The Ones We Sent Away

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Sorry, I just had to know. I was feeling a bit involuntarily solipsistic lately for some reason

Definitely. I like to play a game sometimes... more or less based on the idea that bloodletting and rectal feeding and wound probing were medical "best practices" of the past and now seem so obviously ludicrous to us now. So I like to look at something that I think is obvious, some "best practice of our time", and wonder how it might in 100 or 150 years suddenly seem totally ludicrous to posterity with the revelation of some knowledge K where "oh now everyone knows K, how silly everyone was before they knew K."

K=neuroplasticity is an emerging case of this phenomenon for the more recent history, I think the strength of the evidence is high there.

HN has also entertained in its top ranking some articles from Slime Mold Time Mold hypothesizing a K="what if the obesity epidemic has nothing to do with calories in vs calories out, and actually there is some toxin which the body has to sequester in subcutaneous fat and that's why everyone's getting obese" -- that would be a potential modern example, although I don't think that blog makes a very good case for it. (Lustig makes a better case on this front for K="our modern Western diet removes liver protection and starves our gut microbiomes" and I think you could make an even better case that K="the dangers of chronic low-level whole-body inflammation", with Lustig only gesturing at one part of that broader problem maybe?)

A major theoretical discovery of K="computers can't do XYZ" would be another such thing for all of us who in the modern world chase these fads about computers reinventing finance or art or the modern economy. You'd have people in the year 2100 saying "can you believe only 75 years ago, everyone would just believe that computers were magically going to fix X and then they wouldn't and everyone would suddenly believe they would now fix Y and then they wouldn't and then Z and they wouldn't and and and... straight faced rationalist businesspeople acting like 'Tech-Jesus is coming' on August 1st, oh sorry it's September 1st, sorry -- October 1st? November? Maybe in the coming year? well SURELY this decade."

I worked in a facility like this for the first 5 years of my career

Many of the clients are very aware they’ve been abandoned. Especially so because there are a select few who do get regular family visits.

It was crushingly depressing to work holidays and have the regular crew of kids that never went home or had visitors. If you work with adults it was significantly worse, many of them had no visitors for literal decades

Also those places pay terribly but I’m sure that shocks no one. When I worked there it was at one of the places known for paying very well in the industry and they payed 13/hr for children and 9/hr for adults (2010). AFAIK the rates are only 2-3 dollars more an hour now 13 years later