🐐 World's Greatest Mathematician Criticizes Unfettered Capitalism

Terrence Tao: The role of small organizations in society has shrunk significantly, which has led to widespread psychological harm to disempowered individuals.

Terrence Tao is a 50-year old math professor at UCLA who has authored over 300 academic papers and won every major mathematics award, including a Fields Medal, the “Nobel Prize” of mathematics. He is universally considered one of the greatest mathematicians alive.

In recent years, Professor Tao has increasingly shared his thoughts about the world at large, leading to the Trump Administration to cut his federal grants. Today, he spoke out about how modern society is being ruled by increasingly large organizations, which is doing tremendous harm to individuals.

Here’s a relevant excerpt:

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).

Tao concludes:

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).

Emphasis added. Read the whole piece here: Terrence Tao on Mathstodon