by shermantanktop
4 subcomments
- If I never hear a manager utter “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” again, it’ll be too soon.
It’s one thing to suffer from a blinkered, reductive view of the world. It’s another thing to be proud of it.
- 0) Metrics sure as heck aren’t the issue, because we already have metrics which tell us what to do. There are entire basic fields of economics, sociology and math which have told us how to order these industries to get better outcomes. Since the Scottish widows fund.
1) Healthcare in the USA sucks because politics prevents you from remembering how insurance works. The most basic of basic financial calculations, the advantages of a large pool to absorb risk, vs smaller pools.
2) Education has different reasons for being problematic, and it’s not just in the USA. The USA has only caught up to the problems in the rest of the developing world, having never had to content with these problems before.
by gsf_emergency
2 subcomments
- >"The way forward lies in open-source initiatives, crowdfunded projects, and collaborative efforts that prioritize human outcomes over institutional metrics."
Is it me, or does it feel like developing software for BigCorp sucks for at least these reasons too?
That said, there's also the Baumol cost disease: in certain service industries, productivity increases are difficult to make (or even measure, really). We've tried to automate teaching and healthcare (&art!), but the results are mixed..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
- I have talked about it here a couple times before but my last couple doctors have generally spent more time typing than talking to me. They've become more stenographer than physician. I have lamented how the need for record keeping has seemingly interfered with actual … listening and empathy. They're just typing away on the computer, and I have even had one Google my symptoms and pull up WebMD.
The new piece to this story and in stark contrast - my wife and I recently had a child and our pediatrician is genuinely fantastic. Friendly, helpful, and actively listens to our concerns. It frankly gives me hope that such physician-ing is still possible in today's system.
I don't know what it's going to take to get us back to a reasonable place, but I am frankly kind of hopeful for like some sort of AI note taker so that the doctor could be the human in the room again.
- I wish singleminded focus on measurable outcomes was the problem we have with US healthcare.
by __MatrixMan__
0 subcomment
- I think a lot of these harms could be mitigated by involving practitioners in metric selection. Let the staff pick a metric to focus on this quarter. Next quarter pick a different one. It's optimizing for the same number for ages which leads to the myopia, so lets find a balance re: how fresh we keep them.
- I was being very nitpicky about the ideas shared here before I remembered that BetterSchooling is not a US institution, and so is not talking about US problems. In the US, only the title mostly applies.
- The article isn't wrong, but mostly reads as one big truism. Until we have an actionable alternative to metrics-based systems, they are here to stay.
by low_tech_love
0 subcomment
- Honest question: do you think this article would be worse off without that horrendous image at the start? In other words, was it necessary for the author to add a horror-movie drawing of a hellish hospital within a distorted reality full of misshapen demons in order to make their point?
- Fwiw early childhood education (pre-k) is a slam dunk, one of the highest ROÍ investments a society can make in its people. Yes it can be studied longitudinally and it does make a marked difference.
- The giant, terrible, AI generated header image isn't doing anything to support the page. IMO, either hire an artist for a sketch or remove the image.
Seeing people standing around a classroom... hospital?... as amputees and weird shaped people in a space that's too large for them is very disquieting and distracting from the piece later on.
by throwaway14356
1 subcomments
- didn't give it much thought but couldn't you eventually run schools and universities on a percentage of student income tax (and remove all other sources) combined with a periodic questionnaire (for life) how [?????] one thinks their education was.
probably a bad idea but it gets me to ponder long term measurements
- > Take ApniPathshala, for instance – they're creating learning pods where children can engage in truly self-directed learning
Yeah, children now spend days looking at Youtube hip-hop videos, learning nothing.
> Rethink Metrics
In other words: "The victims of our 'non-education' approach crater on standardized tests. So we must destroy the standardized tests"
by nine_zeros
1 subcomments
- How about a quality and happy customer metric?
How about a quality patient care metric?
How about a metric which asks patients if they felt that the doctor could spend adequate time with them?
How about a metric that measures how long it takes from a phone call to see the doctor?
Ultimately, a lot of metric measuring management is not measuring what customers are asking for. They are only measuring BS that looks good to layers of management, with questionable value produced.
No wonder people have become cynical and unhappy. Our institutions have forgotten to serve the people they are taking money and time from.
by anothernewdude
0 subcomment
- Because private alternatives exist, and therefore the wealthy and powerful have no reason to make public education or healthcare work. (Except for long-sighted views that they seem to lack, possibly because their education is also pretty bad.)
- There's always some dumb "futuristic" education/health solution when countless of countries do it better than the USA in both of these and they didn't have some big tech douchebag running the show. FUND education. Elect people that care about community and education not profits and reducing taxes for the rich(majority of both Rs and Ds)
We live in a society, we are supposed to act civilized first, then throw AI tech solutions at problems. The problem is we do not act civilized, at least rich people and corps don't and rob society of basic funding. Look at food in schools big corps have regulatory capture and can put whatever shit in front of kids and get a stamp from the FDA. Unregulated hyper-concentration of wealth is going to look like and endless funnel to the richer classes and education won't get better even if you can throw some cheap ollama based tools at it.
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