Care Doesn't Scale

post by stavros · 2024-10-28T11:57:38.742Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

This is a link post for https://stevenscrawls.com/care-doesnt-scale/

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If you wanted to design a social system to care for children who have lost their parents, I don’t know if you could do much better. With four children, each kid can get individual care and attention, but there were four social workers each had three 24-hour blocks per week, so they had time to have their own lives with enough flexibility to take vacations and sometimes have two workers with the kids instead of one.

To get that individualized care, though, they had four social workers and four children. One-to-one.

Of course, you could probably add a few more children, or subtract a social worker, as a cost-saving measure. It’d be less sustainable, but it wouldn’t significantly change the experience. But you couldn’t stray that far from one-to-one without changing the nature of the experience, without industrializing it to the point that individual care is lost. With four kids, the kids can feel like kids; if there were forty kids, they’d probably feel like they were cattle.

We’re pretty limited when it comes to care. In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person.

 

Not the OP, just wanted to start a discussion about this here.

Some thoughts of my own:

I'm reminded that we live in a thoroughly maladaptive world, that 'normal' is everyone doing the best they can despite some/many/all of their most fundamental needs - such as care - being insufficiently met.

I think, to the extent the title of this essay is true, it seems a neglected and much ignored truth. I notice that my world models assume a very finite capacity for caring, yet this awareness is not present in my conscious thoughts and strategies and my day to day interactions - I routinely overestimate my own capacity for care, and rarely notice when my own need for care is insufficiently met.

I notice that I do not care skillfully, and worryingly I don't know that I would recognise such skill in others.

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comment by Viliam · 2024-10-28T12:33:09.642Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

These are wise words on a very important topic. It is difficult to navigate the dilemma between caring but small-scale interventions, and large-scale but uncaring ones. Yes, things should scale. And yet, sometimes "things should scale" becomes an infohazard -- when it discourages people from making the individual small contributions because "on the large scale, what's the point?". (Unfortunately, the discouraging effect does scale.)

What about "culture", from this perspective? Culture can make people care, and culture can scale. If you convince millions of people that caring about their neighbors is the right thing to do...

It’s weirdly terrifying to consider that you could be the CEO of a company devoted to feeding the world, spend your life developing the Food-o-Matic which can feed everyone on the planet, but if you neglect to care for your kids, then your kids just have to live with your neglect.

Here is the thing you could do to improve the world: provide babysitting for the CEO's children. Give them the same care you would give to your own kids, and then the CEO is free to focus on feeding the world. More generally, consider the things that don't scale well, and provide them strategically to the people you believe are bringing the most good to the world.

Uhm, the CEO almost by definition is someone who is good at organizing things, so maybe they don't need your help to arrange for babysitting. But consider some other profession, for example a researcher trying to find the cure for cancer. How many relatively trivial inconveniences could you get out of their way, thereby indirectly saving the lives of millions? There might be a lot of low-hanging fruit in contacting people you know that you admire and asking them "is there anything I could help you with? just say it, no matter how big or small the thing is". There may be someone working hard to save the world, who at the same time struggles with something stupid and unrelated, and is too shy to ask for help.