China’s plan to give every citizen a social credit score

Imagine if someone were able to fund a service to provide financial benefits based on inverting the scoring....

More realistically: It provides a (though presumably risky) means of identifying who the Chinese government is concerned about, which would potentially be of interest to dissidents as well... (risky because I presume they'll be keeping a close eye on accesses to this system, and because it of course would be trivial for them to ensure there's plenty of "plants" there to cause problems if dissidents were to use it to find likeminded people)

Proxies like college professors? Students gain points by telling professors what the professors want to hear and if the students thoughts manifest in submitted papers are dissimilar from the professors they are penalized. So, while writing and thinking more important the thinking students are trying to figure out what the professors want to hear.

Of course, this doesn't apply to any discipline that is a system like math, STEM, physics, ect.. But in humanities, what students are learning is to think like their teachers.

I find it quite ironic that you're being downvoted for this.

The amount of discussions about voting even on HN makes it quite clear that even here we are engaging in social-engineering through votes. We see all over the place how people are starting comments with "I know I'll be downvoted for this, but...". Implicit in that is the admission that it takes an extra temptation or push to post something we know will face social sanctions.

Of course this scoring mechanism is worse than getting downvoted on HN or Reddit, but that does not make the comparison irrelevant.

You evaluate this as a credit score. It is not. It is a "citizen score", where the Chinese state is in effect levying an extra tax on business in order to finance financial benefits for those it considers well behaved, and where a credit score is just one of the components.

They could have done the same with direct cash transfers, but here they're leveraging the credit system to make it less blatant (you can pretend to yourself the loan you got wasn't because you pushed your neighbour into withdrawing those posts) and seemingly more rewarding (they just need to finance whatever increased bad credit it causes, so the overall amounts will be larger than if they spent the same on direct transfers).

As a credit score, yes, it's clearly flawed. As a means of controlling the population? It remains to be seen how it'll work for them, but the cost/benefit tradeoff for the Chinese government is whether it costs more or less than maintaining the same control with police and censors.

"If they thought you really were a threat you were executed rather than being sent to a camp."

True, but the threat of deportation was nonetheless one of the Nomenklatura's weapon of choice. Someone's death was, even in the aftermath of the WW2 mass carnage, perceived as brutal mean of "solving" problems and could spur further backslash/dissidence. Someone's separation from their social circle however, was a much more safer method and the perpetrators were able to sleep at night because there could hardly be any retribution for such a thing.

There was a very specific intent of extermination in the slave labour thing, not just utilization of slave labour. Political prisoners would be killed by having too little food when doing heavy work, while ordinary criminals, who would have been equally useful as slave labour, were given a privileged position. [0]

While at this, Soviets also made experiments with people, and I think this was to some extent done out of sheer curiosity for information.

For instance, take a group of men, split them to three and send them to build a canal (dig earth with shovel, cut down trees with hand saw, use these methods to build embankments for a canal).

One of the groups gets "normal" rations (which are far below what is needed to survive). One group gets a little bit more bread, another group gets even less. Then set them to work, and observe how quickly each of them dies. This enables you to optimize a conversion ratio of bread-and-people to kilometres-of-canal.

Soviets studied this, and their then-friends the Nazis came to observe and study and then refined the methods later on.

[0] https://books.google.fi/books/about/Kremlin_kellot.html?id=K... (written by Arvo "Poika" Tuominen, a Finnish communist who was in close contact with Stalin in 1930's. Unfortunately only in Finnish)

Could you please provide some links about this? I'm curious.

Money is a curious sort of behavioral information network, in that the information is destroyed at every hop. If you pay five dollars at my hot dog stand, I accept the exchange in value without the slightest clue if the money came from tutoring orphans, or human trafficking. I'm honestly unsure which has greater perverse incentives and moral hazard: behavioral opacity, or behavioral transparency. (Note that the only entities that have access to at least some of the information of each money hop are governments, banks, credit agencies, and to some extent online silos like Amazon.)

In some other areas, it would be a disaster. I have a habit of ditching game parties where I don't like the outcome. Do we want people to take risk and then just drop it and leave when it doesn't work? Because we've been there with top management compensation.

Most players are lousy at games they play, because they make movies they enjoy instead of movies that are proven best.

Enlightened despotism used to be a popular idea. I don't think it works because there is no guarantee they despot will optimize for country outcome rather than personal enjoyment.