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Comment by walrus1066 | Hacker News Reader

Surprised social credit isn't mentioned, it's incredibly dark and creepy concept.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/10/09/655921710/chin...

It's very creepy indeed, although not sure how dark it is, relatively speaking.

If you've ever lived in a developing country for long enough, often you've thought "I wish people had some incentive to think about my safety/comfort, not just their own". Because they don't have that incentive, and for individuals there's no social pressure to think of "public" comfort.

Priorities are:

1. family

2. myself

3. friends

4. people who may recognize me on the street

The solution might be better education in school and through social programs, to build in a civic-minded or public-minded consciousness.

But the shortcut seems to be, "if you're a lousy member of society, we'll curb your social freedoms and put you on a list".

Is that creepy in the sense that it's invasive and "nanny state/big brother"? Absolutely.

Is that dark? Well it has to be weighed against the darkness of kids growing up in a society in which life is cheap, OSHA is an incomprehensible joke, and "me-first" is the only driving force for the average person on the street. That's pretty dark too.

Who decides the rules you need to follow?

That is the darkness.

That's the philosophical/political question at the heart of this.

Although personally if whoever decides the rules is preventing people from running me over on the sidewalk, preventing smoking in my face while I wash my hands in the restroom, and taking businesses to task for scamming me, then... the darkness isn't that dark.

I'd have to balance that against the over-reach of government indoctrination and blocking access to information.

After enough times nearly being killed by an idiot on a motorbike, it's a genuine mental balancing act.

> the darkness isn't that dark.

Give it a few years. Or read a history book if you are impatient.

It depends, right? Honneker vs the Kim dictatorship in N Korea. Honecker led to people “telling” on each other for gain (making stuff up to advance or get rid of a rival) but it wasn’t do much gulags. North Korea was/id diffetent. It’s there to repress and keep the status quo, nothing else. It’s very repressive.

So, ond can be like Singapore today, another can be like Venezuela today. Depends on the govt and whether it responds to its constituency.

It’s not a competition, it’s an inevitability. You don’t want to roll dice every 4 years when losing equals industrialised genocide.

Better to not have those systems in place.

Any you don’t think the way to solve this is to build better social and cultural institutions instead of throwing surveillance technology at the problem? Terrible ideas are rarely created ex nihilo, they almost always arise as a response to a legitimate problem and justified by the presence of the problem and not their results.

Social credit is a collection of policies, not strictly technological.

I wrote a post that goes through the main points of the official social credit document:

https://paraditedc.wordpress.com/2018/09/30/pdc-2-social-cre...

Makes me think of an episode in the TV series black mirror: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5497778/

I don't see it. In that episode, people are rated by other people. That makes things a popularity contest. Seems more of a satire on the state of democracies and voting for the popular person.

In China, the proposal is that people will be given credit scores by the government based on a set of laws and criteria. In this case, it would not be subject to the whims of mob rule.

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