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Care Doesn't Scale

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Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#241

Post by Eisenstein »

bell-cot wrote: post #172
harimau777 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that capitalism discourages that behavior. If the system is setup to be transactional, and you can't rely on others reciprocating altruism if you need it; then it seems like engaging in altruism would be for suckers.

True-ish. But in older-fashioned communities - long-term stable, extended families usually present, participation in many altruistic groups and activities are established norms, everybody's noses not buried in web browsers and smart phones - there's this thing called "social capital". And, as a generality, it's at least as important as the monetary kind.

True-ish. But when you say 'older-fashioned communities' I have a feeling you are speaking through nostalgia or a rose-tinted view of an idealized past. Can you name some of these older-fashioned communities that exist today, and how they are different from the ones you are contrasting them to?

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#242

Post by Kevguy »

bumby wrote: post #240
Kevguy wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also be aware that non-profit does not mean non-profit-oriented. Just that any profit goes to executives [1] instead of toward community/charity services [2]. [1] https://paddockpost.com/2021/06/10/executive-compensation-at... [2] https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.01542

I think there’s an error in conflating “not for profit” with “charity”. You could provide all care at cost and have zero charity care. That d doesn’t imply all “profit” goes to executives, but rather to keep reimbursed or charged costs lower.

1. Thanks for the nuanced view. I agree that zero charity care doesn't necessarily mean greedy execs.

2. In my mind keeping costs lower is a form of charity. Especially with something as frequently difficult to understand as health care costs.

3. Executives do deserve to make a fair amount for their skills and effort. I'm not sure myself what salary I consider it fair pay vs taking greedy advantage of not-for-profit status.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#243

Post by [deleted] »

moolcool wrote: post #222
czbond wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#244

Post by rightbyte »

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…

Dunno. My wife was reeeeally tryhard with our first child feeding him only home made food from the age of 1 to 2.

He though industrial food was awesome as soon as he was exposed to it.

(Obviously bad sample size)

I think it is something about the perfect homogeneous product they like. Or how the taste even out between different ingredients on the shelf.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#245

Post by bumby »

bunderbunder wrote: post #231
bumby wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Oh, it has. The scale at which we share information has never been greater. Concrete example: 15, 20 years ago when we tracked user stories, the status of the sprint, etc., with sticky notes on a wall. We didn't have to record a lot of information on them because they only needed to track status at a high level. Details were communicated through conversations. That did mean that a lot of that information was tribal k…

I think that highlights the issue I'm poking at. "Good communication" doesn't just mean a firehose of information at your fingertips. It means getting the right amount of information at the right time. Developing systems like the latter is much harder than the former, but they both get the same sales pitch.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#246

Post by lucideer »

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.

This isn't true though. Neither in theory nor in practice. A broad set of individual product quality has consistently declined throughout the industrial era - not least, infamously, one of your own examples: nails.

Many products have increased in quality due to factors unrelated to centralised production: new scientific research, intensive r&d, internal standardisation efforts - but centralised production tends instead to produce demonstrable reductions in individual quality. We're living in an age of unprecedented consumer waste due to this phenomenon. Planned obsolescence is a relatively recent term (& while it may not be real in terms of being intentional it's definitely true in terms of increases in obsolescence-rates).

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#247

Post by Self-Perfection »

avhception wrote: post #61
Tade0 wrote: post #46

> But I wonder if part of that smaller focus comes from a deep realization that care doesn’t scale. My experience (and I believe it to be common) is that I'm really, really, really out of spare energy to care about anyone or anything else. Mind you, I'm in my best shape in years and I've explored my limits to find out they're actually way further than I originally thought, but still.

There was a story on HN a while ago that I can't seem to remember the title of. It was something along the lines of "The optimal amount of slack in an organization is not zero", or something like that. The argument was that, since it's impossible to plan for every eventuality, you need a certain amount of slack capacity in order to retain some flexibility. And that by always using 100% capacity, we end up dysfunction…

I find this article a nice exploration of slack concept in personal lives

https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/38-slack

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#248

Post by kang »

bccdee wrote: post #198
hprotagonist wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but can you argue with them for an indeterminate period of time in earnest dialogue until the idea goes CLICK inside your head? You cannot, and so the value is much lessened because that critical access isn’t present.

Do you always need that kind of prolonged argument whenever you learn a new concept? > Sometimes the YouTube video is more helpful than the private tutor. University lectures work like that. First the general lecture, which has 300 students and is not interactive. Then the tutorial, where students who want extra help can consult individually with a TA. Attendance for tutorials was typically much lower in my experienc…

Except the argument is university lecture (classroom structure) doesn't work. A personal tutor might be able to teach a concept to all their students, whereas not everyone in a classroom passes. Your argument about sufficiency can be made about books and is not relevant here.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#249

Post by bunderbunder »

bumby wrote: post #245
bunderbunder wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, it has. The scale at which we share information has never been greater. Concrete example: 15, 20 years ago when we tracked user stories, the status of the sprint, etc., with sticky notes on a wall. We didn't have to record a lot of information on them because they only needed to track status at a high level. Details were communicated through conversations. That did mean that a lot of that information was tribal k…

I think that highlights the issue I'm poking at. "Good communication" doesn't just mean a firehose of information at your fingertips. It means getting the right amount of information at the right time. Developing systems like the latter is much harder than the former, but they both get the same sales pitch.

This is also where I really dislike a lot of this more recent push toward automating communication.

One person deciding what needs to be said, to whom, and when, can have a LOT of leverage in the productivity department, by reducing the time that tens or even hundreds or thousands of other people lose to coping with the fire hose.

Microsoft Copilot has been yet another downgrade in this department. Since it got adopted at my job, I've seen a lot of human-written 3-sentence updates get replaced with 3-page Copilot-generated summaries that take 10 minutes to digest instead of 10 seconds.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#250

Post by dang »

AStonesThrow wrote: post #229
jimbokun wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]

Could you please stop posting flamewar- and ideological-battle-style comments to HN? Your account has been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and it's not what HN is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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