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Comment by trendia | Hacker News Reader

What actions and what sort of payment?

Not the OP, but in my mind I want a system that rewards members who are improving the health(mental and physical) of the largest possible group of other humans. The anti axis of this would be producing pain in the smallest set of other humans possible.

The way to punish behaviors that are scoring worse on the above would be to reduce the total number of connections possible to other humans. You would need a recovery sensor to catch run away cascading punishments and isolate for rehab.

So you find someone who has healthy relationships and you empower them. You someone with unhealthy relationships and you isolate them and rehab.

Someone who can maintain large n umbers of healthy relationships is a leader.

This sounds dystopian at best.

I was thinking the exact same thing. The whole tone is incredibly Orwellian.

We already do a less granular version of that in the US (it was developed before the ubiquitous surveillance necessary to implement the fine-grained version)--our mechanism for punishment-by-constrained-relationship-options is prison.

Our system was developed with an eye towards penitence (this started with Eastern State penitentiary in Pennsylvania). Forced penitence is a flawed concept to begin with which renders our penal system almost ineffectual in its current state. The fact of the matter is that certain people are better off separated from society while other people could do with a brief respite coupled with some therapy.

This is most aparant in non-violent cases involving drugs. The war on drugs has ruined more lives than conceivable and this is while our government has realized the bad effects of prohibition for almost a century now (there is an entire constitutional amendment). The war on drugs has the effect of granting criminal organizations a monopoly over vices. While vices might not be attractive, they are necessary and granting the monopoly to violent organizations is at best gross negligence on our government's behalf.

So like the social media system china has?

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