China’s Social Credit: Rewards and Punishments
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
that's the most fucked up part. sure, I can see why you want to punish people who smoke on train platforms, but punishing children for their parents misdeeds? how's that even remotely justifiable? would it be justifiable during a bank robbery hostage situation for the state to take their kids/spouse/family hostage for leverage?
>Being publicly named as a bad citizen. [...] However, people will be notified by the courts before they are added to the list, and are allowed to appeal against the decision within ten days of receiving the notification.
I'm sure that the CCP will provide a fair and impartial trial for those people.
Morally? It's not.
Pragmatically? Keeps the parents in line, just like physically threatening their family would, but without the cost of all that personal attention.
I notice you tried to justify immorality by splitting the response into "morally" and "pragmatically". Implying both (1) morality can be argued against in this case and (2) that it has the weaker argument. I also disagree with this approach here.
Hmmm. Perhaps I wasn't clear. You are reading a _lot_ more into my post than I intended.
I'm an Objectivist Libertarian who thinks that (a) what China is doing in this case is positively evil, and (b) that any level of resistance up and to including violent revolution on the part of the Chinese people would be entirely moral and justified.
By explaining the pragmatic 'justification' for this abhorrent system, I was trying to make the point that the Chinese Government gives exactly no shits about the morality involved; they want to exercise power, and this is seen as a cost-effective means of doing so.
The implied point I was _trying_ to make (and, clearly, failing) was that pragmatism in politics is the devil.
The CPC already does that, seriously. They threaten family of oversea critics.
Foreign Policy recently published an excellent piece on just that:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-re...
This is what leads to a sort of caste system, Because the children of people with bad social credit cannot go to good schools, they are stuck in a perpetual cycle of bad social circles which leads to bad social credit and poverty.
This just leads to a cycle of poverty and discrimination without any opportunity for people to redeem themselves.
Also reminds me of a Black mirror episode on social credit.
Laolai 老赖 refers to those who can afford to pay debts but refuse the court orders to do so. High cost private school tuition is considered luxury spending. So the ability to afford private school is considered constructive evidence of ability to pay debt outstanding.
China needs to figure out a personal bankruptcy system. But it also needs to figure out how to deal with people who hide assets through friends and relatives.
As it stands I doubt this has much to do with social mobility, as some seem to be worried about here.
garnishing wages or seizing money from bank accounts isn't a thing in china?
That means that if your social credit goes down for any of these reasons, which are not all financial, then you can be barred from the best schools.
I think it's far more likely to be used to keep top schools (which feed into top gov't/industrial positions) clean of any rabble-rousers.
OP was talking about a government ban. I could only find cases of courts enforcing civil judgement this way at some cities.
It's culture. In China, you are your family/clan and your family is you. Family in China does not refer to just your immediate, but rather your entire family including 2nd cousins. Individualism isn't as strong there. Why? Due to China's society being 'low trust', you need to rely on your family to survive and thrive.
Also, please be aware that the social credit system that we have in the west has not blackballed you for the comment you just made speaking against it. There is no way for me to report you for your distaste for the biases in the US system, even though you are clearly "inciting unrest." (In repressive countries your comment would be off-limts.)
And there all kinds of things I can't say at work or else I'll be denied credit needed for pretty much everything.
what is this "credit" required to board a flight that you speak of? you can pay for tickets with debit or cash at the counter, so it's not like you need a credit card to fly. if you mean payment for the ticket, i think that's a very reasonable requirement in exchange for the service provided. i did a quick search for a roundtrip flight from new york to chicago on google flights, and it works out to $168 on amirican airlines and $50 on spirit airlines. there might be "tens of millions of Americans" who don't have that much money saved up, if you can't save $50 for a plane ticket, you probably have bigger things to worry about than not being able to get from new york to chicago.
But if you think about it, a system that rewards people based on whether or not they're an asshole does make more sense than one that rewards people only on their ability to accumulate points- it seems to me that such a system would lead to pathological outcomes. Which, of course, it does.
The current system already has surveillance. And it's very likely that some hidden score system is already in place (because surveillance is basically useless without some kind of data-analaysis/filtering tools, which boils down to giving scores to people...) So with the current system, you may be denied government jobs or access to some services based on this hidden scoring system already in place. You will be denied but without knowing why, with no clues on how to fix this.
With an explicit social score, contrary to the current system, you see your score going down whenever you do something that does not please the gov. You also get an explicit score increase or (whatever reward) if you manage to change your behavior to please the gov. This makes it possible to understand why your score might go down and to game the system to bring your score back to normal. Gaming the system and understanding how to regain access to denied services is not possible with the (probably) currently implemented hidden scores.
Of course, I am fully against this type of surveillance and thankful of not living in such country. But the idea the the new, more explicit social credit scores will be worse than the current system can be challenged.
Disclaimer: I live in Australia, where the situation may or may not be the same as the US/Europe.
Edit: to make matters worse, if someone knows you're being discriminated against, and know you know that, they have a lot more power to abuse against you, because you're likely a lot more desperate to recover any score.
The benefit of a lawful society is that the laws are open source. (Takes a lot of meetings to get commit privileges, but that's often more of a feature than a bug)
I agree with you that things like DHS scores are problematic because they are invisible.
However, even if you consider your "credit score" to be a hidden system in the US, the usage of that system is not hidden. For example, people in the US have started fighting back against prospective employers using your credit score to deny you employment. In the Chinese system, this is positively encouraged.
Personally, I hope China does this more and more and more. The more of this that China implements, the less we have to worry about them on the world stage.
But I don't think such an experiment has been tried out on such a massive scale over a nation of billion plus humans.
This is the next great social experiment after the failure of the Soviet Union, so it will be interesting to see the end results.
Americans and the West should recognize this a legitimate threat to their civilization, because the success of this system will result in its spread similar to the spread of communism during the cold war days.
What the Chinese Social credit system is way beyond simple discrimination.
>When Mr. Li, the lawyer, was first blacklisted in 2016, it took three weeks before an official talked to him. The court requested a second apology, which he wrote, leading to his removal from the travel blacklist. But he remains on another list, about which he had not been previously informed, this one prohibiting him from applying for credit cards. The court has told Mr. Li to write another apology.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/12/12/chinas-chilling-social-c...
I'm reminded of Alan Turing; there was a really nice quote by some Briton to the tune of "If we had known he was gay we might have lost the war". There are a lot of social norms that simply haven't withstood the test of time. I look at the 10 Commandments and I think about half of them still hold for me.
Linking social norms, which are significantly arbitrary, to a powerful surveillance state and enforcement? Ignoring the personal risk the citizens would face, this might have economic and military consequences to China's detriment.
The major difference is that this is merely enabled by the government, not run by it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-credit/china-to-bar...
Unreal. How long until this takes root in the west?
What happens to people who don't use social media, don't necessarily like being social, and just want to sit at home and play video games or reball some BGP's? Does this mean they're a bad person?
For example, in some states, you can be denied a job based on your credit score.
https://www.selflender.com/blog/can-an-employer-not-hire-me-...
http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/pf/employer-credit-checks/in...
So, with social scores: when corporations organize to share information against people it's bad, but when the government formalizes, legalizes and makes mandatory the entire system it's a whole lot worse.
Power and who has it can be more subtle than guns. However, I agree that the guns add quite a kick. One step deeper though one might interrogate the extent to which government power is used to support corporations. People get shot and go to jail over such things.
America already has one experience with a mechanism that can coordinate non-equilibrium behaviors among companies that would individually benefit from defecting: racism. Government fiat is another such mechanism, and as far as the similarities go, it could produce something of the same results. (Groups cut out of society with nowhere to turn.)
You don't have a Facebook account? That's minus some points too.
Cable companies can already track what and how much you watch. If you use Steam for video games, they can track what you play and for how long. Soon your xBox or Playstation won't work without an internet connection.
[0]: http://scmp.com/sport/hong-kong/article/1901082/hong-kong-fo...
Instead, this is the absolute worst of American-style private contractor bullshit (private prisons, etc.), rolled up with the absolute worst of Chinese-style opacity and oppressiveness.
Who on earth would think that a hidden (known to few) objective function for being a good citizen would help create a better society? Why would anyone think that the private sector in China is even remotely transparent or credible enough to hold this kind of responsibility? Who on earth believes that China has the ability to administer this system with even a modicum of fairness (that might not be a shared value, to be fair)?
Nothing is black and white on this earth, and I genuinely hope this can work, but I think it is a transparently awful idea and I am disappointed in any group of people who would yoke themselves to it.
[edit] It's the worst of neither American private contractor bullshit or Chinese oppressiveness and opacity, that's a deep dark well that it would be pretty tough to scrape the bottom of. It's a crude fusion of both, and it's going to hurt a lot of people in ways little and big, but it isn't the worst of either.
I don't really understand the political spectrum in the United States, tbh. Obviously you need to be willing to take up arms against an oppressive federal government, should such a thing happen (and who would be deluded enough to think that a military coup would be categorically impossible in any country - if not now, what about a century from now?)
You are making an unjustified leap in assuming that "liberals" are in opposition to owning firearms.
Most liberals have no real problem with people owning guns. You don't hear the vast majority of people clamoring to ban hunting rifles or shotguns.
What most people (liberal and conservative) want are sensible regulations to prevent the genuinely mentally ill or disturbed from getting guns and ammo.
The problem is that the NRA plays outrage politics in order generate funding for itself and this short circuits any useful discussion. Although, it is looking like the NRA has just been functioning as a Russian stooge for quite a while now.
As for opposing a coup? That's gonna be tough. The US is BIG. No amount of firearms in Arizona is going to help opposition in Washington DC to fight off a coup.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but: it's my opinion (one widely shared) that one of the reasons this sort of programme hasn't taken root in the USA already is that your Constitution effectively prohibits it. In principle with the entire document, and in practice with the 2nd.
Furthermore, I think that both the 1st and 2nd Amendments act as handy mineshaft canaries. You should mistrust the motivations of anyone who seeks to abrogate either.
This is already in action to some degree in the US: employers are already able to use criminal background, public records, and (in many places) credit checks to make hiring decisions. The difference is that it's primarily private companies doing this research/scoring and some states have protections in place for prospective employees.
The 2nd amendment does nothing about these private companies using your information to limit your career options (indirectly restricting your free movement.) Anyone taking arms to protest this would rightly be considered a terrorist in the eyes of the law.
But rules systems can end up being highly arbitrary too, of course, especially over time. A sufficiently convoluted bureaucratic system bluntly or sloppily implemented can be anarchic (random) in its effects. Witness the Canadian policy of refusing to allow babies to board airplanes if they have the same name as someone on the "no fly list," since the rules don't make an explicit exception for babies.
The next generation of Chinese leaders will be the first modern ones to have been completely untouched by Maoism. Well, that’s assuming they are allowed to take power...