Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Care Doesn't Scale

stevenscrawls.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 382 posts

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#181

Post by stonethrowaway »

> Software engineering as a field is made up of people who are very conscious of missed opportunities for scale […]

It amuses me to read these articles because it’s so airy and nebulous that there is all this text that doesn’t say much. I pretend it’s another pg article instead to humour myself further.

HN is perpetually being played by the storytelling of some minor event that the author saw - people taking care of orphaned children by some rotating number of adults - and is reaching conclusions “care doesn’t scale” as if to educate us. It’s like a TED talk, only even less structured. So all I’m reading is vain, egotistical puffery. There isn’t really anything here other than the author thinking they can bring the tablets to us, the blind unwashed masses. It’s not only software engineers who do this so I won’t say it’s a trait unique to them in any way, though I see software engineers trying to make grandiose life statements more often than not.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#182

Post by blargey »

anonylizard wrote: post #136
delichon wrote: post #123

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. -- Adam Smith Care doesn't scale but self-inte…

That's not true, and only seems true because of highly selective examples. Money can force people to work, out of the necessity of survival. What it buys is reliability. You can force a toilet cleaner to come to work day after day, and the toilets stay clean. But human progress, social progress, economic growth, does not solely come from people grinding through their jobs. It comes from people 'giving it their all',…

The quality floor of "reliable" work produced solely by economic self-interest is also quite vulnerable to misaligned incentives.

If you don't provide the right balance of economic incentives for quality, the rational economic answer becomes "quiet quitting", and quality plummets. And maintaining that balance of incentives is also someone's job, which needs the right economic incentives to be done well, so it's turtles all the way down (or up).

In practice, it's an unstable, patchwork combination of care and economic incentives that keeps real-life institutions in working order.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#183

Post by lesuorac »

tripper_27 wrote: post #158
dkarl wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The food system is different from homecooked meals This is a good point, and everything I've heard from parents says that it's parents, not children, who identify home-cooked meals with care. Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love. In order to feel cared for, all children need is to trust that the person caring for them will make sure they ge…

> Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love. Let me fix that for you: Children notoriously prefer heavily marketed food in attractive packaging which is designed/optimized for addictiveness and immediate gratification.

Eh, if you dumped a container of sugar into a home cooked meal they'd like it more than packaged food.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#184

Post by themaninthedark »

watwut wrote: post #69
paulryanrogers wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quiver full movement is certainly testing the limits.

I would argue that they found it and that kids are not getting that individual attention they need.

I don't know how many kids the Quiver Full families have but are they any different from Amish families?

Are the kids not getting enough individual attention something from an outside perspective or from the kids perspective?

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#185

Post by czbond »

moolcool wrote: post #113
furyg3 wrote: post #13

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

Is that a world you want to live in?

Yes - to me the OP means solving issues ahead of time.... create the vaccine 1x or treat the virus causing the issue millions of times.

I have spent enough of this year injured due to my own adventure sport aggressive mis steps. I was MUCH less productive during this period than before or now due to injury.

Had I not needed to deal with that, is the most productive self and that has a exponential effect society.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#186

Post by amanaplanacanal »

theamk wrote: post #93
lucideer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Centralization isn't needed to scale, it's just needed to exploit scale. Exploitation has become so commonplace it's replaced everything as the primary "desirable metric". I'm writing this comment on a platform founded on the idea of exploitation being a desirable metric.

Try giving everyone housing without centralized production of things like nails, screws, siding electrical wire... Decentralizization is fine sometimes, but a single huge nail factory is going to beat thousands backyard forges in (average/95th percentile) quality and especially in prices.

Yet somehow houses were still well built before the huge nail factory existed. Which means it is not required.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#187

Post by bccdee »

Uvix wrote: post #52
zeroCalories wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any contradiction here. Government care can work, but it simply cannot benefit from economies of scale. Gonna need to double the income tax to pay for elders that have been abandoned by their children.

You mean the elders who failed to take care of themselves, assuming someone else would do it for them.

That's how getting old works, yes. You lose the ability to take care of yourself and begin to depend on others.

Do you really think infirmity is something that can be avoided with the right grindset?

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#188

Post by czbond »

tmsbrg wrote: post #67

Q: How many Silicon Valley software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: They will refuse to change the lightbulb, claiming it "doesn't scale" unless the "lightbulb problem" is fixed globally ;) In seriousness, enjoyed this article and it's a wise realization. I think the world would be a better place if more people take the time to be a good person to the people around them, rather than focusing so much…

I agree with your central point, but in my estimation, the entire world minus a very small percentage point only work on or care about small, short term solutions to problems.

And that is fine. Engineers are not social & feelers with high individual level empathy scores. So let them/us build large scaleable solutions with the individual 1-to-1 personal interaction removed.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#189

Post by marcosdumay »

peepee1982 wrote: post #62
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.

You’re describing the extremes on a spectrum, but you only go to one of the extremes, which exposes your bias. And it’s a false dichotomy to begin with, since shifting more care work towards society doesn’t equate to a path toward totalitarianism. You’re conflating socialism with totalitarianism. Understandable, but misguided. Frankly, your whole premise is based on a capitalist narrative that keeps workers in their…

> shifting more care work towards society doesn’t equate to a path toward totalitarianism

There are plenty of reasons to believe that yes, it does. This is something that is almost completely unknown (except on the extremes).

And history has those two coupled in very complex, hard to understand ways.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#190

Post by ToucanLoucan »

downut wrote: post #147
moolcool wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To complete the thought, the baker example is explicitly in opposition to OP's point. In the economy we exist in, a 3am artisan baker does so explicitly out of a care for craft and community.

Yes. Precisely so. As it happens, we've been friends with a "3am baker" for decades. We do not envy her life, but we do intensely enjoy her taste. Delighted to pay double for it.

I would argue that the killing of small businesses that care by chains that don't is that the vast majority of consumers are in a position where making even such choices as paying twice as much for a donut are luxuries. Salaries have been stagnant forever, with a boost during COVID but was then immediately undone with price gouging on the part of tons of essential-to-life industries. And do not come at me with inflation, it has been demonstrated, numerous times and is continuing to be demonstrated, as nothing more than profit seeking. Inflation was a factor, yes. Greedy bastard corporations were another, IMO much larger, factor.

The pandemic as a whole stomped the gas on an already running process of money being trapped in the hands of the uber rich, and if none of it is coming back down, then the amount of money everyone has to spend necessarily shrinks too. And this is not my usual pinko-commie-scum ass set of thoughts. This is a well understood principle that many economists have been banging on about for years now, because even those who believe capitalism is the best system, though I disagree with them on much, also understand that if all the damn money goes to the rich and stays there then the entire party ends REAL quick and probably violently.

Post reply on HN