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Care Doesn't Scale

stevenscrawls.com

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Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#221

Post by bumby »

bunderbunder wrote: post #204
bumby wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reply seems focused on size, but this line caught my attention: > trusting them to make the right decisions. I'm wondering if trust isn't the real issue. For example, wouldn't a large high-trust organization be able to provide good care? Or is there something intrinsic to scale (e.g. diffusion of responsibility) that makes "high-trust" and "large organization" incompatible?

Paperwork. I swear, it's paperwork. My mom is a (retired) preschool teacher. By the end of her career, she was working for a school affiliated with a large chain, and maybe 1/3 of her time was spent on filling out all the paperwork required by management. That was time she absolutely was not spending with the kids. My dad is a (retired) doctor. Similar story there. His hospital ultimately ended up associated with a r…

>The same thing happens at my own job, software. The bigger a company I'm at, the more of my job consists of filling out paperwork about the work I'm doing, rather than doing the actual work.

There's some irony here considering software has been promising for decades to help businesses scale information sharing.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#222

Post by moolcool »

czbond wrote: post #185
moolcool wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But you're not just a productivity machine though, and as such, you surely yearn to give and receive care in different ways.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#223

Post by lesuorac »

potato3732842 wrote: post #141
Yawrehto wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About housing: I have a few ideas as to why, weirdly none of which overlap with yours. 1) I think part of it is due to our ability to fine-tune the limits. Before, if a company wanted to pass an inspection, they had to be really confident. There were going to be some expenses that in theory they could have avoided if they were better capable of measuring where the line between 'safe' and 'unsafe' was. The end result…

1 is in large part a reflection of idiot proofing everything. Every party's judgement gets reduced down to some some quantitative stuff like wire gauges, stud spacing, etc, that even idiots with poor judgement can reliably assess. Instead of failures because people do shoddy work we instead get failures where people are dumbly building things they know won't last because it's easier to just let things be crappy than…

Heh, I know somebody that was really annoyed their builder wouldn't install conduit since it wasn't in the code or something and their gripe was "but its better than code".

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#224

Post by jimbokun »

furyg3 wrote: post #13

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

Not possible for raising children. Or caring for the elderly until we perfect an immortality elixir.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#225

Post by jimbokun »

mempko wrote: post #71

What most don't understand is that the economy IS us caring for each other. When you go to a restaurant when you are hungry, or a store to get what you need, or a hospital when you get sick, you are getting care. Virtually most people are taking care of other people. And yes it doesn't scale because it takes all of us to care for each other.

Non-paid human interactions exist.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#226

Post by taylorius »

moolcool wrote: post #215
taylorius wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psychopathic? I think that's a ridiculous statement. No-one said anything about automating any human connection. I can tell you that my wife is a full time carer for her parents, and though she does it willingly and with love, it exerts a great toll on her, both physically, and mentally. So if we're going to far-too-easily use words like "psychopathic" - I could just as well say that ignoring that cost is psychopathi…

> No-one said anything about automating any human connection Maybe I was inferring the wrong thing, and if so I apologize, but the context of this comment was invoking LLMs and humanoid robots in a discussion about how "care doesn't scale". Like of course automation and technology should do things to make the lives of the elderly easier, but I would not classify any action done by a machine as "care". My dishwasher i…

Perhaps it is a question of the different meanings the word care can take. Care in its normal everyday usage is indeed a natural human emotion, however this was not the subject of my post.

"Carers", are people who perform functions for people unable to do them themselves. Whether they "care" or not for their charges is not directly relevant (though often they are relatives, and certainly do care for, and love the people they are helping very much). Not always though - consider a "care home", which is essentially a dumping ground for the old and inconveniently frail. Having seen the inside of a few such places, I very much do not want to end up in one.

Enter the Robots, and technologies such as the LLM. In my imagination, a robot equipped with some facility with language, could act as an assistant for an elderly person, allowing them to maintain their independence for much longer without a human carer. This is not a replacement for human connection with their loved ones, but it is a replacement for putting them in a care home, or having ones own children spend part of their lives unable to have a job, or a normal social life, due to complex care requirements of some relative.

For what its worth, I doubt we disagree too much, I think it was a misunderstanding. However I'm interest to hear your thoughts.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#227

Post by jimbokun »

api wrote: post #24

A lot of what makes society and politics so hard comes from the fact that humans have among the most demanding offspring of any living creature. This starts with pregnancy and birth which is a life threatening medical condition with a high mortality rate without modern medicine. We can’t reproduce and raise our children without dedicating gigantic amounts of energy to it, causing an inherent tension between the need…

That is partly true due to biology. But it's partially culturally inflicted.

In previous decades kids were allowed to do much more unsupervised. And the pressure to prepare for high stakes college admissions from early ages was much less extreme.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#228

Post by davidclark »

bumby wrote: post #157
vanderZwan wrote: post #142

If we're going to talk about how to "scale care" and how not to, then Buurtzorg has to be mentioned[0][1]. It's a Dutch home-care company that was started by nurses who basically got frustrated that managers got in the way of them doing their job. It operates by having a flat organization working with small teams of highly trained nurses, and trusting them to make the right decisions. The result is a low-cost provide…

Your reply seems focused on size, but this line caught my attention: > trusting them to make the right decisions. I'm wondering if trust isn't the real issue. For example, wouldn't a large high-trust organization be able to provide good care? Or is there something intrinsic to scale (e.g. diffusion of responsibility) that makes "high-trust" and "large organization" incompatible?

I don’t think it’s that they are incompatible by definition. I think the large organization is a result of low-trust.

A trust-breaking event occurs, so a new form gets added, a compliance process is created with a new team monitoring, etc. etc. Have enough of those and you eventually get your typical, modern healthcare bureaucracy today.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#229

Post by AStonesThrow »

jimbokun wrote: post #194
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. In most cases, this is probably due to the care givers training their children to prefer that kind of food because they don't make many home cooked meals. I don't even know if it's true, though. When I was a kid, the best food in the world were the home made meals my grandmother made, especially on the…

[flagged]

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#230

Post by kubb »

jimbokun wrote: post #203
kubb wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think they ever tried to “abolish family”. Where are you getting this stuff? It sounds like bad history lessons. They did stuff like legalizing divorce, or collectivization of parenting.

You really want to go to bat for the Soviet Union?

Not really, just the notion that trying to abolish family is somehow the hallmark of totalitarianism doesn’t seem like sound reasoning, and indeed it isn’t confirmed by historical examples.
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