Nobody cares
(grantslatton.com)985 points by fzliu 3 days ago
985 points by fzliu 3 days ago
I have an interesting anecdote about that. I was consulting for a very large tech company on their advertising product. They essentially wanted an upsell product to sell to advertisers, like a premium offering to increase their reach. My first step is always to establish a baseline by backtesting their algorithm against simple zeroth and first-order estimators. Measuring this is a little bit complicated, but it seemed their targeting was worse than naive-bayes by a large factor, especially with respect to customer conversion. I was a pretty good data scientist, but this company paid their DS people an awful lot of money, so I couldn’t have been the first to actually discover this. The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature. I started getting a lot of work in advertising, and it took me a number of clients to see a general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be. Note that this is not insider knowledge of actual policy, just common observations from analyzing data at different places.
Effectively the advertisers could buy less ad space and get the same or better conversion? That is somewhat hilarious because that means that not only are the end-users "the product" the advertisers are as well. There's only cows for the milking, on either side... and shareholders.
Yes. It works really well. You can do a WHOLE LOTTA ARB(tm)(circle R), buying the crap placements at super low CPMs and selling the performance difference to clients. This is mitigated by those clients who ONLY WANT THE BEST (but of course, sir, right this way) - but there are ways around that, too - like the MFA (made for advertising) domains of all the big-name sites you can think of that solely exist for your RTB machine to pump ads stacked on top of each other, and only visible to bots and crawlers. It doesn't help that on one side, you have folks astute with math (Data Scientists et al.) and on the other, a metric shit ton of Media Planners/Buyers who are just handed a budget and are often pretty naive about the intricacies of how it all works. But it all sort of goes back to the original point - people put on blinders. They just wanna see the metric get hit, the numbers go up. Most of the time they don't care how any of that works as long as they look good to their boss, and the industry mostly obliges.
> They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.
I worked in the adtech space for almost 10 years and can confirm this is where we landed, too.
>The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature.
This is why I got out. No one cares about getting the right ad to the right person. There's layers upon layers of hand-waving, fraud, and grift. Adtech is a true embodiment of "The Emperor's New Clothes."
Is there a solution? Obviously those companies are not going to change, so what can everyone else do about it - besides already being very rich, starting a competing ad-tech without funding, managing to get market share, and managing to remain one of the good guys.
The only thing I can think of is to use things like influencer ads on places like Instagram or Youtube which ironically sound like much better value for money as you actually know what you're getting for the money.
Lately, the number of times (across different businesses/industries) where I've found myself thinking "Will you please just fucking take my money and stop bothering me?" is too damn high.
Yup, it's not good enough that you're already a paying customer- they have to try their best to manipulate and coerce you into spending even more. It's insulting, abusive and honestly pathetic. These thirsty lamers have to try every trick in the book to eke a few more cents out of me? Embarrassing. Modern tech/business does not have a shred of pride or dignity, as per TFA.
Businesses aren't in business to prioritize the customer point of view [1].
They are not in business to prioritize the employees point of view.
They are in business to maximise revenue, and profit.
If you work for a business, your job is to work on their priorities. By all means object or quit if you don't agree with them. (And yes, assume you'll be fired for refusing to do their tasks.)
If you're a customer, and you font like their behavior stop being their customer. You have agency. Use it.
[1] good customer service, good customer experience, are all good for revenue. Happy customers are the ultimate success. But maximizing the revenue from those happy customers is very much the business goal.
Actually, in a way this is already true. If you consent to installing their mobile app (which includes god knows what kind of analytics), you are rewarded with at least 20% off all McDonald’s food list prices.
So you can pay for “McDonald’s without analytics” by paying list prices in cash at the register.
Now, if there was an option when booking a flight to pick a fare class not subjected to the stupid branded credit card offer walk of shame prior to landing, I would sign up in a heartbeat.
I recently went to a gas station where the pump worked right! No affinity cards. No car wash offer. No asking for a ZIP code, since I'd been there before. No screen with ads. Press card against RFID reader, select octane, pump gas.
I went inside and complemented the worker on their pumps being so easy to use. I go back there occasionally, even though the station with the ad screen is cheaper.
This seemed like a poor example for the author to choose, of "not caring." Annoying, sure. But these extra upsells originate from someone who definitely cares about increasing revenue and is aggressively exploring multiple avenues to achieve it.
Companies don’t care about you, they care about your wallet, extraction of money from. The most pleasant companies to deal with are the ones who have found a niche where customer satisfaction helps with the goal of wallet, extraction from. But at best it’s a means to an end, and McDonald’s is definitely not one of those companies.
My spouse bought us kindles recently, and it popped in my head today that at some point e-books are going to have ads interspersed…
I've found books that had ads inserted into them [1]. It seemed to be a thing from maybe the 1960/1970s. The ad page was a different type of paper, and no text from the book was on it (that is---the ad wasn't on one side and book text on the other).
[1] One example: https://boston.conman.org/2002/12/31.1
There was a post, here, some time ago, about how many paperbacks had ads actually woven into the story. Apparently, it was quite common practice, at one time. Sort of an obnoxious “product placement” thing. I think the author had nothing to do with it.
Sometimes ads end up in the actual text, without the authors permission or even knowledge: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/q1wbie/the_time_te...
Kindles already can have ads on the sleep screen! Unless you paid for the ad free version.
i sent an email to have them removed. it was a thing some years ago at least (though I don't know if US-ians are allowed to do that or if it's just in the EU)
I actually recently purchased my first Kindle, as well as an gift upgrade for my partner. I researched and talked to a friend of mine who owns one.
At first I was determined I would purchase the ad-free version (I think the price difference was like ~20€), but after talking to my friend they kind of convinced me that the ad version is not so bad.
2 points on this: 1. The ad appears only on the lockscreen of the device, so you see it once and then never again until you reopen it. The ad is also only for a book in the Kindle store, never anything else (this might seem trivial, but I think one of the negative aspects of advertising is being blasted with stimuli about so many different things you don't care for)
2. The ads are personalized on books you bought and therefor a sort of recommendation engine. Both my friend and my partner told me they got some inspiration from those ads to find books they liked.
So all in all while I despise ads, I gave this one a try. Personally (and yeah, I know – subconciously) I have never looked at the lockscreen apart from the first time I launched it. It's a relatively non-intrusive ad about a book that I don't even need to engage with. And in case something relevant is on there, it leads to a good outcome for me.
This is advertising done well for me at least.
There are kindle alternatives. Luckily the technology isn't that advanced and any/all of them pretty much MUST support a general PDF (or whatever other similar format). You might have to manage your own library a bit but that means you can just use these devices completely offline
I think e-readers are not that high on the list of technologies most at risk to be taken over by ads
At the dominant pharmacy/convenience store in my area (Shoppers Drug Mart), it can take up to 12 clicks to self-checkout, depending on what garbage they're upselling on the day. I counted them.
I refuse to use them, and (annoyingly, I know) let the cashier know why each time as they're checking me out. I feel bad for the poor cashier but unfortunately for them, they're my only interface to the company.
Just want to thank you for standing up for your values at your workplace. I wish more SWEs would have morals like this.
> That is fucked up.
Yes. Our local IKEA recently started doing this. During self-checkout, you have to click through hot dog, ice cream, cinnamon buns and drink offers, and the inevitable offer to get an IKEA family card before you are actually able to pay for your furniture.
Seeing this after waiting in line for 10 minutes, navigating a sluggish, unresponsive touch screen terminal and unsuccessfully trying to scan slightly bend bar codes while 10 people are watching you doesn't exactly increase my desire to return to this store.
I really think a huge part of the problem is that there isn't a direct interaction with a human anymore. If IKEA would ask their cashiers to advertise all this crap to customers before accepting their money, they would revert this after a single day because many customers would very, very strongly complain, and the cashiers would care and threaten to quit.
But you cannot complain to a self-checkout-terminal, which makes this even more frustrating. As another comment has pointed out, there is just a "No thanks" button. I want a "I am seriously offended that you try to milk me like a brainless cash-cow, you should be ashamed to even advertise this to me after I bought a couch for 1,400 EUR, and I will not return anytime soon" button.
Last time I went it was only one food upsell. But it is still really annoying. Before this they had basically a perfect self-checkout, fast and easy to use. But now it is adding crap and I fear that I'm going to have to stop shopping there like many of the other self-checkouts around me.
Next time go to the cashier instead, and complain to them about the self-checkout terminal ??
Which relates to the linked incentives piece: when you create incentives, you think you're changing people's behaviour. Actually you're selecting for people who respond to the incentive.
Yeah, there's always the "No thanks" button but not the "No, fuck you" button.
The iOS app “Calendars” recently starting showing a modal on launch trying to up-sell something - I don’t give a shit what it was - the “no” option was labeled “Thank you”. I had to click “Thank you” to dismiss it so that I could use the fucking app I pay a yearly subscription for. Or in this case: paid. The cheek of these people.
That "Thank you" button just raised the bar on cheek, I think.
I'm actually chuckling at it -- just the sheer passive-aggressive childishness of its attempt at shaming users. I mean, what did they think writing that on the button would achieve? It has literally no effect except to infuriate people who were already going to opt out. Labelling it "I suck" would have been better.
because that 2nd one requires a "No, fuck YOU!" button and so on ad infinitum.
Well.. I did implement most of the framework. The good thing is that I'm waaaayyyyy detail oriented, and I made an extremely sophisticated system for it.
Maybe a little bit TOO sophisticated
Not my proudest _engineering_ achievement, but as an R&D project? I consider it a success.
Ethical outcome? Success.
Volkswagen already had this idea...
and decoupling order taking with service makes for "funny" times. since mcdonalds installed the tablets i regularly wait 10 minutes while looking at confused / avoidant employees not knowing what to do, even if there's nobody else waiting.
i can almost feel the meeting where someone managed to sell this idea to shareholders... "decouple everything, more efficient !"
That seems more indicative of just bad management. It’s been over a decade since I’ve been in (specially) a McDonalds, but I used to frequent them easier in my life. The ones I went to were well run and efficient. But still as seemed as decoupled as kiosk ordering. The cashier would take the order and put it into the computer. The food preparers would prepare the food and put it on the trays where the packagers would subsequently take it and put it on your tray or in your bag. There was 0 communication between the three groups in 99% of the cases. Often I would make small talk with the cashiers or packagers if there was nobody behind me.
I don’t see how kiosk/tablet ordering would change that significantly.
it's pretty obvious, there's no more tension in the job, the cooks still have a list of things to do, but people serving customers have no idea who ordered what beside a number. they have no real relationship with any of us waiting and quite often I see them roaming around aimlessly, not sure if I've been called or not
This is a result of Taylorist management brain rot drive to reduce drive thru wait time metrics at the expense of anybody not in the drive through. Watch the shot clock near the drive through window (they're highly visible at Taco Bell) and observe that drive thru customers almost never wait more than 60-80 seconds.
Even Costco gives you a pop up trying to upsell you on a cookie.
McDonald's touch-screen were only profitable because users ordered more. Possibly Covid and processes to get costs down have changed this, but not to begin.
I feel like your comment falls under "Nobody cares"
I love the touch screens and having the time to order what I want. I used to rush my order at the checkout and never got exactly what I wanted.
If you did a start-up 'ethical ordering' you'd care, made money, and probably forced McDonalds to change it's touch screens. In South Korea it asks the user are you sure, here's the extra kJ, when it does an upsell.
> In South Korea it asks the user are you sure, here's the extra kJ, when it does an upsell.
Really? I guess I've just never taken up such an upsell, but I'll try to remember it next time I go just to see the UI. Barely ever go there now that ironically Lotteria has more veggie burger options here (1) than McDonalds (0), and their chicken burgers are imo worse than KFC's.
> Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done?
> Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the department of transportation do not give a shit.
No the reasons are likely wholly political.
It's clear from the photo that doing the bike ramp better would require more space. It would require moving that street sign. It could require allocating less space to cars and more to sidewalk, pedestrians and cyclists. These are financial decisions and political decisions. Spending money on cyclists is a political lightning rod that special interest groups will fight at all costs to maintain the automobile oriented status quo. Spending money is aggressively fought at all costs in an effort to keep property taxes as low as possible.
Engineers and policy people are not lazy they are constrained by aggressive political special interest groups.
> These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving.
hint hint.
It's almost as if the decisions are being made for car drivers and not pedestrians. This is a political choice driven by special interest groups that seek to preserve 1950s era thinking automobile dominated status quo.
The author assumes that everything sucks because everyone is lazy and stupid but the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded.
I have a friend who sees what he thinks is a problem and starts off with "I don't know why they just didn't...", as if he could come up with a better solution in 2 minutes of thinking than experts in the field. The reality is that he just doesn't know all the competing interests and problems. The article feels the same way.
I see this fallacy a lot in the US. I think it's because of our individualism. Attention and hard-work can't overcome everything, we aren't all-powerful beings.
If you care enough and have the resources available. It's rare for someone to care only about one specific thing like a bicycle ramp to put in the resources to make a difference, though.
(i.e. my experience is that people do, on the whole, care. But they generally care about different things, and especially have different priorities in terms of how they allocate their resources, especially time. This blog is a rant about people caring about things that the author cares about, a lot of which are reasonable, but are not the be-all end-all of priorities)
You're more likely to burn out butting your head against the incentives working against you. If you're lucky, you may get a few successes before you burn out.
That's partly true, but "competing interests and problems" have a tendency to accumulate in much the same way as technical debt.
Particularly so in a world of longer lifespans and careers, higher information connectivity and so on.
It's arguably one of the reasons nations tend to experience boom periods in the aftermath of major wars. The destruction has a way of clearing out the accumulated complexity, giving people a clean slate to decide what's _really_ important/valuable/productive.
(To avoid any doubt, this is not an argument in favour of major wars.)
I live on the fringes of an old European city which was damaged but, largely, not destroyed by WWII bombing. The difficulty of building new transit lines here is legendary, essentially they're almost entirely paralysed by the web of competing interests, and this grows more every year, not less, as new ones arise.
Places that suffered nearer total war damage have a two-fold advantage. First, they could build back a city-plan that was more suited to the modern era - and secondly, nobody had time to get all that attached to the new city-plan, so they've had the flexibility to iterate further, things like retrofitting trams, relocating the main traffic arterials further from the city centre, new metro lines to adjust to changing demographic/geographic patterns and so on.
To this specific example - it's not that the competing interests are worthless exactly, but their sum total value is surely orders of magnitude less than a new metro line. However, because of the due processes that hold sway in a peaceful, democratic and rights-based society, they're able to gum up the works to the point that we can only build about one genuinely new metro line every 30 years, despite being one of the richest cities in the Western world.
It's not necessarily that complicated. My mom likes to complain that the person who designed her new stove never cooked in their life. I think the simpler explanation is that the person who designed that ramp arrangement didn't cycle very much and just wasn't empathetic to riders flying down the hill. In other words, they didn't care.
No, there are very specific regulations around infrastructure design, including what sorts of curves are safe in bike lanes at which speeds.
The reason that angle is that "sharp" (I don't think it's very sharp tbh) is because cyclists are explicitly not supposed to zoom up onto the sidewalk at 20 miles per hour. That's how you kill someone. If you're going too fast to make a 30-degree turn and avoid crashing, you're going too fast to be on the sidewalk. It's like complaining that the tight curves on a residential street make it unsafe to drive down it at 60mph.
Anyway, the influence of the auto lobby on urban infrastructure is really well-established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dependency
> the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded
This may be the case for many things, but I would add that a lot of things suck because of conflicting incentives. Whether it's laziness or even because they are actually getting paid MORE to do the sucky thing.
As an example, where I live a running joke is about the number of road cones whenever work is being done. They don't need THAT many road cones, but they put them there... why? I have no evidence, but I suspect someone is getting paid to add extra road cones - OR potentially another incentive is at play.
The biggest one that gets me is traffic lights within roundabouts... how anyone thinks that is a good idea.... arghh #sigh :(
> Person with headphones blocking the sidewalk.
Any normal sidewalk would be wide enough that a single person could not conceivably block it, and wearing headphones while walking, especially noise canceling ones, is popular because US cities are largely unpleasant, deafeningly loud places full of fast-moving cars.
Minority groups are not the same thing as special interest groups. Special interest groups usually have undue money, resources, or power given their size.
Yeah, they shouldn't. Cars are a terrible mode of urban transit. They should all get bikes and bus passes, and then everyone would get everywhere quickly and cheaply and without deadly collisions.
Everyone complains about traffic, but nobody realizes that traffic is just what it's like to drive in a city. Stop driving.
As a physician who does care, I found it interesting that he chose to include doctors in this tirade but then patted himself on the back for squashing bugs quickly and feeling badly about having written buggy code. I know that there are outliers, but in meeting and working with literally hundreds of other physicians at this point in my career, I can count on one hand the doctors who truly do not care. And boy do we feel bad when we make a mistake.
A lot of physicians have terrible bedside manner and that is going to be one of the biggest criteria a non-physician is going to use to judge how much they care.
And I don't think that's unreasonable, either. It's necessary for a physician to communicate effectively with their patient. Trust is a requirement to work effectively together. If you can't establish that, then you've failed. Encounters with doctors shouldn't feel adversarial.
in situations like that, i like to think about Berkson's paradox [0].
In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated. But the individuals that fall into the quadrant of bad bedside manner AND low medical aptitude will be filtered out of the profession. That means that in the remaining population, you have an externally-induced negative correlation between bedside manner and medical aptitude.
So if you find a doctor with bad bedside manner, they're likely to have better medical aptitude otherwise they would've been filtered out.
There are plenty of professions where it makes sense someone unpleasant still has a job because they're actually hyper competent (like software development) but why would physicians be filtered out of the profession for poor bedside manner? In what part of the world is there a surplus of supply of doctors that would allow for that?
"In the overall population, bedside manner and medical aptitude are likely uncorrelated."
I'd [citation needed] on that, depending on the condition.
In that for some conditions, successful diagnosis and treatment across a wide range of the population (not just the most educated, articulate, mentally with-it and compliant quartile) is going to depend on being able to get qualitative information from the patient, and interpret that correctly.
Equally though the medical profession has enough specialisation in terms of role to be able to put the right personality types in the right jobs.
citation: i made it up based on my intuition because this is a thought experiment to illustrate a paradox.
also "bedside manner" is not just about conveying information. that would be a big part of successful treatment.
if you ask people about bedside manner is all going to be about personality and emotional sensitivity (where they gruff? did they make you feel bad? etc). somebody can be amazing at conveying accurate information but come across as a complete asshole, and those are the 'bad bedside manner' docs.
TIL that there's a name for it. I always just sort of intuited this phenomenon.
The entire article is a form of engagement bait. It’s a pile of stereotypes with storytelling. Paul Graham does the same thing. Arguing about which stereotype is true or false… you’re just playing into it.
My mother is a nurse practitioner who works in an acute care clinic, and I can say that she feels horrible when she makes a mistake, learns that one of her patients’ conditions has worsened and they’ve been hospitalized, or — worst of all — when they die, even if it was expected.
My personal experience with multiple doctors, some in primary care and others in hospitals, is that they often don't care and just want to get you out of the door.
Bring up some symptoms not immediately easily attributed to something? Sorry, those are "nonspecific symptoms" and they can't help you. Maybe see a specialist, maybe not. Figure it out.
Obviously this isn't all of them, but it is definitely a decent chunk.
Let me ask you a question. What's the longest time you've spent on a single patient over the last month? What do you think that number is like for your fellow physicians?
Of course this will massively depend on your specific workplace, the ratio of doctors to patients in your vicinity, and so on. But I've seen plenty of doctors for who that statistic can't be higher than 10 minutes.
I'll freely admit I'm biased. I have a medical issue that despite visiting a good number of different doctors, none have properly diagnosed. This is despite the symptoms being visible, audible and showing up on certain scans (inflammation), so it can't be disregarded as "it's in your head". Some have made an attempt, and after that failed quickly did the equivalent of throwing their hands up and saying "I don't know", providing no further path.
Regardless of facts about how much doctors actually care, he still perceives the world as one where almost nobody does. I'm glad he expressed himself as such because I feel the same way sometime, even though I know that most people try to fill their role in society well. It's like a special kind of loneliness that grows quick. I like how he describes the development of this loneliness. Once he put on its glasses, he thinks carelessness is everywhere, even in doctors who do care, so he develops existential hopelessness of some sort.
Loneliness is a really good way to describe it. I definitely have had similar experiences to the author. It can make you feel really pessimistic and like a freak outcast for actually caring. It makes me feel arrogant or overly confident too.
I think ironically it does show that the author thinks highly of people and their potential. A truly bitter person would have long stopped expecting anything of anyone, which I think is very unhealthy. You expect people to care but only about things that harm you.
I'm guessing there's more people out there who feel this way, and likewise I'm glad the author shared this experience even if it's not the healthiest mindset to always be in.
This is a statement of privilege: find a doctor who cares and stick with them.
I'm T1 diabetic, and it took me a long time to find an endo and a PCP that care. I have long since moved away from their offices, but I still make the drive because they are worth it.
My tip on finding good providers is basically to get lucky and find a good one. Then you should ask who they recommend. They know who the bad ones are.
Doctors are at the very top of my list of people who don’t care. Not necessarily that they got into the field not wanting to care, but that in practice they quickly get to the point of caring largely about getting through their day — maybe a few select patients stir them out of their bizarrely intense waking slumber where they go from patient to patient and immediately prescribe nearly the first thing that comes to mind for nearly the first diagnosis that comes to mind. Given the volumes of patients they are expected to churn through though it’s not surprising that they become desensitized and divorced from the ramifications of shoddy work with minimal research — for many (especially nonspecialists) it’s effectively impossible to do thoughtful work for every patient. I think overwork desensitizes many/most and few actually have the time or energy to do more research or think deeply about an individual patient, but ultimately decisions which consume minimal resources from them drastically affect the lives of patients.
Healthcare professionals know this to be true. This is why when their own loved ones are the patients they have such a strong tendency to become very actively involved —- it’s not necessarily that the person attending to their loved one is incompetent, but chances are that their loved ones will similarly be just another face that occupies another physician’s mind for a few minutes.
Artificially high barriers of entry in the field may lead to massive compensations but also to a huge ratio of patients to physicians — this takes a toll.
It's not just the ratio. In many medical roles, engaging your full humanity with every patient would destroy you psychologically, even at a much lower number of patients.
"Follow the process, follow the training" is how medics, emergency responders and the armed forces are able to stay in the job more than a few years without burning out completely.
(It's also, as psychological defensive mechanisms go, somewhat fairer than those used in the past. Ask a retired medic in their 80s or 90s if you know any.)
My primary care physician will only do video meetings or wait 6 months for in-person appointment. He does not care.
Yes. They just choose to fill it way passed capacity because they want more money and don't want to accept the money they will end up getting for doing a proper non-rushed job.
That's why they have 15min slots and rush you out the door if you look like you'll be taking too much of their time. Maybe blame the insurance for dictating they must charge per-session instead of per-hour, sure, but the doctors at the end of the day prioritize their own salary over patients well being. Not to the extent that one can say they are negligent or do a bad job, but they ride that line between in order to optimize their earnings without getting into (too much) trouble.
Presumably, if the GP comment hasn't switched yet, then there's a bit of a shortage of options. So it's entirely possible that there's a shortage of doctors in general in the area, and a doctor that does care about serving patients in that circumstance will find themselves in exactly the same pattern of behaviour, because there's more need from patients than they can satisfy, so they try to help the most people they can even if that means each person gets less help.
More egregously in that regard, in the UK it's common for doctors to part work for the NHS and part work privately. Anything on the NHS is massively underresourced and so long waiting times for short, overworked appointments are common, but you can get an appointment much faster and with better attention from the same doctor if you pay. But then even these private services are starting to have too much demand, because the problem is more structural as the population grows and ages, while investment in the education and training, not to mention reasons to stay in the country afterwards, has stagnated.
His care does not scale and he has to ration his care between existing patients. For him to give you more care, it will likely come at the expense of someone else's care.
This situation has occurred because somewhere and somewhen else, a chain of other people have not cared and allowed primary care resources to get to this state.
They might be living in the UK where most of the population has no private healthcare insurance and the nationalized GPs are frequently all overloaded like that.
Most of the government employees that work in the bureaucracy do care. They care a lot. The reason their "favorite" part of the job is "stability" or "job security" is because the pay usually sucks compared to industry, and the bullshit you have to put up with to avoid scandals, lawsuits, and corruption also sucks. Most of the civil servants I know stay in their jobs because they really do want to help people; they really do want to make their agencies or institutions more efficient and better.
My wife works for the federal government of Canada. Her and her coworkers are some of the most sincerely interested and concerned people I've met, at least as far as their work goes. I work with chronic job-hoppers and shiny-thing-chasers. She works with people who care deeply about their teams, the quality of their work, the health and purpose of their union, the sustainability of their organization, the safety of their work, etc. They pour so much into it.
I had a thought years ago that the startup I was working for would find them laughably inefficient. Yet that startup is dead and gone, in part because they put none of the same care, intention, and thought into creating something functional and sustainable. We often think highly of how we work from first principles, move fast and break things, or whatever, but I think many of us have lost sight of what having a regular job that gradually, yet more certainly, improves the world around us looks like.
I do think they should strive to innovate more. I often write scripts to automate my wife's work, and it blows my mind how little they've invested in exploring what's possible. Yet they're one of the best hydrographic offices in the world.
The move fast and break things mantra, at least in my estimation, was always about not being fearful of trying new things. The things that break on the way were always going to break in the long run with enough changes accrued over time anyway. Implicit is an assumption that the things that were breaking were the most dysfunctional, or most restrictive parts, of incumbent systems of work or thought. Moving fast for the sake of moving fast, or for the sake of breaking things, was never the goal. It became a slogan of misplaced pride aimed at making movement the goal. At least that’s how I feel about that era.
I think you’re absolutely right. I was using it in the more abused term, but I actually subscribe to the original intent of it. My wife’s organization would almost certainly be better off if they embraced this mentality even slightly more. Maybe most people would, for that matter.
But yeah, the movement did seem to become the primary goal, and breaking things seemed less about stress-testing and freeing from restrictions, and more like an inconvenience on the path of progress, whatever that might mean. It seemed like a lot of us went from being experimental and nimble to clumsy and incoherent at some point.
I've worked as a temp for my government in a bureaucracy (tax recovery/delaying) before studying CS (15 years ago now).
The bureaucracy have rules to disempower low-level civil servants and keep them from having too much agency.
Everytime someone asked for a payment delay on their taxes, i had to fill their data in 2 to 3 different software that did not allow pasting (well, the third one did, but wasn't used in most cases). If the info given by the citizen was wrong, I often took upon myself to correct it even. All that doesn't help with willingness to help, but like most people, if someone asks me for a payment delay, I'll accept it. But wait, I can't if this is the third year they ask one! (Or second year in a row). I had to go through another software to ask confirmation from an unknown person. Except the demand/justification wasn't in a mail but in a letter, in that case my manager had to handle it. Except she was overworked, so it took weeks, and sometimes the 'tax majoration coz not in time' was probably sent before the 'yeah, ok for the delay' letter (if you're in France and need help with taxes: send emails, not letters).
Most of the rules were probably there for good reasons: data separation and anonymity, and probably fraud/corruption prevention. That didn't make them good rules.
Also external people don’t generally know or understand all the constrains that led to decisions that are suboptimal (for the person complaining).
I work for the government IT.
Constraints are often bogus, made by a few bad actors and never questioned because the government is structured to avoid personal responsibility. Unfortunately, this takes away agility and disempowers individual workers.
Which, as noted in a nearby comment, makes them coping instead of caring.
An overlooked cause is the management science that insists on getting rid of individual ownership.
There are many problems with individual ownership though. It is a whole large system where people constantly change. You need to have multiple owners and redundancy otherwise all the projects are dependent on one individual who might quit any time. Things happen in the past, people make mistakes and you start to incorporate processes to avoid it because people are and will always be imperfect, you end up with thise processes and bureaucracy.
Yes, but they don't seem to care about the stuff OP cares about, therefore they're just mindless bureaucrats. Unlike Elon, who's defeating armies of nihilists by sheer force of will!!!
One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
What kills me though is that we travel to landmarks in New York City or Florence or wherever, and gawk at the beautifully-designed old buildings and charming plazas, and seem to lack the recognition that we could live in places just as beautiful if somebody cared.
It doesn't really have to cost much more. I used to live in a 20th century building originally built as a schoolhouse. The city architect, who was budget-constrained, still made a point of including decorative brickwork. 120 years later it was by far the most attractive building on the street.
> One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
> This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
There is a tradeoff between affordability and aesthetics. Lengthy review processes make housing more expensive. Seattle cares, but it cares more about affordability. With the cost of housing right now I think that's the right call. Who cares how beautiful grand buildings appear when you have people living in the street?
> Who cares how beautiful grand buildings appear when you have people living in the street?
Where's the followup part that the money saved on decorative brickwork is being used to fix homelessness? Because if it isn't, then this is a non-sequitur.
> Where's the followup part that the money saved on decorative brickwork is being used to fix homelessness? Because if it isn't, then this is a non-sequitur.
Paying architects, engineers, and lawyers to go back and forth with city bureaucrats and committees for months or even years is typically the expensive part.
Do you think New York and Florence have those beautiful buildings because their local design review committees had high standards? I don't.
I think aesthetics should nearly always come second to other concerns, except in very specialised cases. For a start, it's largely a matter of personal taste. "Streamlining the design review process" is something I wish was more of a priority where I live. Those rates (local property tax) dollars are much better spent on almost anything else in my opinion.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Also, there is often a tradeoff between aesthetics and affordability. The cost of living has gone up, and most people struggling to climb the property ladder would happily sacrifice the former for the latter. With respect, this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems.
The ugly townhouses going up in my neighborhood cost $1.3M each. The apartments are $2500/mo and up. It doesn’t have anything to do with affordability but it is convenient for the developers that people think this is the excuse.
> this falls squarely in the category of first-world problems
I’m talking about one of the wealthiest cities in the first world.
I’ve gone the other way. I moved to Tokyo, most of the buildings are copy-pasted and objectively ugly. But taken together it forms an extremely functional city, so it’s a dream to be here.
In NYC at least, the low point of architectural beauty was in the 1960-2000 era. In the past decade or two I think there has been a lot of really quality architecture going up. The current aesthetic issue plaguing the city is the onerous regulations that result in unneeded scaffolding being put up around buildings for months or even years.
100% of the people around me at work care.
I wish they didn't, because they're bad at their job and "them caring" puts them as a peer for experts and people who both care AND are competent/experienced via design by committee and inclusion. Their incompetency is explained away as "unique point of view."
So perhaps the entire piece is an exercise in overgeneralization, where you assume that everyone has a baseline amount of competency. That curb could have been designed by a very caring intern, who is awful at what they do. They were managed by someone who had 100 other deadlines that are more important. They care about that curb, but they care about 100 other things with more priority.
We're in the era of Good Enough.
I find it's an impossible thought experiment to judge doing 100 things Good Enough is better/worse than doing 1 thing perfectly and ignoring 99 other things. Add a token / currency to the mix, costs + returns on investment. And now you have something substantial to judge.
There is a massive difference between actively not caring and passively omitting attention.
Peppered into the diatribe is direct, aggressive, not caring. But that doesn't validate the general stance.
Make a consultancy called Caring Company that makes companies/products/projects more efficient at same or less cost.
My institution has hired multiple consultancies to fix structures and form new ones... the entropy of pay grade and how to prioritize thousands of tasks in parallel doesn't "get solved" because someone finds that some employee is just bad at what they do. And what do you do when you find you can only hire those employees because you don't pay enough for better, because your products' incomes don't match the skill level required?
Is this an AI response? Has the dead internet lured me in, again? Or, more likely, do you just not care as well?
Every example in the linked post is either "not caring" about the work being done OR aggressively "not caring" due to main-character syndrome/individualism of modern American society. AND on top of it, every political fix is a _feel good_ fix instead of actually fixing the fucking problem.
An "era of good enough" makes no goddamn sense in response to this article. NONE of the things listed are good enough. None of them.
No, the examples in the article are bad.
The bike ramp is designed correctly. It should not be possible for a cyclist to maintain 20mph speed while mounting up onto the sidewalk. That's dangerous. The ramp (correctly) forces them to slow down.
DMVs are not slow because the staff don't care. They're slow because they're understaffed, because it's cheaper that way. No politician is willing to raise taxes just to make the DMV a bit faster.
The McDonalds kiosk upsells you 3 times because McDonalds makes more money that way. They care a very great deal about that.
Most of these have actual explanations that the author of the article just didn't think about.
I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.
It means that one just does, maybe even more then necessary because one doesn’t actually understand what their responsibilities are. And to be not detected it’s better to seem very busy and very caring.
> I would argue that incompetence is a form of not caring.
It is not.
It can be a product of not caring, and what is actually not caring can be mistaken for incompetence, but incompetence can coexist with dedication (the idea that it cannot seems is a face of the "effort is all that matters, there are no real differences in capabilities" myth), competence and concern are not at all the same thing or inherently linked such that either necessary implies the other.
One man's incompetence is another man's profound skill. OK maybe not actually, but let's just say that some people are quick to apply a label of "incompetent" to people who think a little differently, or who are perhaps only 10% less knowledgeable, or to people they imagine are less knowledgeable.
> One man's incompetence is another man's profound skill
Only when there's no way to measure the results.
Measuring results is notoriously hard in this industry. Any metric can be easily manipulated, and many qualitative aspects of software are not quantifiable. Moreover, the people who get to decide the metrics will tend to choose them in a way that gives an advantage to themselves.
Not always. I've seen multiple people who are very enthusiastic and care deeply about something they are absolutely terrible at, but are unable to recognise it (possibly because it's a hard thing to admit to yourself that this thing you like and care about is probably best left to someone else).
Maybe some fraction of incompetent interns are playing a kind of double game, where they merely pretend to be really caring.
But I doubt that’s the norm. There really are a lot of not so smart people of all ages out there in positions way beyond their actual capability.
Edit: And in a lot of situations the dumb and hard working are way more dangerous than the smart and lazy.
With the dumb and lazy being somewhat better, so I partially agree with the parent.
I'm sure there are also a lot of competent smart people who may happen to have other issues in their lives affecting their output. Maybe they are burned out, have some family drama, have health issues, etc.
I for one am glad if 10 interns get a chance even if only 1 turns out to be truly useful. It's a matter of empathy and I hope it prevails because what real purpose do we have without it.
As the software archeologist on call for literally anything going wrong with anything IT operations related for a large publishing house that unfortunately had an IT department since the 80s and a web presence since the 90s, I'd like to extend a generous "fuck you" to all the people who have not cared to document a single thing in the past 30 years.
Point being, this isn't new.
The "era of good enough" here really resonates with me, I've been in product and people mgmt and there's a lot of tension between "optimal amount of quality for the business" vs "optimal amount of quality for the user", esp in B2B or other contexts where the user isn't necessarily the buyer. The author sort of blows off "something something bad incentives" but IMO that is the majority of it.
On top of that, people have genuinely different preferences so what seems "better" for a user to one person might not to another.
And then on top of that, yeah, some people don't care. But in my experience w/ software engineers at least, the engineers cared a lot, and wanted to take a lot of pride in what they built, and often the people pushing against that are the mgmt. Sometimes for good reason, sometimes not, that whole thing can get very debateable.
I've only used "good enough", and have only ever seen it used, when enough margin beyond bare minimum exists to make it "good enough", which requires caring.
I suppose it depends on the personal definition of good enough, but I like to reserve "bare minimum" for those who truly do the minimal work, teetering on line between functional and non-functional.
Good enough... seems almost too self explanatory. Its good enough! Great!
Not really sure why you brought your job into this, other than to inject corporatism into social problems.
Good enough = human shit in the street in USA.
This reads more like a death by a thousand tiny cuts, much like people that do not return their shopping carts.
As for solutions, it won't happen in our life time in USA.
Shame has a function in society, USA as a whole is shameless, that's all there is to it.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
I fully expected that bit. Can't say I would agree in any way though. If anything, a perfect example of a person with way too much agency and executive power and way too little restraint and rationality. The perfect anti social candidate to not care but to want to appear to due to his own personal insecurities that the world now has to suffer for.
Getting off this planet is easy without absurd missions like going to Mars. We could build space habitats or moon bases. Going to live on Mars is not an option for us at this time. We lack the biological resilience to do so. I won't even mention that it must be a planetary effort to even have some chance of success.
edit: typos
He's certainly working towards getting humanity of this planet by making it a worse place to survive. I'm not sure why you would praise him for that.
Also Elon lies all the time. He's even lying about playing games.
He's just trying to get money and power. Maybe he's doing some stuff that interests him on the side but he really doesn't care about you specifically.
He only cares about benefiting himself and promoting his image.
> If that's true what would be explanation of his gaming/streaming?
It's a PR stunt. He pays someone to play for him and level up his account. Then, he plays for a bit and it's painfully obvious that he's inexperienced.
He doesn't take criticism very well either. He recently removed a live streamers Twitter verification for pointing out his lack of skill. How's that for a "free speech" platform?
Elon is extremely partisan, insecure, and rich. That's it.
> I believe his motivations are beyond getting rich. At some point in life money become means to goals, and goals are driven by real motivation.
They are now about acquiring power and respect from other people, after he became rich and everyone started making fun of him.
What do you not agree with? That he doesn't care? I would assume scaling Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity are net positive for the world (as it stands). Can you achieve those ambitious things if the leader/ceo of the company doesn't care?
I mean, he clearly didn't care that supervisors at his company were calling people the N-word on the job. He cares about benefiting himself and promoting his image, at least to a specific audience.
Perhaps the bike path engineer was focused on caring intensely about something else and didn't allocate much caring for the bike path.
I really do not care but that is because the economy has incentivised me to get into work I don't care about. It is completely unprofitable to do things I do care about. So I don't do them. So everything I do do, I don't care about. Of course, I would hope if I was a doctor or sth where I really affected people's lives, I would care just for their sake if nothing else. But I'm a developer. It's really not that deep. Let me be an artist without me and my sick mother going homeless and I would actually care.
If everybody followed their hearts deepest passions, we’d all be starving.
I do see your point. But that is why what the article describes is an inevitable problem.
Edit: I also do think that if I didn't do my job, nobody would be starving, and I am greatly overcompensated for it. Doctors, nurses, teachers, farmers... all of those jobs that are wildly more important for society to function are way less paid than my job fixing bugs in a corporate website, which is a fundamental flaw in the system if the aim is to incentivise people to keep society running well. For example, I know someone who is a doctor who is trying to leave to work at a hedge fund because the work is so under-compensated. This is a massive problem.
But your work may contribute to a product that helps a doctor, nurse or teacher do their job.
Even if it does not directly do that, maybe your fellow workers use the income they get from the company existence to raise their kid who becomes a doctor, nurse, etc.
I don't know about that. We might not have all the choices for eating we have now, but there are a lot of people (even in my own family) that like growing/ hunting for, and serving food for some reason. At this point we have all the resources and knowledge to produce the food needed to survive, but it's in human (animal) nature to always want more than nature provides.
Yeah but most people aren't farmers. How much economic value gets tied up in investment schemes? How many people worked for years on crypto or the metaverse or what-have-you—projects that only existed to boost stock price, rather than because anyone needed them?
Our society doesn't optimize the lifestyles of its citizens. It optimizes stock price, which leads to an economy where everyone works a lot, even on things nobody needs, in pursuit of returns for investors. Does the Silicon Valley VC unicorn portfolio model actually help anyone other than VCs and founders?
Sorry, I'm British so I have a totally different perspective. Healthcare is mainly public here and the salaries suck. Nobody becomes a doctor to be rich. They become one because its a decent job and they want to help people. Of course you can be a private doctor but this is seen as publicly shameful. So I think that proves that there are other reasons people become doctors. Anyway, the issue in the UK is, the salaries used to be good but just not excellent, and would become excellent with a decent specialty. They also were guaranteed an excellent pension for their service to the country. Now doctors I know make just above minimum wage and I make basically double them as a junior dev (not at FAANG and devs aren't paid 6 figures over here, I make less than £50k). This has come from years of defunding public services from people who believe in the power of capitalism to.... create more finance bros and 1x engineers?
This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
I hired a contractor once, who was a fantastic one. We were designing some changes to one of our rooms, and he had a proposal that would have made for some interesting, yet unfortunate corners in one of our rooms. It would have been more annoying and more expensive, but I don't think for one minute that it was because they didn't care.
They just didn't live in the space, they didn't spend enough time sitting in the problem to appreciate other solutions. I however had, and when I presented them with a cleaner solution, they ruminated on it for a bit and loved it. Saved a ton of time and money, and the end solution was better.
All it took was a conversation, and building a shared understanding of the needs and possibilities.
Ha. The traffic curb example is actually a good one. I don’t think it’s an excuse to build a potentially dangerous ramp because you aren’t a cyclist yourself. People who design ramps should be capable to do it properly.
Imagine it were a ramp for wheelchairs and they would have decided that a 20 degree slope is doable.
This may be intentional.
Road to sidewalk is a speed transition point. The transition from street to sidewalk via a tight turn here is an effective traffic-calming component to slow down bikes from road speed to walking speed. That's done on freeway off-ramps, where there's a curved section or two of decreasing radii to force vehicle speeds down before they reach a stop sign or traffic light. Same problem.
This reminds me of Tempest in a Pothole, an episode of The Paper Chase TV show from 1984:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEFBX4M5LCQ&t=2896s
The thrust is that standards of accountability are (or should be) higher for a professional than for a random reasonable person.
I agree people should be able to design things property, but I'm not sure this ramp is actually a good example. It might be! But no one is talking about an obvious issue for any ramp that would exist in that photo: it is merging bikes in to pedestrian traffic. So I'd think that you specifically want a ramp that forces the bike to slow down.
People who aren't competent to do a job also generally aren't competent to teach themselves the job. That's why we the whole idea of qualification, competency testing, supervision, training, etc., exists.
I imagine the designer was under a set of constraints, for example, only a certain about of linear space was available for the ramp, because of other issues in the area; or maybe there was some budget constraint.
The designer may have thought about what it's like for a cyclist to make that curve, and thought, "the bicyclist can slow down to make the ramp."
None of those things have anything to do with not caring.
> This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
They literally mentioned it to the Director of the Seattle DOT. If the person who designed a bike lane isn't aware of the needs and dangers to bike users then they are not fit for the job. Engineers must make decisions for the curve of car lanes based on speed limits and terrain. They must make those same decisions for other vehicles.
>Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
So... In other words... They did not care about their job enough to investigate and think through the situation. They just did the default easy thing and moved on with their day.
it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
Can you even imagine any piece of automobile infrastructure being designed in a way that is dangerous to drivers, and those drivers' concern being downplayed with the excuse that perhaps the person who designed the infrastructure isn't an automobile driver and didn't think about what it would be like to be a driver?
That would be inconceivable, but when non-drivers are the ones whose safety is ignored in favor of automobile drivers' convenience, nobody cares.
> isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
But this is exactly the "don't care" attitude. Ignore the specifics of the problem, avoid studying it or just giving it a thought. Didn't think that, not being a cyclist themselves, they should ask somebody who is. Didn't even think about very obvious things, like putting a warning sign ahead of the actual object that it would warn about.
No. That person did not care. Really sad.
Imagine building an app for a market you’re totally unfamiliar with. You don’t research the market, you don’t talk to potential users, you don’t do any real world testing. You just build something that seems like it should be ok, ship it, and never touch it again.
None of us would dream of doing that, but that’s what the designer of this atrocity did, if we’re assuming the best.
Bonus: the app probably isn’t going to kill anyone.
Usually constraints are financial related. It takes money to do all that and public works is not some big tech company
The whole article is "This design isn't optimized for me" and "No one else prioritizes my priorities". Empathy is something one can develop with practice if you take the self-reflection to recognize things from others perspectives. Their "Nobody cares" can easily be redirected back to author with how little other perspectives they consider. Multiple times their "objectively" better thing is worse for some.
I completely agree. The author is attributing apathy to every action or inaction of everybody they see.
Just take the banal examples, like the person listening to their headphones. Maybe that person is listening to an audio book about medicine, because they are in medical school, and they really care about being a good student. Or the people taking up the whole escalator. Maybe they are old friends who have the opportunity to be together, and they care about listening to the conversation. Maybe the man zoned out in traffic who doesn't see your signal has his mind occupied by thoughts of his new baby who is sick in the hospital. Maybe the bike ramp was designed by a plucky intern who, despite inexperience, successfully got the entire mile-long bike lane installed in the first place.
The author is entirely wrong because they are myopic. It isn't that nobody cares, but rather that _everybody cares_. About different things, but the author has no insight into this and it's not their place to judge those things in the first place. They reach a good conclusion though, which is to change the things they care about with personal activism.
Yes, I get a lack of empathy from this article. The author mentions a lot of little things other people do that annoy him, without the sense that maybe you need to put up with a little annoyance to get along with other people, and without any awareness that maybe he does little things that annoy other people.
I totally agree with the article and the examples. Problem here in France is the same: many people do not care. I would not say it's a majority, but a minority is enough to ruin other people's lives.
I'm really annoyed by the noise. From the deafening motorbike engine in the street, to the idiot with his speaker vomitting rap music, to the neighbor having a party until 3AM, they do not care.
Why is that? Mostly because modern western civilizations promote a me-first culture. Look at these personal developpment books: it's mostly about caring for yourself, barely about the others. When it's about the others, it's to advance your interests.
We do not learn from infancy to put others' interests first. Basic principles and values like selflessness are taught NOWHERE. When a problem arises here in France, you get yet another law to restrict and punish. We should just teach peoples to care for others.
I'm longering for a world when people care, where people who are "lovers of themselves", "not open to any agreement, without self-control, without love of goodness" will have disappeared,
and where "there is more happiness in giving than there is in receiving", where this is applied: "All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them", will be the standard.
It's not just the West. I'm Indian and it's 2x worse there.
Don't have a ton of experience in Paris, but I stayed at the Yotel at Charles De Gaulle once. The first room had dirty bedsheets, and the lamps were broken. I called the guy to give me another room, and he just goes, 'there's no problem' And I was left wondering—what is 'problem' reserved for? A fire?
I agree also with most of the rant but the part about state/municipal jobs looks a bit unfair to me. If you have ever volonteer or worked for this kind of job, you could find that many people are so ungrateful: only few care to answer polls or attend public meetings, almost nobody cares about the why. But when something changes, lots of loud mouths shout rants like this one. People sometimes don't imagine how hard this is to have basic consensus on anything when there is lots of people in a group. Doing anything is also so complicated nowadays with the numerous parts involved in any decision, each one having their own priority set and timelines, the constraints of the law...
The care is certainly not the only reason of having broken things.
You could replace "they do not care" with "they are prevented from caring" or "they care about different things" to get a more empathetic take.
Designing entire cities on shoestring budgets and break-neck timelines prevents caring.
Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.
Driving is a complex task. Watching for mergers while trying not to die in a crash is hard to do simultaneously.
I could go on, but the solution to these things is not to get weirdly mad at people who may have a perfectly good reason for their behavior (sometimes they don't).
Cities should be designed in close consultation with residents (not just whoever has the free time to show up to meetings). Humans shouldn't be forced to drive everywhere. Up-selling should be a consumer protection violation. Caring alone isn't enough if you care about the wrong things.
> Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.
The author was complaining about the use of cool white (5000k) LEDs instead of warm ones (2700k). Cool LEDs aren't any cheaper or more efficient than warm ones. So what tradeoffs are we talking about?
Everybody has a limit to their capacity To Care About Things. It's not fixed in stone, people can care about more things and more deeply, but at any given time it's essentially some finite capacity. A glass-half-empty mentality (like the author's) is to look at everything that people don't care about and despair, while a glass-half-full mentality is to look at everything people do care about and remain optimistic about our ability to inspire people to care more.
The classic needs ladder states that first you need to take care of yourself, only after which can you take care of your in-group, only after which can you take care of your out-group. A lot of the process of inspiring others is to first set a good personal example, then helping others in such a way that ascribes cultural value to paying it forward, i.e. to teach people to fish instead of giving them fish. Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs. But it can be restored, with some optimism and finding people who are receptive to it.
Nobody is asking you to care and fix everything. They are asking you to care about the things in direct control, like your job or kid.
This thread is filled with “I do care but can’t because _”. And yet there are those rare people who do care, and with a little bit of preparation and effort make a big difference.
When people start in a new job they go through a tough 3-6 week sink or swim experience, and then the skills and approach they develop rarely changes. Think about that. Most professionals probably have spent 200-300 focused hours of their entire life trying to get good at what they do for 40 years.
> Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately, thank you for writing this.
I have a pet theory that selling products and services that reduce people's ability to look after their own needs (either directly or as a side-effect), while marketing that the same product actually improves your life is one of the key business strategies of our generation.
I've lived in Japan for a few months. I was about halfway through the article, thinking about how it seemed to be a counter-example, before the author called out Japan specifically.
For all the other differences in culture, the attribute of "People Actually Care" seems to have a huge impact on how pleasant a place it is to visit or live.
I don't know why it seems to be the case there. I don't know how to replicate it. I don't think it's magic. I've heard people bandy about the theory of cultural homogeneity. That might be a _factor_, but I doubt it's the full story.
I suspect if you dig into it, differences in economics are a major factor. In the US, it feels like caring is actively punished, economically. Caring is nice, but someone can only _afford_ to care if their other needs are met.
I also wonder if density is a major factor - not so much for the difference in economy of scale, but the difference of "if my physical space is incredibly constrained, I'm both more incentivized to keep it looking nice, and there's less of it to keep looking nice."
And, of course, it's not like Japan is some kind of otherworldly utopia. There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries. But it does seem like almost everyone, everywhere, just... puts in a bit more effort. Takes a little bit more time.
> There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries.
The collectivism of the society which both gives them a public sense of ownership of the whole country (thus, the caring), also yields crazy bullying in school and work, a high suicide rate, and lots of racist and xenophobic attitudes.
Maybe it's changing. It's been a long time since I spent any real time in Japan. My buddy who grew up in Tokushima also is out of touch with how things are there now. Who knows?
This is still pretty true. The xenophobia is waning as Japan's economy stagnates and there's a general vibe that Japan did something wrong economically. But otherwise, these all continue to be real issues in Japan.
These days there's also huge problems with infidelity, marriage rates, and divorce.
Not sure what the "official government figures" are but the OECD says otherwise: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/suicide-rates.html
> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such.
I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into checkout. That is fucked up.