrote:
| > Our kids' co-op preschool went out of business last year
|
| The fact that schools can go "out of business" is incredible.
| The more I get in contact with everything American, the more
| left I lean.
| mef51 wrote:
| I'm not sure I entirely agree with the framing, despite agreeing
| with many of the points raised. I think it's relevant to
| recognize that large organizations often become large by
| consuming smaller organizations. And that they consume smaller
| organizations precisely because they offer something like purpose
| and meaning, and other emotional/spiritual needs. When there are
| no more smaller organizations to consume, the larger
| organizations fracture out of an absence of these necessities.
| The division of 'small' and 'large' organizations is maybe
| relevant in today's economic structure but it does not feel
| absolute or permanent. Anyway, this well highlights the
| importance of genuine connections and activities at the
| individual level.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| It seems to me that:
|
| - on average, complexity is increasing.
|
| - most patterns in how civilization is arranged oscilate over
| time
|
| - what's happening right now is most likely an artifact of right
| now (economics, power structure, culture, politics, etc).
|
| - it seems that a shift back to smaller groups is likely in the
| future
|
| - what I'm not sure about is whether the larger groups need to
| dissolve or stabilize in order for smaller groups to rebound
|
| - I can't help but think that if our whole economic system
| reconfigures after reaching sufficient abundance, more of
| people's time will be spent on satisfying the soft needs met by
| smaller social groups, and less time will be spent on what feels
| meaningless
| scottfr wrote:
| In the early 1800's Alexis de Tocqueville attributed a lot of
| American success to its small organizations/associations:
|
| "There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract
| our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of
| America....
|
| In democratic countries the science of association is the mother
| science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress
| of that one."
|
| [0] https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/805328.html
| lordleft wrote:
| Tocqueville is the first person I thought of reading this!
| daxfohl wrote:
| Yeah, I remember he commented on every town having its own
| local newspaper too, which has obviously been replaced by
| commercialized mass media today.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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 the same kids' birthday parties.
|
| This is very obviously a "smell shit everywhere you go"
| situation.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| > 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.
| nextworddev wrote:
| All roads lead to great centralization.
| pama wrote:
| Although I totally agree with this analysis, I also feel
| optimistic that this moment in time provides the first real
| opportunity in over 40 years for smaller organizations to start
| to affect societal change again. The existing efficiencies due to
| reduced (human-to-human) communication and fast decision-making
| processes in small organizations combine very nicely with the
| reduction in the barrier to entry with the help of AI and the
| accelerated pace of change in society due to AI. I hope that once
| a main driver of scalability and societal change becomes access
| to computation, rather than human headcount, we will see a
| reversal of the ongoing trend.
| rck wrote:
| Pope Pius XI wrote about _subsidiarity_ as a guiding social
| principle:
|
| "Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they
| can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it
| to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time
| a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a
| greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate
| organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very
| nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and
| never destroy and absorb them."
|
| Tao is observing the consequences of a society that increasingly
| has abandoned subsidiarity as an operating principle. (I had
| hoped that crypto might be able to bring subsidiarity back, but
| so far the opposite has happened in practice.)
| fraserharris wrote:
| 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 product.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Interesting take. What is the market-serving product you
| mentioned?
| fraserharris wrote:
| Whatever fills the void for people. ie: instead of bowling
| leagues, people watch TV or play video games. It's arguably a
| worse product because it doesn't fulfill the socialization or
| exercise needs of people, but it does fill the same block of
| time.
| Ifkaluva wrote:
| I guess it's worse in the sense of providing health
| benefits, but it's better in the sense that more people
| would freely choose it if given the choice.
|
| It's the same as junk food, people will freely choose it
| over healthier options.
|
| Basically, products on the free market optimize for what
| people prefer to buy, and people's preferences are shaped
| by evolution to a world in which physical rest and high-
| calorie foods were scarce. This makes us mismatched to the
| modern landscape.
| pnathan wrote:
| I would concur. It's my observation from 20 years of watching
| and participating - the volunteers are the retired, the
| wealthy, the underemployed, and the stay at home parent.
| "Normal" working people are not volunteering and handling the
| complexity of doing these things, they are at their work. I can
| only imagine that prior generations had the working parent
| participate through the free time freed up by the stay at home
| parent.
|
| It suggests to me that there is a long running flaw. I believe
| Bowling Alone pegs the inflection point in the late 50s or
| early 60s, ('57?) and the substantative issues came about with
| the generation hitting the workforce in something like 1960. So
| the kids born in the 1935-1945 era had something in their
| culture materially different than prior eras that kept on
| spreading.
| missinglugnut wrote:
| I'll add that there are some feedback loops making it worse.
| When these organizations aren't available kids are more
| dependent on their parents for something to do, which makes
| the already strained parents even less likely to take on
| volunteer work.
|
| And then kids who grew up without mentors are less likely to
| try to be that for someone else.
|
| Basically the orgs don't have enough volunteers to do
| important things, and the people don't volunteer because the
| org isn't important to them.
| smokel wrote:
| Could we perhaps remove "Terence Tao" from the title? It feels
| somewhat disingenuous to lean on their name to bolster the
| argument. While someone in this thread is criticized for an ad
| hominem attack, this risks being the opposite, a kind of pro
| hominem. The arguments should stand on their own merit without
| invoking authority in the title, no?
| monknomo wrote:
| argument from authority, I think
| skybrian wrote:
| Families are still the most common small organization and I think
| they need to be considered as a distinct category rather than
| being grouped with other small organizations.
| daedrdev wrote:
| I think too many people starting companies dream of getting
| bought rather than running a profitable business. They care far
| more about financial games rather than the complex details of say
| their products manufacturing that matter most (instead relying on
| a third party in china who arguably is the more important
| partner). I don't know how saas relates to this problem.
|
| This is HN though so my complaints are ironic for sure
| chickenzzzzu wrote:
| The behavior wouldn't exist if the system didn't so heavily
| incentivize it. How many pizza place owners do you know with a
| net worth of $10,000,000 or higher, vs how many pizza place
| owners have ever tried?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| Small organizations are part of civil society. We have the
| numbers to know if their role is changing.
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/civil-society-participati...
| energy123 wrote:
| Hasn't this been an ongoing process for hundreds of years?
| paulpauper wrote:
| I've joked that mathstodon is effectively Terence's Tao's
| personal blog, with some occasional guest bloggers
| Maro wrote:
| I 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!
| stonogo wrote:
| >This is not Twitter
|
| only just. Mastodon is basically a twitter clone.
| sim7c00 wrote:
| this seems to be oriented at a specific region of the world. my
| advice would be to encourage to provide information about what
| regions it affects would be included in the title to avoid people
| opening information irrelevant to them...
| stego-tech wrote:
| I would argue that the role of small orgs has shrunk
| significantly from the perspective of the majority, but grown in
| importance and impact for groups outcast from that majority.
|
| The example I like to trot out is the amalgamation of furry and
| queer persons into a larger unit when collaborating at scale, but
| otherwise fostering positive impacts in smaller groups. The
| response to their successes has been attacks by larger orgs who
| are unable to integrate or co-opt them for profit (corporations)
| or power motives (politicians), as well as cringe-y reputations
| by individuals not included in those groups (see the mocking of
| both subcultures and groups by eRandos). Yet despite these
| negative attacks, both groups continue to grow and create
| parallel economies, logistics networks, communities, and even
| limited forms of governance (cons, parades, and social forums).
|
| So in that vein, I believe we're simply in the midst of an era of
| transformation, from a broken system to something new. Smaller
| orgs often lead these changes until one or more balloon in size,
| at which point they become the larger and more dominant
| organizations in the new era that follows. What we're seeing now
| is a classic fight between opposing political, social, and
| economic views, aided by technology on both sides of the battle
| and fundamentally reshaping how conflicts are waged.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I've found this to be a funny framing on the left because it
| always ignores what happens when the group stops being outcast.
| It's always a framing based around the current time and
| conveniently orients itself around the mores of the current
| era. Anime and otaku interest groups used to be like this in
| the '80s and '90s, generally ideologically aligned, creating
| parallel economies, in response to attack and scorn from the
| outside. Then it became mainstream. The stigma in liking anime
| went away. And with it the pressure to organize against the
| mainstream.
|
| We need to think about _durable_ small organizations, not ones
| that are based around the social mores of the moment. The magic
| of a neighborhood group is that as long as people live in an
| area together there will be neighbors.
|
| FWIW opposition-based interest groups have a long history in
| pretty much every state we've ever had records of.
| prngl wrote:
| Certainly onto something but misses how much large organizations
| are actually controlled by small organizations operating in the
| "large complex system" environment. It is only individuals and
| small organizations that have agency at all. Large organizations
| and large complex systems are both emergent, one with
| hierarchical control, and one with distributed control. What has
| really changed is how unequal small organizations have become in
| their influence and power. The small cadres of people at the
| "top" (of organizations, media, government, tech, etc)
| control/influence more and more, not only at the expense of other
| small organizations (power is zero sum) but also at the expense
| of the decentralized mechanism, ie the large complex system
| becomes increasingly hierarchically/centrally controlled (vs
| distributed/decentralized control).
| w10-1 wrote:
| Great post.
|
| But not sure I'd pre-position small organizations as having some
| kind of "role" -- effect maybe?
|
| I'm reminded of a term "the locus of relevant possibility" used
| to characterize where people spend their time and effort. This
| enables one to compare across activities (say, believers,
| merchants, workers, etc.), and also to propose that change
| happens where people put their efforts -- nowadays into larger
| organizations.
|
| Small organizations became relatively less effective at producing
| any relevant possibilities for people due to loss of locality for
| people and gain of targeting by large organizations.
|
| People now are participating fans in sports, politics, hardware,
| and of course work (most jobs come with a cultural context).
| If/when organizations get better at targeting people, they can
| scale.
|
| "Local" is a function of time/space/effort cost. Often now it's
| hard to visit your parents, but easy to engineer complex PR with
| someone across the world. So physical locality is not a proxy for
| relevance or possibility any more.
|
| (Too bad locality is still the basis for political
| representation.)
|
| There's also a key difference in the small organization: it
| incentivizes people to take some responsibility for others, i.e.,
| some organizing roles, to keep the organization afloat. A world
| with large effective organizations has fewer leaders -- fewer
| individuals effecting change.
|
| Probably the main small organizations are personal work networks.
| That's what determines ability and possibility in an increasingly
| productive world. In many cases, it centers on a rainmaker
| effect: people who can find and/or make work are followed.
|
| (I would love to see some clean way to distinguish the
| organizations with their own cultures vs. those that labor under
| rainmaker sub-cultures -- alignment vs competition, efficiency vs
| relevance...)
| magicfractal wrote:
| This is just what Lenin said about monopolistic capitalism. Free
| competition reduces profit rates which can't happen in
| capitalism.
| carabiner wrote:
| It's called consolidation. Strengthen governments and
| corporations, weaken individuals. Through taxes it can be done
| imperceptibly over time.
| amai wrote:
| Monopolies are better for shareholder value. They destroy
| competition and the fair market, but shareholder value is all
| that counts nowadays. So here we are. And the worst offenders are
| probably in the IT industry and startup world.
| jmyeet wrote:
| What I find fascinating about these kinds of legitimate
| complaints and the comments here and elsewhere is nobody wants to
| talk about the root cause: capitalism. What I've come to realize
| is Americans in particular can't define capitalism but will die
| on the hill of defending it. Another casualty of the Red Scare.
| Let me explain.
|
| People often like farmers markets. People like locally grown
| produce. People like Mom and Pop stores over big chains. These
| things aren't strictly true but they're generally true.
|
| Walmart is capitalism. A farmer's market is socialism. Your local
| Italian restaurant run by a family of immigrants is socialism.
| Olive Garden is capitalism.
|
| What's the difference? Easy. The worker's relationship to the
| means of production. If you buy from a local grower at a farmer's
| market, that grower likely owns their farm and any production
| facilities. If you buy from Walmart, you're paying the Walton
| family, Blackstone, Vanguard and all the other shareholders (or
| _capital owners_ ). That money leaves your community.
|
| This is rent-seeking behavior. And it's exactly what private
| equity is. What additionally makes private equity profitable are
| the legal enclosures PE firms create to increase profits at your
| expense. So they'll buy a medical practice, which was previously
| owned by the doctors most likely, and jack up the prices to pay
| off the LBO and their investors. They then use noncompetes to
| stop those medical practitioners in that local area or state
| (depdning on what they can get away with).
|
| At this stage of capitalism, every aspect of your life is getting
| financialized. Housing, health care, education, vets, food,
| water, utilities and so on. In every one of them is rent-seeking
| behavior to use the legal system to create an enclosure for them
| to jack up prices at your expense.
|
| Terence is a smart guy but the word "capitalism" doesn't appear
| once. Instead there's lip service to the notion of "economies of
| scale". This is in part propaganda. Why? Because if it were
| really true, why do all these large companies need legal
| protections of their business? Like states who ban municipal
| broadband?
|
| Secondly, Terence notes essentially the destruction of community.
| This is an intentional goal of neoliberalism because any form of
| community or collectivism is dangerous to a neoliberal project.
| Also, people spending time on community is lost profit for some
| company who would rather you were creating shareholder value
| instead.
| latexr wrote:
| > nobody wants to talk about the root cause: capitalism.
|
| If you both believe capitalism is evil and that no one wants to
| talk about it (while you do), you should definitely rethink the
| circles you frequent. And we're discussing a Mastodon post, of
| all platforms, just search for #capitalism and you'll find no
| end of critiques.
|
| See also Wikipedia if you want more sources.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-capitalism
| chermi wrote:
| "A farmer's market is socialism."
|
| Lolwut? Here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism.
|
| Are you thinking of farming collectives?
|
| Also, farmers markets (today, in the West) are basically
| luxuries for wealthy people. In the real world, we try to feed
| as many people as possible for as cheaply as possible. But
| sure, let's grow everything locally and let people starve,
| because farmers markets give us fuzzy warm feelings of a utopia
| that never existed. And capitalism bad.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > Lolwut?
|
| This is why I used this example because you've just
| demonstrated that you don't know what socialism is. There is
| a myth that capitalism is "free markets". First, there's no
| such thing as a free market. All markets require regulation
| to function. Second, markets exist in every organization of
| the economy and existed long before capitalism existed. We
| have records of such from Sumeria from 4000+ years ago. In
| late feudalism, serfs would sell the food they grew to pay
| their fedual landlord, an early from of taxation.
|
| > Also, farmers markets (today, in the West) are basically
| luxuries for wealthy people.
|
| Walmart is one of the most heavily subsidized businesses on
| Earth. Directly you have agricultural subsidies but another
| is food stamps paid to Walmart employees [1] as well as
| Medicaid. Why? Because Walmart pays below a living wage.
|
| Also, Walmart is known for setting up in a town, selling
| their products at below cost to kill all local businesses and
| then jacking up the prices, if not leaving outright, creating
| a new food desert.
|
| As for locally grown food being expensive, that's not really
| true once you look at the bigger picture. We've seen this
| pattern play out in every country the IMF and Wolrd Bank have
| gotten involved in. The IMF/WB place conditions such that
| local farmers can no longer produce crops to feed their
| populations. Those they have to buy from the West. Instead,
| farmers have to grow export crops to earn foreign currency to
| service debt.
|
| In the short term this lowers food prices but forces all the
| farmers off their land. They then have to move to cities to
| seek work and/or become a drain on the state.
|
| Inevitably, with and without manipulation, the local currency
| collapses and locals can no longer afford that foreign food.
| It's entirely predatory. A system was destroyed for foreign
| bankers. This is almost exactly what happened in Haiti and
| Somalia, to name just two examples.
|
| Now if the community owned that supermarket, this predation
| just wouldn't happen. In other words, it's the worker's
| relationship to the means of production.
|
| [1]: https://www.worldhunger.org/report-walmart-workers-cost-
| taxp...
| chermi wrote:
| Oh boy you got me good! How could I have fallen for such a
| clever ruse. This actually isn't complicated. Who owns the
| farm + stand? Again, maybe you meant farming collective,
| one last chance.
|
| I don't really know who you think you're arguing against,
| but free markets can exist as a theoretical idealization,
| you know, like some other systems I'm guessing you're fond
| of.
|
| Btw, if a farmers stand is socialism, then certainly I can
| say Walmart with subsidization via food stamps most
| definitely isn't capitalism.
|
| Every actual fact you state I agree with. As for your
| theories and straw men, I'll leave to you.
|
| Just as an exercise, try to run through the mental
| trajectory that got you to your rant on free markets and
| Sumeria and shit. What is going on there? You have some
| enemy in your head your imagining you're dunking on?
| solatic wrote:
| Author posits a causal relationship in a zero-sum game that he
| provides no evidence for. Paraphrasing, that uncontrollable
| intangibles like technology gave slightly more power to
| individuals and much more power to large organizations at the
| expense of small organizations. Since when do these
| uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own?
| Is there some zero-sum pie of power to be distributed? So if I go
| into the desert or wilderness, somewhere where there are no
| individuals, small organizations, or large organizations as of
| yet; that means it is literally impossible for any of them to
| come in, develop it, and make it a center of power?
|
| There's a much simpler explanation. Most entities most of the
| time (with such probabilities increasing with the size and age of
| the entity) seek to defend and expand their power. The American
| political tradition held that the blessings of liberty would be
| granted and prosperity _would grow_ if the power of the largest
| such entities were kept in check; first and foremost the British
| Crown, second the newfound American governments (at different
| levels), and eventually the largest private entities as well. But
| America abandoned its commitment to that tradition in all but
| name. America is no longer committed to property rights, free
| markets, free expression, or free association, such protections
| exist today only on paper. So every entity makes locally optimal
| decisions, leading society into a slow collapse.
| brap wrote:
| On one hand you're saying property rights and free markets, on
| the other you're saying private entities should be kept in
| check (by who? I assume the government). Isn't that a
| contradiction?
| bootsmann wrote:
| Is it? Is it not Americas refusal to step in the reason why
| most of the web today is based on and designed around the
| things Google deems important? Doesn't seem like a free
| market to me.
| solatic wrote:
| Who said a belief in property rights and free markets made
| you an anarchist? Strong governments are required to protect
| property rights and free markets; still, the government is
| supposed to have a system of checks and balances that helps
| to keep its power from being abused. There is a tension, but
| one that was supposed to be guided by the north star of
| protecting American values.
|
| Sadly, in the modern American government, legislation is too
| slow, justice is sold, and the executive runs amok unchecked.
| None of them are able to effectively attack the zoning and
| permitting processes that prevent developers from exercising
| their property rights to develop additional housing; markets
| have been captured by oligarchs who actively undermine the
| competition necessary for a free market, again with complicit
| legislative, judicial, and executive branches.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| >Is there some zero-sum pie of power
|
| Yes, that's exactly how power works. You can dilute power (in
| non-hierarchical organizations) or you can concentrate it (in
| rigidly hierarchical societies), but there's a finite amount of
| it and it's deeply coveted by all
| mmmore wrote:
| > a zero-sum game
|
| I don't see any reference to the game being zero-sum in Tao's
| words.
|
| > Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a
| genuine agency of their own?
|
| I don't think Tao is saying the uncontrollable force of
| technological and economic advancement exhibits a genuine
| agency of its own. Just that our current technology and society
| and has expanded the role of the extremely large
| organization/power structures compared to other times in
| history. This is a bit of technological determinist argument,
| and of course there's many counter-arguments, but it at least
| has a broad base of support. And at the very least it's a
| little bit true; pre-agricultural the biggest human
| organizations were 50 person hunter-gatherer bands.
|
| Honestly, I feel like you are filtering his words through your
| own worldview a bit, and his opinions might be less
| oppositional to your own than you might think.
| addcommitpush wrote:
| See also [0] This paper proposes that
| idiosyncratic firm-level shocks can explain an important
| part of aggregate movements and provide a microfoundation for
| aggregate shocks. Ex- isting research has focused on
| using aggregate shocks to explain business cycles, argu-
| ing that individual firm shocks average out in the aggregate. I
| show that this argument breaks down if the distribution
| of firm sizes is fat-tailed, as documented empirically.
| The idiosyncratic movements of the largest 100 firms in the
| United States appear to explain about one-third of
| variations in output growth. This "granular" hypothesis sug-
| gests new directions for macroeconomic research, in particular
| that macroeconomic questions can be clarified by looking
| at the behavior of large firms. This paper's ideas and
| analytical results may also be useful for thinking about the
| fluctuations of other economic aggregates, such as
| exports or the trade balance.
|
| [0] https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~xgabaix/papers/granular.pdf
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Using the feudal system as an analogy. Smaller aristocracies
| cannot fight larger ones without the support of king.
|
| Does the king support smaller aristocracies nowadays? No. The
| king works with the larger aristocracies to eat everyone else.
| pphysch wrote:
| Social graphs used to be constrained by individual human
| capacity, roughly parametrized by Dunbar's Number.
|
| Nowadays, a single commodity computer server can store
| information and relationships for every single living human.
|
| You can have a direct economic relationship with a factory 5,000
| miles away. This used to be utterly impossible, and required many
| degrees of primary human interaction through a chain of
| relatively small organizations.
| yesfitz wrote:
| I've been thinking about this due to a renewed local interest in
| _Bowling Alone_ [1].
|
| Besides the main identified contributors of personalized media,
| suburbanization, real estate prices, and the increase of dual-
| income households, I've started to suspect that government-
| funding of organizations has also had a significant impact.
|
| In the past, organizations had to raise funds from their
| communities. As government grants for organizations increased,
| the cost floor was raised on _all_ organizations (i.e.
| fundraising, rents, salaries, etc.), and led to the
| professionalization of what was previously handled by volunteers.
|
| In the same way that the 30-year mortgage and zero-interest-rate
| policy made it _harder_ for individuals to raise the initial
| funds to buy a home (by enabling an increase in home prices,
| making it easier to buy a home if you already own one), I suspect
| access to government capital has made it _harder_ for small
| organizations to remain small while they compete with more
| professional (read "larger") organizations for their members'
| time and money.
|
| And this is a problem because as Terence Tao points out,
| "...[Small Groups] also fill social and emotional needs, and the
| average participant in such groups can feel connected to such
| groups and able to have real influence on their direction."
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
| chaseadam17 wrote:
| Great post. One lesser known factor that's contributing to this
| problem is bank consolidation in the US.
|
| * Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more
| profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans.
|
| * Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like
| mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than
| productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not
| contributing to growing the economy (but creating money out of
| thin air to flood the market with mortgages does increase housing
| prices...).
|
| One way to solve this problem is to break up the big banks and
| incentivize small regional banks to lend to productive small
| businesses. Worse for the bankers but better for the economy.
| Incidentally, this is exactly China's strategy, but as long as
| big banks are paying politicians millions for luncheon talks,
| it's unlikely to happen here.
| talbo888 wrote:
| It's almost certainly more profitable to make to make 1,000
| $100k loans from a banks point of view as the single loan will
| be much riskier (effectively not benefiting from the law of
| large numbers). Not to say there are benefits of dealing large
| loans such as cross selling other financial products to the
| large business.
|
| Your second point is totally correct, but it is exacerbated as
| a result of (broadly good) government policy. A bank wouldn't
| mind making uncollateralised loans any more than a mortgage,
| although it might charge more interest for the risk. However
| the government penalises banks based on (approximately) the sum
| of their _risk weighted_ assets [0]. Here mortgages, as
| collateralised loans, are greatly incentivised over
| uncollateralised loans to business.
|
| It's hard to say if the situation would be worse without it,
| it's possible we might have more risky business loans leading
| to growth, but also more likely we could see a serious global
| financial crisis.
|
| [0] I am simplifying here slightly but you can see how the US
| ranks major banks here, higher is worse from the banks point of
| view https://www.fsb.org/uploads/P261124.pdf
| chaseadam17 wrote:
| Yes, one $100M loan in isolation is risky (I was just giving
| an example), but my point was that a portfolio of a small
| number of large loans to big businesses is much more
| profitable than a portfolio of many more smaller loans to
| small businesses. Large companies are much less likely to go
| bankrupt and the overhead of making the loan relative to the
| profit from interest is much lower. 50% of small businesses
| go bankrupt in the first 5 years. It's simply less profitable
| to lend to them...
| hazn wrote:
| Nadia wrote recently published the book "antimemetics" about this
| exact finding: https://nayafia.substack.com/p/introducing-
| antimemetics-my-n...
|
| Her takeaway is that the value of small, antimemetic, high-trust
| groups has risen -- exactly because there are less than before
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 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's not a really good solution to this. I'm lucky enough to
| be in a game dev group, and I do have my bar that I go to every
| now and then, but aside from that I'm not really a part of any
| small organizations.
|
| I haven't been to church in decades, but arguably that's why most
| people actually go. It's not because you imagine God is taking
| attendance, but it's the joy of being around other people.
| Historically most people stayed in the same town from cradle to
| grave, maybe you would move for work, or marriage, but for the
| most part you just stayed put.
| azemetre wrote:
| I've recently finished Tribe by Sebastian Junger. I highly
| recommend it as well.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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 the
| NLRB, unions being forbidden from offering their members health
| insurance (they're the ones who started doing this), but
| employers offering insurance being _subsidized._ Elites were so
| terrified that they got close to pulling a coup and installing
| a dictator with the Business Plot
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot).
|
| They got everything tight again with WWII, McCarthy and the
| Cold War, though. Lucky, right?
|
| I think there has been an intentional effort to isolate people
| from each other, and to destroy communities, and even make them
| look suspicious or evil in some way. Isolated, atomized people
| are more easily controlled. I think the encouragement of labor
| mobility and the trashing of small towns and small business in
| favor of the internet has also been an intentional effort in
| that regard. I also think there has been an intentional effort
| to consolidate media and merge it with government, which
| reached a frenzy during the Biden administration. Oracle's nepo
| baby is going to have Paramount, CBS, Tiktok, and who knows
| what else.
|
| An evil antidemocratic streak has been encouraged among the
| "left," who now love benevolent dictators, credentialism, and
| decision by "consent" which immediately devolves into rule by
| the loudest and the whiniest cluster B personality or
| sociopath. Votes mean that you don't get your way a lot, but
| you get stuff done. If you don't get your way too much, you can
| just _leave_ and join a group that works for you. Monopoly, and
| rule by anointment take that away from us, and that 's what's
| happening.
|
| It's been devastating for black Americans. Our media used to be
| vibrant and exciting, now it doesn't exist _at all._ This is
| the fate of all minorities under cultural consolidation. Alone,
| getting your directions from a screen, with the screen
| listening to any conversation you manage to have and reporting
| it to your rulers.
|
| They'll eventually go after the churches, too, or consolidate
| them. I'm sorry, they'll go after the "christofascists."
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| offtopic, but does anyone know how to disable per-post scrolling
| on mastodon?
|
| I press down arrow to slowly read the rest of the text - and
| instead it jumps me all the way down
| internet_points wrote:
| glad to hear I'm not the only one, it's incredibly frustrating,
| especially when posts aren't big enough to fit on the screen
| and there is no keyboard-way to read the bottom half **
| brap wrote:
| Large organizations provide economical value.
|
| Small organizations provide a sense of belonging.
|
| Both can and do exist at the same time. We don't need to compare
| them using the same scales and we don't need to sacrifice one for
| the other.
|
| You can shop at Amazon but go to the local bar. Work at Google
| and attend church. Vote for The Party and start a garage band.
| Now more than ever we have the time and resources to do both.
|
| Although I agree this is easy to forget.
| ppsreejith wrote:
| In the book "The Quest for Community" (1953), Robert Nisbet
| argues that social function is primary and natural and leads to
| true association which for man fulfils a core need. From the
| book:
|
| > In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has
| progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y
| Gasset has written, "people do not live together merely to be
| together. They live together to do something together". To
| suppose that the present family, or any other group, can
| perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional
| tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like
| supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up
| incidentally in a military unit will along outlast a condition in
| which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the
| family, the argument suggests that affection and personality
| cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by
| the determining goals and ideals of economic and political
| society.
|
| Going on a tangent, my current beliefs are that:
|
| 1. Social functions (i.e accomplished through association) has
| always had, and will always have high marginal utility,
| independent of and utilising any technology.
|
| 2. That there are political and not technological barriers
| suppressing it in our current age.
|
| 3. That humans are evolved to interact with large numbers of
| humans (probably seasonality), and that our evolved sociality is
| scalable even to the present day and beyond (i.e a rejection of
| Dunbar's number as an evolved constraint)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nisbet
|
| and
|
| https://joinordiefilm.com/
|
| One thing I find annoying about that movie is that it doesn't
| mention Nisbet one of whose major ideas is that a panopoly of
| organizations of all shapes and sizes mediates the relationship
| of individuals with the state and other megaorganizations.
| tempestn wrote:
| Funny coincidence. I was just pondering last night how an
| extremely intelligent person would look at the problems in the
| world. (And whether it would be incredibly frustrating!) For
| those who aren't familiar, Terence Tao is considered one of the
| greatest living mathematicians, and arguably one of the world's
| most brilliant minds.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and
| technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the
| individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the
| significant expense of small organizations [...]
|
| The large organization are turning to rent seeking, which
| adversely affects the liberty of the average individual.
|
| Claiming that it has "slightly empowered the individual" is a
| reflection of where you are in the current social structure. If
| you've fallen below the line, then you're certainly not empowered
| at all, and more like you're enslaved. And that line keeps on
| going up.
|
| The corrosiveness of increasing housing costs and health care
| costs are examples of this. The fact that individual
| transportation is both necessary and is likely to turn into a
| subscription-model is likely to be another example.
|
| Regulatory capture is also a part of this. Large organizations
| enjoy the complexity of government regulations (while at the same
| time screaming about it) because they have the resources to
| navigate it, and they enjoy near monopolies which allow them to
| pass the costs down to their customers. And we've entirely
| forgotten how to break up monopolies, like we did with AT&T.
|
| Also, most organizations these days exist to capture profits for
| the people who lead them. And this can even be seen in left-
| leaning political organizations that are more concerned with
| fund-raising than solving the problems that they're supposedly
| addressing (the DNC being the most massive example of this).
|
| All of this corrodes individual liberties of the average person.
| It just may not have caught up with you yet, or you may have
| lucked into the resources to avoid it.
|
| This is why I'm a left-libertarian anti-capitalist. The problem
| that we have today is too much power in the hands of large
| organizations (the fact that organizations are led by
| individuals, however, is not a logical contradiction -- the
| problem to solve here isn't a simple rule to limit the ability of
| individuals to work together, but an optimization problem to
| increase or maximize individual liberty, which necessarily
| results in a push-pull tradeoff at the interaction between
| individuals and groups that they might participate in). All large
| organized groups (Religion, Government, Corporations, Unions)
| needs to be restrained in their ability to exploit individuals.
| What we have now is that Unions have been destroyed and
| Government and Religion largely do the bidding of Corporations
| and their billionaire owners.
|
| (Billionaires being individuals is also not a logical
| contradiction -- they have so many resources they may as well
| just be massive organizations -- employing hundreds of people and
| owning all kinds of property)
| polskibus wrote:
| Reminds be of cyberpunk dystopia. Several corporations like
| Arasaka and Militech defacto ruling the world.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Is there data to back this up? I'm skeptical.
|
| I see all kinds of "small organizations" forming in Slack
| communities, subreddits, and other online spaces. Some might be
| described as influencer driven communities like substack. Or
| audiences of a specific podcast. And so on. It's almost never
| been easier to participate in one of these "organizations".
|
| Even locally, where I live, the school board, city council, local
| advocacy groups, etc are heavily attended. We have a local group
| advocating for immigrant rights. Another YIMBY group. Another
| group that argues against the YIMBYs. PTA meetings. Another group
| that advocates for the homeless.
|
| I'd say its true that many are in the "universe" of one political
| sphere (in my case left-leaning). But that does not mean they
| have been wholly subsumed by "The Left", they often disagree and
| fight against "Left" politicians. And often "The Left" is not a
| uniform thing in a city with differing interests and
| stakeholders.
| xmprt wrote:
| I think this is what Tao is saying that large organizations are
| filling the niche that was previously served by smaller
| organizations. eg. Discord, Slack, and other online platforms
| like Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, Fortnite, Roblox, etc., are
| being used instead of smaller forums and local communities.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| But are these reflective of the communities themselves? Or
| the tools used to organize community? If slack disappeared
| tomorrow wouldn't many just move to another tool?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think the key difference is that online communities are
| "cheap"; they're easy to create and easy to destroy. Offline
| communities are difficult to form and as such more "sticky". A
| great example is ideological differences. Lefty political
| groups (no doubt Righty ones have this too but I'm not as
| familiar with them) constantly reorganize based on perceived
| ideological bounds. Leftist groups splinter from liberal
| groups, labor-forward leftist groups split from identity
| politic leftist groups, and on and on.
|
| A PTA doesn't do that. The folks in the PTA all have the same
| shared interest in the school their kids attend. They can't
| just splinter off into another PTA over a perceived difference.
| This forces the folks on the PTA to work together and makes the
| organization sticky in a way an online group might not be.
|
| If the activation energy to form and join a community needed
| it's also really easy to just churn from the community.
| Moreover when splitting is this easy it prompts the creation of
| hyper-specific communities which lead to things like
| radicalization and dehumanization of the other (look at the
| acrimony between leftist identity-politic progressives and
| center-left liberals on the internet right now for example.)
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| If you read between the lines of what Terence Tao is saying -
| which, by the way, the most charitable summary is, "Isn't
| Dunbar's number interesting?" - he is really saying, "It is
| hard to make friends as an adult." Extra so if your day to day
| is something esoteric like academic theoretical math (read
| between the lines: really boring to most people), and if you
| are right leaning or libertarian (read between the lines:
| unfriendly as a matter of policy).
| ngcazz wrote:
| Dude has discovered the atomization of workers under capitalism!
| tehjoker wrote:
| What happens when an expert wanders outside of their field and
| stumbles across insights that have been described voluminously in
| economic and political theory.
| md224 wrote:
| Tanner Greer has a good piece on how the American tradition of
| bottom-up self-organization has been supplanted by top-down
| bureaucracy: https://palladiummag.com/2023/03/30/a-school-of-
| strength-and...
| macrocosmos wrote:
| I know something is worth reading when I see a wall of people
| being defensive of whatever the author presented.
| Animats wrote:
| So here we are on Mastodon. There are three columns. One is an ad
| for the site, one is an ad for Mastodon, and the one in the
| middle has some content. The article is part 1 of 5, because
| there's some severe limit on article length. The rest of the
| article is comments in small type. There are no examples.
|
| Is this LLM output?
|
| _And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the
| void formed by the absence of small communities, providing
| synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking,
| to more authentic such products as highly processed "junk" food
| is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal
| nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of
| advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices
| tend to exacerbate the trends listed above)_
|
| This is a real issue, but a poor posting. The classic on this is
| "Bowling Alone" (2000) [1] That book predates most social media.
| The author bemoans the decline of local organizations such as
| Rotary International, local Chambers of Commerce, Odd Fellows -
| all those organizations that have little signs on the outskirts
| of medium-sized towns. (In Silicon Valley, both Redwood City and
| Half Moon Bay have such signs.)
|
| Here's a useful question for Americans: do you belong to any
| organization where the members can, by voting, fire the
| leadership? Small organizations used to have elected leaders.
| Today, they tend to be run by self-perpetuating boards. Being
| involved in such organizations is where people learned how to
| make democracy work.
|
| When was the last time you went to a non-government meeting run
| by Roberts Rules of Order? Do you even know what that is, or,
| more important, why it is? The whole point of Roberts Rules of
| Order is that the group is in charge and the result is a decision
| to be acted upon. The Rules are intended to keep the loudest
| voice in the room from running over everyone else.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
| leafmeal wrote:
| I'm reading _The Economy of Cities_ by Jane Jacobs right now. One
| of the main theses of the book is that small "inefficient"
| enterprises are actually the engines of economic grown. Large
| efficient organizations often lead to stagnation.
|
| It's interesting how this intersects with Tao's point, about the
| social benefits.
| jarbus wrote:
| Side tangent, but I absolutely love how Tao uses mastodon
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| He should look up Roald Coase - mid 20C who tried o answer the
| question of why have firms at all - big or small. The "market"
| ought to be able to supply services (secretary, welding etc) -
| but his "Theory of the firm" suggests that there are complex
| processes inside a firm that are pretty easy to employ someone
| and teach them, and pretty hard to write a contract for.
|
| So there is a natural size of a firm that is a tug of war between
| savings of contracting out and the cost of contracting to the
| market
|
| My still to be published magnum opus claims this is upended by
| software - that processes can be written and followed in software
| reducing the cost of hiring and changing the dynamics in favour
| of large companies.
|
| But software literacy in all employees will enable smaller
| companies to outperform larger ones - we hope
| ripe wrote:
| Here's the full article, copied, for your benefit. (I found it
| difficult to read because the mastodon UI forces the author to
| split the article into five tiny parts, so I copied it for my own
| benefit). I hope this is not against some HN guidelines, in which
| case, please feel free to downvote or delete this comment.
|
| Terence Tao
|
| Some loosely organized thoughts on the current Zeitgeist. They
| were inspired by the response to my recent meta-project mentioned
| in my previous post
| https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115254145226514817, where within 24
| hours I became aware of a large number of ongoing small-scale
| collaborative math projects with their own modest but active
| community (now listed at
| https://mathoverflow.net/questions/500720/list-of-crowdsourc...
| ); but they are from the perspective of a human rather than a
| mathematician.
|
| As a crude first approximation, one can think of human society as
| the interaction between entities at four different scales:
|
| 1. Individual humans
|
| 2. Small organized groups of humans (e.g., close or extended
| family; friends; local social or religious organizations;
| informal sports clubs; small businesses and non-profits; ad hoc
| collaborations on small projects; small online communities)
|
| 3. Large organized groups of humans (e.g., large companies;
| governments; global institutions; professional sports clubs;
| large political parties or movements; large social media sites)
|
| 4. Large complex systems (e.g., the global economy; the
| environment; the geopolitical climate; popular culture and
| "viral" topics; the collective state of science and technology).
|
| An individual human without any of the support provided by larger
| organized groups is only able to exist at quite primitive levels,
| as any number of pieces of post-apocalyptic fiction can portray.
| Both small and large organized groups offer significant economies
| of scale and division of labor that provide most of the material
| conveniences that we take for granted in the modern world:
| abundant food, access to power, clean water, internet; cheap,
| safe and affordable long distance travel; and so forth. It is
| also only through such groups that one can meaningfully interact
| with (and even influence) the largest scale systems that humans
| are part of.
|
| But the benefits and dynamics of small and large groups are quite
| different. Small organized groups offer some economy of scale,
| but - being essentially below Dunbar's number
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number in size - also
| fill social and emotional needs, and the average participant in
| such groups can feel connected to such groups and able to have
| real influence on their direction. Their dynamics can range
| anywhere from extremely healthy to extremely dysfunctional and
| toxic, or anything in between; but in the latter cases there is
| real possibility of individuals able to effect change in the
| organization (or at least to escape it and leave it to fail on
| its own).
|
| Large organized groups can offer substantially more economies of
| scale, and so can outcompete small organizations based on the
| economic goods they offer. They also have more significant impact
| on global systems than either average individuals or small
| organizations. But the social and emotional services they provide
| are significantly less satisfying and authentic. And unless an
| individual is extremely wealthy, well-connected, or popular, they
| are unlikely to have any influence on the direction of such a
| large organization, except possibly through small organizations
| acting as intermediaries. In particular, when a large
| organization becomes dysfunctional, it can be an extremely
| frustrating task to try to correct its course (and if it is
| extremely large, other options such as escaping it or leaving it
| to fail are also highly problematic).
|
| My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and
| technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the
| individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the
| significant expense of small organizations, whose role in the
| human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly, with many
| small organizations either weakening in influence or
| transitioning to (or absorbed by) large organizations. While this
| imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts
| (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of
| agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of
| disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism
| about the ability to influence future events or meet major
| challenges, except perhaps through the often ruthless competition
| to become wealthy or influential enough to gain, as an
| individual, a status comparable to a small or even large
| organization. And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly
| step in the void formed by the absence of small communities,
| providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly
| speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed
| "junk" food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently
| impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the
| modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to
| their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above).
|
| Much of the current debate on societal issues is then framed as
| conflicts between large organizations (e.g., opposing political
| parties, or extremely powerful or wealthy individuals with a
| status comparable to such organizations), conflicts between large
| organizations and average individuals, or a yearning for a return
| to a more traditional era where legacy small organizations
| recovered their former role. While these are valid framings, I
| think one aspect we could highlight more is the valuable (though
| usually non-economic) roles played by emerging grassroots
| organizations, both in providing "softer" benefits to individuals
| (such as a sense of purpose, and belonging) and as a way to
| meaningfully connect with larger organizations and systems; and
| be more aware of what the tradeoffs are when converting such an
| organization to a larger one (or component of a larger
| organization).
| themafia wrote:
| > Large organized groups can offer substantially more economies
| of scale, and so can outcompete small organizations based on the
| economic goods they offer.
|
| This premise ignores the existence of the Internet. Wherein small
| groups of distributed actors can combine their efforts through a
| nearly instantaneous communications mechanism to match that of
| the larger groups.
|
| The federal government was conceived when horses were the only
| way to transmit large amounts of data over a great distance.
|
| We built the replacement for large global groups but then kept
| the large global groups. The results were entirely predictable.
| uncomputation wrote:
| It's the television and the Internet. It's that simple.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Does this vary between political systems, and how would you test
| it.
|
| I suppose analysis of existence of smaller NGOs in societies and
| how they are distributed, but not any real idea as to what the
| analysis should look like.
| andrepd wrote:
| > My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and
| technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower the
| individual, and massively empower large organizations, but at the
| significant expense of small organizations, whose role in the
| human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly, with many
| small organizations either weakening in influence or
| transitioning to (or absorbed by) large organizations. While this
| imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts
| (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of
| agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of
| disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism
| about the ability to influence future events or meet major
| challenges.
|
| I call your attention to an earlier, 19th century German
| philosopher...
|
| > The theoretical basis of alienation is that a worker invariably
| loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of
| the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of
| their own actions; to determine the character of these actions;
| to define relationships with other people; and to own those items
| of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour.
| dogman144 wrote:
| My very loose sense on this was developed after a lot of
| perspective shifts via fortunately living in a lot of different
| spots in the US.
|
| I think these small orgs are still around, are needed and I wish
| they were easier to find, but feels like finding them filters
| through:
|
| - If it's useful, it involves coastal tech people so to speak,
| and you can wade through many unknown gates to include
| "community" that's actually sponsored marketing: often seems to
| be small group digital communities on Signal with shared thematic
| backgrounds of the members. Pair these with meeting people IRL
| when you can via travel and find time, it's quite a useful
| network that's all built digitally at first.
|
| - If it's fulfilling but low stakes, and peer-oriented: a lot of
| this is in infosec still via hacker culture, but overall I think
| you have to get outside of your economic class and bubble to find
| it generally, esp if you're a tech person. In tech and similar
| careers, every "small group dinner" under the hood feels like 6-7
| men making $550tc and trying to hit 650tc, or a group trying to
| attract those people. Dodgeball league for young professionals or
| not, career management feels very often in the background. It
| doesn't feel authentic, or at least feel safe, because it likely
| isn't.
|
| Groups of people still do go fishing together, hiking together,
| cities sponsor makerspaces, community centers offer wood working
| classes, small group s get together to dicusss ideas, people have
| standing brunches... but it's really hard to find this stuff in
| authentic contexts if first you're not looking for it over some
| time, second you can't suffer through being into the things
| you're into alone, until you find someone doing the same, and
| third *if you city or area doesn't have a moat to keep out, or at
| bay, modern, massively networked economies and what I think it
| tends to incentivize - the small org is in the cheap but
| functional community center, that is sponsored by a city that
| cares about it, that is advertised via the community radio
| station, that is in a city not under water by angry people at the
| exploding CoL...
|
| I found 1 city out of 6-7 that still offers the latter input, and
| it to me feels is the lynchpin.
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