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Care Doesn't Scale

stevenscrawls.com

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Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#11

Post by paulryanrogers »

plaidfuji wrote: post #5
aniviacat wrote: post #3

> In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person. What does this imply, that two parents cannot care for three children? I disagree.

No, they go on to say > With four kids, the kids can feel like kids; if there were forty kids, they’d probably feel like they were cattle. The point of the article is that you’ll never achieve economies of scale (10, 100, 1000x) for situations that require individualized attention, no matter how much engineering effort you put into it. At least with today’s technology…

The quiver full movement is certainly testing the limits.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#14

Post by lynx23 »

Whats much more important, empathy doesn't scale. Care can be established. But no one will ever know about its quality. I know what I am talking about, I visited a k12 school for the blind, and have a mentally unstable mother. Nobody ever asked me if I am happy/content at home. They all assumed my mother is doing her best. My life only started when I managed to escape from every kind of care. Institutionalized care is the worst, because its lacking empathy the most...

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#15

Post by cobbzilla »

furyg3 wrote: post #13

This is why avoiding the need for care, while never totally achievable, is always the most scalable solution.

Yes, also simultaneously why (some) smaller companies can offer exceptional service unmatched by larger competitors.

I am reminded of the PG startup advice to “do things that don’t scale”, this seems to be one of those cases.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#16

Post by taylorius »

I think in the future, descendants of today's LLM models and some future version of Tesla's Optimus could create a paradigm shift in how care is given.

I'm hopeful that when I get old, and inevitably come to need some help with living, that such a solution will be available.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#17

Post by sokoloff »

plaidfuji wrote: post #10

This is a pretty big realization and one that resonates strongly with me. As an engineer, parenting can be frustrating, of course for the usual reasons, but also because you realize there’s really no way to “hack” it. I feel like we as a society need to acknowledge that this probably applies to childcare, teaching, health and elder care to a large extent. That no matter how much private sector ingenuity you apply to…

I think some of the healthcare changes during my lifetime have increased efficiency and been fine (maybe even good) for patients.

I used to have my vitals taken by the doctor. Now, that’s a nurse. Used to get vaccine shots from the doctor, now a nurse. I feel like docs used to do blood draws, now a nurse. All of that is good, IMO. Doctors may not like the 20 minute blocks, but overall I can get the same care at a lower total cost and the nurses are probably better at the job they do twice as frequently than the doctor whose head might be somewhere else during the “boring parts”.

I suspect aspects of this apply to teaching (why does every calc teacher need to give the lecture? Why not have the top 1% of them in that skill record lectures with excellent production quality/editing and have students watch those?)

Yes, there are upper bounds, but I think even +50% or +100% might be possible with minimal (or in the calc case, negative) losses. Those efficiencies can really matter when someone else has to pay the bill.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#18

Post by wazoox »

This has been well-known for ages and is a major subject of feminist studies. Care jobs are mostly feminine, and don't scale, and this dichotomy plays a big role in the overall wage gap.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#19

Post by dqv »

bluetomcat wrote: post #8

This is ultimately a dichotomy between having the family unit or "the state" as the central point of governance. Many totalitarian regimes looked at newborns as "belonging to the state". The result is a unified mass person who dresses, thinks and acts in predictable ways. The more power, personal connection and influence parents have over their children, the more diverse society will become.

What? What does this have to do with orphaned children?

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#20

Post by kome »

I have what I think it's a very good article on the economy of care - making exactly this point and others, but it's in the dungeon of peer review for more than one year. And the reviewers do not even answer my emails.
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