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Care Doesn't Scale

stevenscrawls.com

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Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#281

Post by brailsafe »

This should be a crucial realization for anyone out there trying to establish worthwhile intimacy with friends or anyone else as an adult. If you use the idea of scaling in a more abstract sense, you don't get to relentlessly pursue your personal career ambitions AND come out with substantial personal intimate relationships for free. It takes deliberate time and attention to cultivate a worthwhile connection with someone, whether it's your kids, or your parents, or your friends, and that's going to come from the few hours you get after work or on the weekend, or it just simply won't.

This is already very apparent to anyone who still has friends and family back home, wherever you went to school or went to grade school. If when you visit, you tell everyone you're available, you're going to give everyone a small scheduled fraction of time and then hurry yourself off somewhere else, making no more than a shallow appearance. But if you only tell the people you know you can for sure spend a good uninterrupted chunk of time with, then it'll be wildly better

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#283

Post by jen20 »

alamortsubite wrote: post #173
jen20 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the idea of an option. Great if it works for him, but having spent a lot of time with Pieter Hintjens (of AMQP and ZeroMQ fame) before he chose the time of his own passing from recurrent cancer, the notion that this is not allowed in order to appease religious zealots is simply barbaric.

I'm not sure you replied to the right post, but religious zealots don't watch Larry David.

Indeed: but the kind of people that prevent individuals from having the option to die as and when they see fit tend to be.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#284

Post by tightbookkeeper »

croes wrote: post #129
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…

The countless hours of voluntary unpaid work by many people shows don’t act only for their own benefit

There are more kinds of compensation than money

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#285

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I do pretty “small scale” work that has a fairly outsized impact on folks.

The app I released in January, currently has a bit over 600 users. I get one or two a day (plus, the odd scammer). It may accelerate, in the future, but the demographic is small. There’s only so many people that can use it.

I tested with 12,000 fake users. I suspect we won’t ever see half that. To many folks here, 12K is a rounding error.

But the ones that do use the app, get a top-shelf experience.

On another note, I have family that used to run a group home for kids that were made wards of the state (many terrible stories). He’s really good with kids, but he’s been an EE for the last couple of decades. Running the group home was very stressful, and emotionally wrenching, so the engineering was a cakewalk.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#286

Post by tightbookkeeper »

keeptrying wrote: post #258

“Care Doesn’t Scale” is a fractal type of truth which essentially describes life but also is a steadfast warning of the underlying state of healthcare in general. Holistic 100% care doesn’t exist - even for the rich. The only way to get optimal care is to pay for it with study. Even the richest in the world don’t necessarily get the best care because care is a function of the present life situation of the practitione…

My question is why can’t we pay someone to get that 2 years of medical education to help with broken bones and stitches.

In other words, there should be less expensive and less sophisticated care providers for less complex needs.

Only in the US is there such a cartel on medical care.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#287

Post by tightbookkeeper »

intended wrote: post #105
tehabe wrote: post #2

This is one reason why we have a state, which collect taxes and can provide those services.

This is not the same thing. The state is ideally suited to manufacture public goods, more efficiently than private enterprise. That means armies, judiciaries, policing municipalities, governance amongst others. They address issues like management of the commons. This does not translate into scaled care - care for orphans (from the article) still needs large numbers of skilled manpower, which is in short supply across…

> The state is ideally suited to manufacture public goods, more efficiently

The government does not provide a more efficient military or education. It compels individuals to pay for something which is in the collective good, but not their personal interest.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#288

Post by tightbookkeeper »

lucideer wrote: post #246
theamk wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inste…

Are you suggesting there is no provider of high quality nails at industrial scale?

That’s ridiculous. Many people just prefer to pay for cheap nails because they are good enough for the application, and that’s a good thing because this option did not previously exist. But the high end still exists and is higher quality than ever.

Capitalism has problems, but providing low complexity commodity improvements at scale and quality is not one of them.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#289

Post by kanodiaashu »

I wonder if education/teaching is fundamentally inseparable from, at least to a serious degree, caring. Every single teacher who impacted my life seems to have cared for me. Maybe not. I have learned a lot on my own too. It would be interesting to see the minimum amount of care needed for a successful education; that would directly increase how scalable education can be.

Re: Care Doesn't Scale

#290

Post by _carbyau_ »

Care can scale differently.

Humans can have hundreds if not thousands of human-to-human (or human-intermediary-human) interactions a day.

Caring for those kids when they need it - a sibling comment also mentions education/ideas - leads to adults that hopefully have thousands upon thousands of better interactions in future. Better for them AND better for the other humans in the society they live in.

[snip to the point]

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