College Rejection Threat Highlights Social Credit Blacklists | Hacker News Reader

College Rejection Threat Highlights Social Credit Blacklists

chinadigitaltimes.net

65 pointsSami_Lehtinen30 comments

Minority View Warning!!

In a small rural village, when one person misbehaves, everyone knows and punishes the offender with collective actions. That serves as a major deterrent against bad behaviors. This mechanism is weakened by the size of community. Reputational information cannot always travel as far as a person could. The social credit system is a reimplementation of this mechanism from the old days.

It can be abused the same way. A village peon who angers the powerful become an outcast regardless of who is in the right.

A blacklist without context and without the people executing the punishment knowing the person is pretty different from small communities. It captures some of the "small" aspect but completely misses the effects of having a "community".

Also my wife grew up in a small town and how judgemental they were is the main reason she is glad not to be there anymore so even if we could recreate how small towns actually work I don't know if we want to.

In that case we should also reproduce the other things that are available in the village, like a shared history that helps with the understanding of the situation.

The thing that is scary is the blanket application of rules. This type of system is bound to have issues because it will lose the finesse that individuals can apply to a situation. As usual with bigger, more efficient systems some qualities are lost, and here it's the human touch.

Does this really happen, though? If you look at incidence rates for violence, prostitution, alcoholism, and other anti-social behaviors, misbehavior tends to decrease over time (in line with urbanization/modernization).

Small communities may be better at incentivizing the perception of good behavior, but it's debatable whether this leads to better outcomes, or if it just teaches community members how to hide or ignore transgressions.

I think one of the most important considerations for any law of governmental system is to ask yourself not how it could ideally be used, but how it could be used or misused in case when there was a bad player in power. Because government is not objective nor benevolent. It's just a collection of individuals that some might argue self selects to some of the least desirable traits for those of such responsibility and power. And the thing that history has shown time and again is that it's not a question if a government will be corrupted, but when.

Take for instance gerrymandering. The system that enables it was created with great intentions. State populations change over time and so the idea is to let politicians, democratically elected, adjust the boundaries of various districts to compensate for changing populations over time. Great idea, but now it's little more than a tool for trying to screw over 'the other side' while bypassing democratic representation so much as possible. Imagine the potential for attacking companies, individuals, or groups with a tool as amorphous as a social credit system.

So I do actually agree with you, that if used properly it could really be a quite useful system. But, I would never support such a thing because, sooner or later, it will not be used properly - and the consequences will be dire.

Reputation is very abstract concept and in the eyes of the beholder. There is no universal reputation metric.

In the US there is credit rating system, which everyone used prior to 2008 to determine who is credit worthy. After economy collapsed majority of businesses just completely ignored it because huge chunk of population who still had good jobs just defaulted on their obligations, because their assets were so much underwater.It just made total economic sense to default.

Unless of course its the village elders/headmen who are doing the oppressing eg the abuse lower case villagers in India face.

Barring someone from getting an education because of their father's debts seems tremendously short-sighted. Setting aside the issue of being punished for someone else's offenses, if you start taking away people's life prospects, it's not hard to see the criminal undervlasses growing in numbers. If the case described in the article is representative of how this credit system works, it seems likely to undermine the stability of Chinese society, not bolster it.

If you click through the links after links and read the original article, the family obviously had a $200,000 loan from a bank and failed to pay at due time, meanwhile his kids still attend private schools. The case was brought to a court, and the father was added to the "blacklist".

This story aside, the system is in spotlight because China now have a huge debt problem.

Sociopaths do exist and a social credit system can be helpful in limiting the extent of their damage. On the other hand, at what costs?

Some social problems (illegal immigration in the US comes to mind) might not actually have a practical solution. For such problems, it might be the case that actually trying to solve the problem is much worse than just living with it. Kind of like back problems. Light treatment - like physical therapy - can be really helpful, but the heavy handed approach of surgery can leave you paralyzed / dealing with extreme pain.

Sociopaths are precisely the sort of people who enjoy success in optimizing for whatever metrics they're measured by

Orwellian and insane as fuck. Who decides what is a “credit” and what is a “debt?” What recourse or due-process do people have to challenge this evidence-free, glorified thought-policing? Those were rhetorical questions because this sort of whole social-engineering is totalitarian, ludicrous and the textbook definition of evil; also look at internet and media censorship, Xi installing himself as Emperor, lack of property rights and the supposedly “anti-corruption” campaign. What shred of moral authority can one have when they install themselves as supreme dictator?

Exactly. This is horrifying. Another insane situation is the US drone program's Social Credit Kill List [1],

> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”

> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”

> “When I learned about signature strikes, that was incredible,” Faisal says. “If the criteria is being armed or having a beard – that is everyone in Yemen.”

Governments need to be more transparent on how social credits are "credited" and "debited".

1. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...

Thank you for sharing that Rolling Stone link. It is harrowing and absolutely terrifying, and indeed a clear and irrefutable description of how the U.S. has already been using a form of algorithmic social credit system for years to select assassination targets in the middle east. Highly relevant for a thread like this one duscussing additional (less lethal) types of damage from social credit systems.

> Who decides what is a “credit” and what is a “debt?” What recourse or due-process do people have to challenge this evidence-free, glorified thought-policing?

While I agree that the whole "credit system" is nonsense, but for this particular question, I'd blame bad journalism.

China may be on to something. White-collar crime convictions should include restrictions like that unless and until all losses and fines have been repaid. You can fly, but only in coach. You can't fly in a private aircraft. You can't have a credit card above the low-end level. You can't be an officer or director of a company. You can't play golf on a public course. You have to file taxes with the standard deduction.

It's easy to go to far with those by accident. Examples:

- no private aircraft - what about rural doctors and farmers?

- no high end credit card - so you want them to pay more (higher interest) to the banks, because... why?

- can't be a director - so do you just take their company from them? who do you give it to? how does that help repay debt?

- no golf - so if someone's a professional golfer/trainer you're stripping them of a job that would help repay the debt?

Almost all these ideas are like debtors prison - maybe feels good to kick the guilty, but does society benefit?

> - no private aircraft - what about rural doctors and farmers?

The day that a rural doctor or farmer is indicted for defrauding investors for hundreds of millions of dollars, that objection might make sense.

It isn't so out of the question for folks to cheat on their taxes and get caught for it. This happens at all levels of society. It doesn't have to be for much money, after all, just enough to help folks survive. With the US tax code as-is, it is actually pretty easy.

Not investors, but I don't see why they couldn't defraud people for large amount via scams.

But why? They are already getting prison sentence for it.

The problem is that all the punishment is actually cost society money and productivity. Like telling people that they can’t get education because of whatever is huge net negative to society.

Based on the article, it appears that the blacklists are used to punish instances where someone was ordered to pay a fine but didn't comply. I think in pretty much any western country, that would result in a prison sentence in itself, but apparently not in China. So those limitations that are put on blacklisted persons are essentially a half-prison: not complete restriction of movement, but enough to serve as punishment. From that viewpoint, it might actually be cheaper to enforce than a prison sentence. It certainly seems to be preferable to the Chinese authorities who came up with the system.

Whoa there. Not paying a fine in a western country doesn’t necessarily (and doesn’t often) lead to jail time. Civil penalties are not easily converted into criminal ones, for obvious reasons (they punish poorer offenders for not being rich).

I'm most familiar with the situation in Germany [1] where you either have to pay your fines, prove that you can't pay (in which case the fine is deferred or split into smaller installments) or get detained in prison for up to six weeks (or three months for multiple fines).

Of course most people do end up complying in one way or another (which means that the fine is eventually paid, even if very poor people might need many small installments).

I'm pretty sure that most other countries will also eventually threaten to imprison someone if they make no effort to pay a fine, otherwise many people would simply ignore them and never pay.

[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_owig/englisch_ow...

No, that definitely isn’t true in the USA. I didn’t realize Germany was so backwards.

They will seize your assets, garnish your wages, but they won’t send you to jail, how would you even pay then?

It's exactly the same in US

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/09/384968360...

For the sake of argument: US universities argue the importance of personality scores. Couldn't social credit be interpreted in the same way? Maybe society stands to gain if more reputable and trustworthy people get the top education spots?

That argument doesn't work for banning the children of people with debts though.

I would expect most people who argue against the social credit system to also argue against those personality scores.

Very interesting references in this post which give a good perspective on the blacklist system.

This story is totally taken out of context. The rejection was from a PRIVATE university and based on an inability to pay past loans. This is totally within scope of reasonableness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com