Terence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...)

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.

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

> 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.

This guy may be a math genius, but he should at least pay minimal respect to the thousands of people who have studied human cultures, societies and civilizations, and to their findings, before coming up with a post about groups of people based on what "post-apocaliptic fiction" has portrayed. As an anthropologist, I just stopped taking his ideas seriously at that point.

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).

We have done a lot to reduce risk, which has lowered the need for trust. We have national paper money, credit cards, insurance, flood-prevention infrastructure, FEMA (or did), etc.. We have less need for safety brought by connections with our neighbors.

And, with shipping being cheaper and the internet, you can stay at home and get food delivered, homegoods delivered, entertainment delivered, etc. and live without even interacting with your neighbors or seeing them at the local store.

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

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)

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.

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

The causes for this, in my mind, are largely because of:

1) regulatory frameworks (which work to protect vested interests in my world view), mean that costs of doing business are higher, defending incumbents from competition. Banking regulation policy, for instance, has explicitly favoured larger institutions.

2) financialisation of basically everything (market values increasing to their discounted cost of capital), means that significant capital is required for many businesses. By this I mean the normal interpretation of capital for a business, but also the precursors such as high residential real estate + mortgages reducing the incentives to take risk in a new business, pushing people to already established businesses.

3) weird incentives around work and welfare distort the labour market, and hence the propensity for people to take on low wage jobs in smaller businesses. See high numbers of disabilities for instance.

4) globalisation generally means that the businesses that remain are probably bigger (I hypothesize)

A corollary of economies of scale is high opportunity cost for maintaining small organizations. Partly because of this, many institutions providing the benefits of small organizations have high costs of entry---sport/country clubs, boating groups, HOAs, social clubs, etc. The opportunity cost is real, and it must be paid.

This has made membership to small organizations unaffordable for some portions of society. Especially students, fresh graduates, and other young people in formative parts of their lives. The result is a disenfranchised youth with very weak ties to a disparate and diffuse set of communities, and often none of those communities are robust enough to supply the empathetic benefits mentioned by Tao in the post.

It seems like this trend is only increasing in the near term.

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.)

Terence is brushing up against the classical principle of subsidiarity. If we respected this principle, we would make decision making, policy, and law as local as possible, only kicking things up the ladder if the local cannot deal with them effectively.

Hyperindividualism, paradoxically, destroys smaller societies and organizations, because the hyperindividual doesn't want to be tied down by them through commitment. Globalism is the inevitable result of hyperindividualism, because it creates the largest possible space for the hyperindividual to move about, at the cost of the local. And this moving about, because it is so solitary and transient, leads to transient encounters only, like the shallow and empty hookup culture, or increasingly, the entirely solitary porn culture.

The first, most fundamental, and most local of societies is the family. So it should not come as a surprise that when the family suffers, all of society suffers. The more local something is, the more personal, and all friendships and the like are personal. (Marriage is one such friendship, but it is an obstacle to the hyperindividual who's "got to be ME!". Marriage is the foundation of the family, and so naturally, its destruction means the aforementioned destruction of the family.)

We live in a solipsistic age of the supreme, defiled self whose apex is something like a slob glued to his recliner and plugged into a VR headset, a dildo, and a feeding tube.

I agree. I would say in practical terms the most impactful subcategory here is companies and their consolidation. This is especially so because they tend to be more strict about funneling money to the top, which generally means they funnel decision-making to the top as well, and that leads to the problem mentioned about individuals having difficulty influencing what goes on in the organization.

The same phenomenon is observable with other kinds of groups, but I think less so. Various kinds of clubs and local institutions exist more robustly than small independent businesses. Even those that remain though are under threat from big companies. (A great example is how Craigslist, and later things like Facebook Marketplace, centralized and gobbled up all the money that used to go to classified advertisements in local newspapers.)

I think a key point is this:

> Large organized groups can offer substantially more economies of scale, and so can outcompete small organizations based on the economic goods they offer.

More and more I'm coming to the conclusion that economies of scale are a bad thing. As in, they have harmful effects. When it becomes cheaper and cheaper to do more and more of what you're doing, that creates a runaway feedback loop. We need to consciously work towards making it so that the stable equilibrium state is many small organizations that stay small, and growth happens largely through the creation of new organizations rather than the growth of existing ones.

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.

> 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.

What's being described here lines up with what Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt warned about decades ago. Habermas, for instance, wrote about the "colonization of the lifeworld", where large systems eat into the small, everyday spaces in which people actually build meaning and trust. Arendt, likewise, warned about the fragility of such "space of appearance", where people gather, talk, and act together. The result is "alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events".

(I really recommend reading Arendt especially regarding how these happen.)

This topic - autonomy - may sound unfamiliar, but it is the essence of democracy and should not be treated as separate from it. They are two sides of the same coin: autonomy is natural small-scale democracy, and democracy is institutionalized large-scale autonomy. While the notion of autonomy is nothing new, revitalizing it in the modern IT era is a bit of an emerging topic. At least that's how I see it.

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.

Small organizations used to provide the bulk of low-cost housing to transients. (Until early 70s)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house#History

One wonders if the homeless situation would improve if people were more aware of their historical role

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.

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).

>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).

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...

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.

The problem is that people gravitate towards more impersonal relationships themselves because it frees them from the complexity of social calculations. We escape small organisations, we try to be independent from each other and prefer to depend on impersonal institutions.

It is true that larger organizations have economies of scale but smaller groups and individuals have more flexibility and can pivot easily.

I dont think access to tech is any different (significantly that is) at the top than itnis at the bottom. Feature sets are more austere (8 out of the 10 functions maybe that they really need) for individuals and small groups, but less wasteful, at the top they're richer but more wasteful (hundreds of features maybe but you only really need 10). The bigger you are the worst value for money because you pay for a lot of stuff you dont need which cancels out the economies of scale in my opinion because you have to pay so much for such a small edge.

Getting more out of less is better than getting less out of more.

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.

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.

> 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.

If a multi-agent game is played in which each agent grows proportionally to its current size, isn't the end result that small agents are eaten by big agents, and at the end you have one big agent? Ie the end state of Monopoly? In practice, systems crack apart by the time there's only a few agents left.

But it must be a wild ride to live while these cracks start to show. It probably looks like the greatest living mathematician making stream of thought tweets about how there aren't any small agents left.

I have to say, I like that much better than the Unabomber Manifesto.

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.

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.

Anyone interested in this sort of thinking from the economic side should give The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim wu a read. It's a call to action in favor of the neo-Brandeis movement, which is trying to change how we think of antitrust in the United States. Key to neo-Brandeisian anti-trust is a shift away from consumer welfare, and a shift towards a focus on a firms size and power

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

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...

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.

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.

I love the observation that by the minimization of influence of smaller organizations leads people to feel like they are on their own. We are so inundated with information about large organizations through most internet media streams that small scale organizations seem too small potatoes to be worth our time or notice.

I've joked that mathstodon is effectively Terence's Tao's personal blog, with some occasional guest bloggers

I think COVID did a number on a lot of the informal groups. These things take _so long_ to build up, and almost all existing ones suffered.

It's only like 5 years later that a lot of informal meetup groups that didn't get destroyed entirely seemed to have crawled back to their former size.

Reminds be of cyberpunk dystopia. Several corporations like Arasaka and Militech defacto ruling the world.

> Extreme levels of wealth, consolidation and economic consolidation breeds dark triad personality traits. Beyond a critical mass of net worth further increases rapidly expand the power of those traits.

Well said, although I feel almost unable to even parse the second sentence.

Was hoping for a more data-driven diagnosis. The reality is much different, smaller orgs can move faster than large. It is definitely not possible in areas that require huge CAPEX or OPEX like AI, but in many other areas it happens often.

This made me thinking, is AI accelerating "less small orgs" trend?

Individuales are now even more disconnected. Everything can be solved by "chatting with an AI", instead of your friends, your mentor, your close relatives and such.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What happens when an expert wanders outside of their field and stumbles across insights that have been described voluminously in economic and political theory.

We need personal relationships - but we also prefer impersonal relationships - because it frees us from the social calculations about what is fair.

Terry seems to have recovered a key feature of the theory expressed by North, Wallis, and Weingast in Violence and Social Orders. On their view, industrialization depended upon a handful of nation states achieving what they call "door step conditions", which include the ability for citizens to freely form legitimate political parties or for-profit corporations without an affirmative act of government.

According to North, Wallis, and Weingast, the "double balance" of open political and economic competition — between incumbent large organizations and what we might call "startups" — is what allowed a handful of countries to transcend the "natural state" or "limited access order" in which an oligarchy of elites control the economy and government (including access to violence).

It seems like his posts represent an independent reproduction of a key piece of their theory.

It's called consolidation. Strengthen governments and corporations, weaken individuals. Through taxes it can be done imperceptibly over time.

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.

I know something is worth reading when I see a wall of people being defensive of whatever the author presented.

The post could have been called «The Unexpected Woes of Scalability: Few in-betweens».

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

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

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!

Tao is great in lots of ways--obviously as a first-rate mathematician, but also as an educator and an ambassador of mathematics to the general public. It's cool to see him thinking along these lines, but if anyone is really interested in where this line of thinking goes, it's basically the problem of modernity. Just about everyone in the humanities is fully aware of this already. It emerged vaguely around the 1830s and basically became the major subject of the humanities--in one way or another--ever since. Marshall Berman's book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is good intro. I would expect that if you take Tao's specific line of thinking here (society beginning gas-like, interacting particles, then clumping together at various levels of abstraction, and interacting up and down the levels, etc) you get into all sorts of issues that were debated endlessly a very long time ago. But as a quick, temporary prism for looking at the world it's fine I guess. As a symptom, it makes one think something else might be going on when a very famous mathematician is suddenly now rediscovering modernity--perhaps things become more clear the more they break apart. One might even go so far as to say Tao's apparent ignorance of the issue of modernity has something to do with specialization, i.e. is a symptom of modernity itself.

PS--to add one thing as a criticism, the "retreat" into "grassroots groups" has also long been viewed as a false solution to the problem. Politically, this "solution" emerged in various forms: the 19th century's utopian socialism (especially in the US!), late 19th-early 20th century syndicalism, 1960s communes and "turn-on, tune-in, drop-out," up to now with the stubborn idea that communal living is somehow "revolutionary" and various other guises. It's there in less "radical" forms too, like when liberals say we just need to restart the bowling leagues. It's fine as an individual respite, but will never really get at the problem, not least because there are many other (and better!) ways of getting some "relief".

Hasn't this been an ongoing process for hundreds of years?

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?

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

Side tangent, but I absolutely love how Tao uses mastodon

This is just what Lenin said about monopolistic capitalism. Free competition reduces profit rates which can’t happen in capitalism.

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.

what a long-winded way of saying power consolidates...

This post is so eloquent! This post describes a lot of ideas that I have been thinking about, and Tao has created a framework that lets me describe many of these thoughts.

I think people have been really underestimating the power of small organized groups, and I have been putting significant effort into invigorating the small groups around me.

Tao hints at some of the values of small groups, but I think he misses the irreplaceable value that small groups have. We as a society have conceptualized value itself into certain quantities, mostly in dollar amounts (time, money, income, wealth, assets, services, etc) that we have lost our humanity. I find it amusing that Tao describes "a sense of purpose" as a "softer" benefit, and I agree that this is the lens by which society implicitly sees "a sense of purpose" - a sense of purpose does not have a monetary value that can be assigned to it. Even so, what is all the money in the world worth without a sense of purpose?

Tao correctly points out that "large organizations" "offer substantially more economies of scale" and "provide significant material comforts", I wonder if humanity is ready to wonder if it really needs more material comforts at a global scale. Perhaps we can start paring down some of our global organizations into their core functions of providing material comforts and we can start invigorating small organizations to nourish our souls.

We spend so much time, energy, and mental anguish over challenges like war and political gridlock. Our natural inclination to consolidate power into large organizations to overcome these challenges may be counterproductive because these large organizations naturally dehumanize us. And when this dehumanized organization inevitably fail to achieve the original noble goals of e.g. strongarming Russia into peace with Ukraine, we naturally try to push for more power and use different forms of aggression or increase the magnitude of our aggression, not only to try to "conquer" the "problem" but also feel safe in our membership into a big and powerful organization capable of such aggression. This might also drive us to abandon "small organizations" for some "great cause". For example, look at all the time and energy we put into global political coalitions on social media rather than local causes.

Tao may be right that we need to fundamentally rethink how these different levels and sizes of organizations need to engage with one another. When we encounter a problem, even a big problem, a big organization sometimes is not only ineffective but they can be actively harmful.

I feel like small organizations are doing well in Europe and NYC. The US is deeply fucked right now, don't get em wrong, but Terry this sounds like a So Cal problem.

All roads lead to great centralization.

"but they are from the perspective of a human rather than a mathematician."

Dude has discovered the atomization of workers under capitalism!

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).

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.

> 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)

It's the television and the Internet. It's that simple.

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...

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.