10 ms·

Ultimately, what would such a system be optimized for? The goals will be modulated by the persons or groups in power. From what I've seen, the powerful in China

Ultimately, what would such a system be optimized for? The goals will be modulated by the persons or groups in power. From what I've seen, the powerful in China seek a stable, well behaved, productive workforce such that the profit from their labor can accrue to the benefit of the ruling class. A data collection system as pervasive as the social credit system that feeds into a self-optimizing control center that can influence the behavior of the ruled, is economically potent. Make the goals to get the most profit from the least investment into the work force, coerce their productivity with increasing restrictions and penalties, and you're moving towards virtual enslavement.

HashingtheCode 6y ago
> what would such a system be optimized for? Power and control of the population at large. The SCS willbe the largest spy network and intelligence gathering system outside of the NSA. Through its massive data collection ability, the CCP will be able to spy on dissidents, minority groups such as the Uighur, protestors of the party regime, political opponents, and any other undesirables the party so chooses. Anyone can be a target and will be punished by disobeying the party rules both financially (directly through the score) and also physically with imprisonment. What is the Social Credit Score at its most basic level? Control. It is a computer generated prison built to keep people under control in order to change a once free human being into a slave.
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
At least on paper it's optimized for all good things. From the article above: Negative factors: dishonest and fraudulent financial behavior, playing loud music, violating traffic rules, making reservations at restaurants and not showing up, failing to correctly sort your waste, fraudulently using other people's public transportation ID cards Positive factors, on the other hand, include: donating blood, donating to charity, volunteering to community services But the lack of transparency means that what's promised may be different from what's actually done.
- HashingtheCode 6y ago
  > At least on paper it's optimized for all good things.... Tell that to Liu Hu. Liu Hu is a journalist in China, writing about censorship and government corruption. Because of his work, Liu has been arrested and fined — and blacklisted. Liu found he was named on a List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People's Court as "not qualified" to buy a plane ticket, and banned from travelling some train lines, buying property, or taking out a loan. "There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to," he told The Globe and Mail. "What's really scary is there's nothing you can do about it. You can report to no one. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere."
  - 2a0c40 6y ago
    https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/grounded-life-no-fly-list https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/grounded-life-...
    - HashingtheCode 6y ago
      Not the same thing as it applies to suspected terrorist only. In contrast anyone can be blacklisted by the SCS for numerous reasons unrelated to terrorism and banned from using ALL forms of public transport.
      - kelnos 6y ago
        Given the opaque nature of the US no-fly list, in practice you can be blacklisted from flying for any -- or no -- reason, and no one is accountable for that choice. If -- and that's a big "if" -- you have the connections required to appeal that decision, the end result is just "oops, sorry, it was an accident", with no consequences to the government for their "error".
      - nl 6y ago
        The key question is "is this subject to judicial oversight such that an ordinary citizen can challenge it" The US is better in that id can be challenged. However, there are significant difficulties with this in practice[1]. This is still better than the situation in China where there is no legal means to challenge it. [1] eg, https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2019/01/02/no-fly-list-terrorists-government-1078246 https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2019/01/02/no...
lowdose 6y ago
Maybe this system is able to make sociopaths more accountable for the suffering they cause. We have no data on people with this spectrum of mental illness because they do not report themselves. Estimations on the number of sociopaths in the wild are anywhere between 1% to 5 % of the population. If this social credit score is able to limit the damage these people can cause during their lifetime I would say the experiment is successful.
- jacobush 6y ago
  It will also make minorities more accountable for being minorities. Also known as "driving while black". "Enemy of the State (1998)" but as mundane everyday reality, not a blockbuster movie and with your jelaous neighbours reporting you for anything and everything.
  - lowdose 6y ago
    I was talking about the possible positive goals from such a scoring system without projecting local extremes on a foreign system.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- HashingtheCode 6y ago
  > Maybe this system is able to make sociopaths more accountable for the suffering they cause. So you support the entire enslavement of a population using this Orwellian system of surveillance and control because of the "damage" sociopaths cause, even though sociopaths makes up approximately 3 to 5 percent of the general population?????
- mcguire 6y ago
  How much collateral damage from the system itself are you willing to accept?
op03 6y ago
You give them too much credit. There is no such fine grained control. Its more like an ant hill or an endocrine system.
- HashingtheCode 6y ago
  Once a person has a score, all their credit behavior in life is recorded and can be evaluated by that number. The goal is to force people to obey out of fear of punishment in the reduction of this number and the resulting restrictions, which ultimately is expressed by the CCP in the following manner: "It will allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step"
- Lammy 6y ago
  It’s even worse than that: no direct fine-grained control, because the system trains the grains to control themselves and each other.
mistermann 6y ago
> From what I've seen, the powerful in China seek a stable, well behaved, productive workforce such that the profit from their labor can accrue to the benefit of the ruling class. > Make the goals to get the most profit from the least investment into the work force, coerce their productivity with increasing restrictions and penalties, and you're moving towards virtual enslavement. This seems like the polar opposite of my perception. If one looks at statistics [1], or simply spends a few hours (or years, as I have) watching China based YouTube vloggers, there seems to be an unmistakable and rapid increase of the common man's wealth and material well being. I can't really think of any observation I've experienced that contradicts this apparent trend. What data sources are you using? [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages
- np- 6y ago
  If by common man you mean Han Chinese who live in major urban areas - then yes, your observation is mostly correct. But the expense seems to be the systematic oppression of rural populations and ethnic minorities (Uighurs, Tibetans, etc). The virtual (and physical) enslavement already exists [1], it's not really some hypothetical. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/24/china-has-built-380-internment-camps-in-xinjiang-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/24/china-has-buil...
  - mistermann 6y ago
    > But the expense seems to be... There does indeed seem to be signs of oppression of ethnic minorities in China, but to me this is a relatively unrelated anomaly on a statistical basis compared to the general question of where do the fruits of labour in China go: to those doing the work, or to the ruling class. Most of what I have observed suggests that there is a "rising tide lifts all boats" phenomenon underway, although determining the degree to which the distribution is consistent with what is "fair" is obviously problematic, as with any other country. As for the Uighur & Tibetan situation, this is starting to look like it's going to be just one of those very unfortunate facts of life, but my intuition is that once the distinctness of these cultures is sufficiently eliminated (wild guess: 20-100 years), the difference of treatment will be relatively minimal, provided standard of living continues to rise across the board. But then who knows, anything can happen.
willis936 6y ago
Judging from tik toks and r/scriptedasiangifs: misogyny is one thing being optimized for.
- wakawaka1 6y ago
  "misogyny" has lost its meaning, as it is such a frivolously used term. good riddance. it's mostly a feminist-branded term, pushed as part of a category (men vs women) neomarxist classist oppression narrative. frankly, I don't see what point you're trying to make, except trying to make anything/everything about misogyny-- which is precisely why it has lost its meaning. Perhaps it's your psychological projection, or your virtue signal?
nendroid 6y ago
>Ultimately, what would such a system be optimized for? You're completely right. The purpose of such a system shall be used to maintain power but that's not the sole purpose of such a system. More than just benefiting the ruling class China wants to be better than and more powerful than the United States of America in every possible way. In order to do this their policies must benefit the working class as well as it is the working class that will be responsible for building a society that supasses the United States economically and technologically. It's naive to think that China sole purpose is just to have a fat happy ruling class... as the status quo pretty much supports that already. Like all humans no one stays satisfied forever and China's ruling class wants to be better than the United States. Given the state of things China of course has ambitions far greater than your presumptions. That being said there is a more immediate purpose for the system that involves changing people's' behavior so that they can avoid the tragedy of the commons. If you ever been to China you'll notice that people in general just don't care about the common good. Such systems stop people from pissing on the sidewalk or shitting out in an open field, spitting everywhere and littering cigarette butts wherever they please as this is much of what chinese people do without care. Improving society is not just a gimmicky cover for consolidating power. It is an actual goal to be used in conjunction with consolidating power. Chinas' goal is to build a happy society that is more affluent and happy than the US but has less freedoms. A similar system has already been tried in another country successfully. They used extreme punishment in place of extreme monitoring. See Singapore. In Singapore you can get the death penalty for possessing weed, not kidding.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  I'd be happy to let the chinese take over but I think they'd put me in a death camp and harvest my organs and rape my sister because we're brown. Just seems like what they'd do, after seeing what they're doing to the uighurs.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please do not take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. Such discussions are repetitive, predictable, nasty, and dumb. We're trying for thoughtful conversation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
mechnesium 6y ago
A social credit system seems like the only logical and humane evolutionary solution for a nation with over a billion people and counting. There has to be a way to filter the signal from the noise. If you want something different, go somewhere with a smaller population where you can afford that luxury. Quantity versus quality.
chrischen 6y ago
The powerful in any society seek that. Some don't even realize it. What do you think the oft-sought "passive income" comes from. That's when your wealth reaches a point where you can use it to derive more wealth off of others' work.
DeonPenny 6y ago
But you have to think the CCP know what to optimize for. Which history shows us govts rarely know more than people faced with issues daily.
- adrianN 6y ago
  I think you need to differentiate. Some issues can't be optimized by the people facing them daily, because game theory forbids them. Issues involving coordinated action are basically unsolvable bottom up.
  - DeonPenny 6y ago
    I think history disagrees with that. With deregulation and incentive and because how the resource pool in human civilization according to Pareto distributions. You can have a individual coordinate most things bottom up if you let them. Like people thought private space flight was impossible, but it ended up being more impossible from a top down process than a bottoms up on via elon musk.
hardsoftnfloppy 6y ago
I think you're overreacting. They're just using this information to make lists. No harm ever came from systematically labelling, listing, and categorizing people into specific groups, and shaming them publically.
bleepblorp 6y ago
Nitpick: I don't think it's completely accurate to imply that Chinese elites are exclusively interested in economic self-enrichment. Societies where the elites are only interested in stealing everything they can take look like Nigeria (or Mississippi): a tiny sliver of people living in luxury while the rest of the population lives in permanent, abject, squalor. In contrast, median living standards in China have improved dramatically in living memory. In many cases, the transformation has literally been from mud huts to skyscrapers. The kind of wealth distribution that supported this transformation would not have been possible if China's elites were only interested in self enrichment; if they were, they would have taken the wealth for themselves. Obviously, China's human rights policies have no redeeming qualities, but its economic policies have benefited the average Chinese citizen. Credit where it's due.
- Hasz 6y ago
  I would argue that the CCP has largely traded an increased standard of living for the commoners for additional system stability for the elite. It's a small absolute cost to take someone from mud hut to concrete box, but the relative economic multiples for those in charge, multiplied by a few hundred million, are massive. It's also much harder to foment revolution when you've been lifted out of poverty in a generation (even if it's due!)
- readams 6y ago
  Only if the elites are very short sighted. You can extract far more wealth if the economy is strong.
  - danielheath 6y ago
    Whoever ends up in charge can extract more wealth. Staying on top is the first problem for any elite.
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago
  Just a reminder that the managerial class hasn't always existed, and once most of the jobs that require high amounts of skill have been automated away, we'll see a large contraction of middle class back into general impoverished
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

HashingtheCode 6y ago

> what would such a system be optimized for? Power and control of the population at large. The SCS willbe the largest spy network and intelligence gathering system outside of the NSA. Through its massive data collection ability, the CCP will be able to spy on dissidents, minority groups such as the Uighur, protestors of the party regime, political opponents, and any other undesirables the party so chooses. Anyone can be a target and will be punished by disobeying the party rules both financially (directly through the score) and also physically with imprisonment. What is the Social Credit Score at its most basic level? Control. It is a computer generated prison built to keep people under control in order to change a once free human being into a slave.

AlexTWithBeard 6y ago

At least on paper it's optimized for all good things. From the article above: Negative factors: dishonest and fraudulent financial behavior, playing loud music, violating traffic rules, making reservations at restaurants and not showing up, failing to correctly sort your waste, fraudulently using other people's public transportation ID cards Positive factors, on the other hand, include: donating blood, donating to charity, volunteering to community services But the lack of transparency means that what's promised may be different from what's actually done.

HashingtheCode 6y ago
> At least on paper it's optimized for all good things.... Tell that to Liu Hu. Liu Hu is a journalist in China, writing about censorship and government corruption. Because of his work, Liu has been arrested and fined — and blacklisted. Liu found he was named on a List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People's Court as "not qualified" to buy a plane ticket, and banned from travelling some train lines, buying property, or taking out a loan. "There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to," he told The Globe and Mail. "What's really scary is there's nothing you can do about it. You can report to no one. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere."
- 2a0c40 6y ago
  https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/grounded-life-no-fly-list https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/grounded-life-...
  - HashingtheCode 6y ago
    Not the same thing as it applies to suspected terrorist only. In contrast anyone can be blacklisted by the SCS for numerous reasons unrelated to terrorism and banned from using ALL forms of public transport.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      Given the opaque nature of the US no-fly list, in practice you can be blacklisted from flying for any -- or no -- reason, and no one is accountable for that choice. If -- and that's a big "if" -- you have the connections required to appeal that decision, the end result is just "oops, sorry, it was an accident", with no consequences to the government for their "error".
    - nl 6y ago
      The key question is "is this subject to judicial oversight such that an ordinary citizen can challenge it" The US is better in that id can be challenged. However, there are significant difficulties with this in practice[1]. This is still better than the situation in China where there is no legal means to challenge it. [1] eg, https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2019/01/02/no-fly-list-terrorists-government-1078246 https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2019/01/02/no...

lowdose 6y ago

Maybe this system is able to make sociopaths more accountable for the suffering they cause. We have no data on people with this spectrum of mental illness because they do not report themselves. Estimations on the number of sociopaths in the wild are anywhere between 1% to 5 % of the population. If this social credit score is able to limit the damage these people can cause during their lifetime I would say the experiment is successful.

jacobush 6y ago
It will also make minorities more accountable for being minorities. Also known as "driving while black". "Enemy of the State (1998)" but as mundane everyday reality, not a blockbuster movie and with your jelaous neighbours reporting you for anything and everything.
- lowdose 6y ago
  I was talking about the possible positive goals from such a scoring system without projecting local extremes on a foreign system.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
HashingtheCode 6y ago
> Maybe this system is able to make sociopaths more accountable for the suffering they cause. So you support the entire enslavement of a population using this Orwellian system of surveillance and control because of the "damage" sociopaths cause, even though sociopaths makes up approximately 3 to 5 percent of the general population?????
mcguire 6y ago
How much collateral damage from the system itself are you willing to accept?

op03 6y ago

You give them too much credit. There is no such fine grained control. Its more like an ant hill or an endocrine system.

HashingtheCode 6y ago
Once a person has a score, all their credit behavior in life is recorded and can be evaluated by that number. The goal is to force people to obey out of fear of punishment in the reduction of this number and the resulting restrictions, which ultimately is expressed by the CCP in the following manner: "It will allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step"
Lammy 6y ago
It’s even worse than that: no direct fine-grained control, because the system trains the grains to control themselves and each other.

mistermann 6y ago

> From what I've seen, the powerful in China seek a stable, well behaved, productive workforce such that the profit from their labor can accrue to the benefit of the ruling class. > Make the goals to get the most profit from the least investment into the work force, coerce their productivity with increasing restrictions and penalties, and you're moving towards virtual enslavement. This seems like the polar opposite of my perception. If one looks at statistics [1], or simply spends a few hours (or years, as I have) watching China based YouTube vloggers, there seems to be an unmistakable and rapid increase of the common man's wealth and material well being. I can't really think of any observation I've experienced that contradicts this apparent trend. What data sources are you using? [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages

np- 6y ago
If by common man you mean Han Chinese who live in major urban areas - then yes, your observation is mostly correct. But the expense seems to be the systematic oppression of rural populations and ethnic minorities (Uighurs, Tibetans, etc). The virtual (and physical) enslavement already exists [1], it's not really some hypothetical. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/24/china-has-built-380-internment-camps-in-xinjiang-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/24/china-has-buil...
- mistermann 6y ago
  > But the expense seems to be... There does indeed seem to be signs of oppression of ethnic minorities in China, but to me this is a relatively unrelated anomaly on a statistical basis compared to the general question of where do the fruits of labour in China go: to those doing the work, or to the ruling class. Most of what I have observed suggests that there is a "rising tide lifts all boats" phenomenon underway, although determining the degree to which the distribution is consistent with what is "fair" is obviously problematic, as with any other country. As for the Uighur & Tibetan situation, this is starting to look like it's going to be just one of those very unfortunate facts of life, but my intuition is that once the distinctness of these cultures is sufficiently eliminated (wild guess: 20-100 years), the difference of treatment will be relatively minimal, provided standard of living continues to rise across the board. But then who knows, anything can happen.

willis936 6y ago

Judging from tik toks and r/scriptedasiangifs: misogyny is one thing being optimized for.

wakawaka1 6y ago
"misogyny" has lost its meaning, as it is such a frivolously used term. good riddance. it's mostly a feminist-branded term, pushed as part of a category (men vs women) neomarxist classist oppression narrative. frankly, I don't see what point you're trying to make, except trying to make anything/everything about misogyny-- which is precisely why it has lost its meaning. Perhaps it's your psychological projection, or your virtue signal?

nendroid 6y ago

>Ultimately, what would such a system be optimized for? You're completely right. The purpose of such a system shall be used to maintain power but that's not the sole purpose of such a system. More than just benefiting the ruling class China wants to be better than and more powerful than the United States of America in every possible way. In order to do this their policies must benefit the working class as well as it is the working class that will be responsible for building a society that supasses the United States economically and technologically. It's naive to think that China sole purpose is just to have a fat happy ruling class... as the status quo pretty much supports that already. Like all humans no one stays satisfied forever and China's ruling class wants to be better than the United States. Given the state of things China of course has ambitions far greater than your presumptions. That being said there is a more immediate purpose for the system that involves changing people's' behavior so that they can avoid the tragedy of the commons. If you ever been to China you'll notice that people in general just don't care about the common good. Such systems stop people from pissing on the sidewalk or shitting out in an open field, spitting everywhere and littering cigarette butts wherever they please as this is much of what chinese people do without care. Improving society is not just a gimmicky cover for consolidating power. It is an actual goal to be used in conjunction with consolidating power. Chinas' goal is to build a happy society that is more affluent and happy than the US but has less freedoms. A similar system has already been tried in another country successfully. They used extreme punishment in place of extreme monitoring. See Singapore. In Singapore you can get the death penalty for possessing weed, not kidding.

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
I'd be happy to let the chinese take over but I think they'd put me in a death camp and harvest my organs and rape my sister because we're brown. Just seems like what they'd do, after seeing what they're doing to the uighurs.
- dang 6y ago
  Please do not take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. Such discussions are repetitive, predictable, nasty, and dumb. We're trying for thoughtful conversation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mechnesium 6y ago

A social credit system seems like the only logical and humane evolutionary solution for a nation with over a billion people and counting. There has to be a way to filter the signal from the noise. If you want something different, go somewhere with a smaller population where you can afford that luxury. Quantity versus quality.

chrischen 6y ago

The powerful in any society seek that. Some don't even realize it. What do you think the oft-sought "passive income" comes from. That's when your wealth reaches a point where you can use it to derive more wealth off of others' work.

DeonPenny 6y ago

But you have to think the CCP know what to optimize for. Which history shows us govts rarely know more than people faced with issues daily.

adrianN 6y ago
I think you need to differentiate. Some issues can't be optimized by the people facing them daily, because game theory forbids them. Issues involving coordinated action are basically unsolvable bottom up.
- DeonPenny 6y ago
  I think history disagrees with that. With deregulation and incentive and because how the resource pool in human civilization according to Pareto distributions. You can have a individual coordinate most things bottom up if you let them. Like people thought private space flight was impossible, but it ended up being more impossible from a top down process than a bottoms up on via elon musk.

hardsoftnfloppy 6y ago

I think you're overreacting. They're just using this information to make lists. No harm ever came from systematically labelling, listing, and categorizing people into specific groups, and shaming them publically.

bleepblorp 6y ago

Nitpick: I don't think it's completely accurate to imply that Chinese elites are exclusively interested in economic self-enrichment. Societies where the elites are only interested in stealing everything they can take look like Nigeria (or Mississippi): a tiny sliver of people living in luxury while the rest of the population lives in permanent, abject, squalor. In contrast, median living standards in China have improved dramatically in living memory. In many cases, the transformation has literally been from mud huts to skyscrapers. The kind of wealth distribution that supported this transformation would not have been possible if China's elites were only interested in self enrichment; if they were, they would have taken the wealth for themselves. Obviously, China's human rights policies have no redeeming qualities, but its economic policies have benefited the average Chinese citizen. Credit where it's due.

Hasz 6y ago
I would argue that the CCP has largely traded an increased standard of living for the commoners for additional system stability for the elite. It's a small absolute cost to take someone from mud hut to concrete box, but the relative economic multiples for those in charge, multiplied by a few hundred million, are massive. It's also much harder to foment revolution when you've been lifted out of poverty in a generation (even if it's due!)
readams 6y ago
Only if the elites are very short sighted. You can extract far more wealth if the economy is strong.
- danielheath 6y ago
  Whoever ends up in charge can extract more wealth. Staying on top is the first problem for any elite.
SQueeeeeL 6y ago
Just a reminder that the managerial class hasn't always existed, and once most of the jobs that require high amounts of skill have been automated away, we'll see a large contraction of middle class back into general impoverished

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]