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Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

Ultimately, what would such a system be optimized for? The goals will be modulated by the persons or groups in power. From what I've seen, the powerful in China seek a stable, well behaved, productive workforce such that the profit from their labor can accrue to the benefit of the ruling class. A data collection system as pervasive as the social credit system that feeds into a self-optimizing control center that can influence the behavior of the ruled, is economically potent.

Make the goals to get the most profit from the least investment into the work force, coerce their productivity with increasing restrictions and penalties, and you're moving towards virtual enslavement.

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Nitpick: I don't think it's completely accurate to imply that Chinese elites are exclusively interested in economic self-enrichment.

Societies where the elites are only interested in stealing everything they can take look like Nigeria (or Mississippi): a tiny sliver of people living in luxury while the rest of the population lives in permanent, abject, squalor.

In contrast, median living standards in China have improved dramatically in living memory. In many cases, the transformation has literally been from mud huts to skyscrapers. The kind of wealth distribution that supported this transformation would not have been possible if China's elites were only interested in self enrichment; if they were, they would have taken the wealth for themselves.

Obviously, China's human rights policies have no redeeming qualities, but its economic policies have benefited the average Chinese citizen. Credit where it's due.

I would argue that the CCP has largely traded an increased standard of living for the commoners for additional system stability for the elite.

It's a small absolute cost to take someone from mud hut to concrete box, but the relative economic multiples for those in charge, multiplied by a few hundred million, are massive. It's also much harder to foment revolution when you've been lifted out of poverty in a generation (even if it's due!)

Just a reminder that the managerial class hasn't always existed, and once most of the jobs that require high amounts of skill have been automated away, we'll see a large contraction of middle class back into general impoverished

Only if the elites are very short sighted. You can extract far more wealth if the economy is strong.

Whoever ends up in charge can extract more wealth. Staying on top is the first problem for any elite.

At least on paper it's optimized for all good things. From the article above:

Negative factors: dishonest and fraudulent financial behavior, playing loud music, violating traffic rules, making reservations at restaurants and not showing up, failing to correctly sort your waste, fraudulently using other people's public transportation ID cards

Positive factors, on the other hand, include:

donating blood, donating to charity, volunteering to community services

But the lack of transparency means that what's promised may be different from what's actually done.

> At least on paper it's optimized for all good things....

Tell that to Liu Hu.

Liu Hu is a journalist in China, writing about censorship and government corruption. Because of his work, Liu has been arrested and fined — and blacklisted. Liu found he was named on a List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People's Court as "not qualified" to buy a plane ticket, and banned from travelling some train lines, buying property, or taking out a loan.

"There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to," he told The Globe and Mail. "What's really scary is there's nothing you can do about it. You can report to no one. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere."

https://www.aclu.org/issues/national-security/grounded-life-...

Not the same thing as it applies to suspected terrorist only. In contrast anyone can be blacklisted by the SCS for numerous reasons unrelated to terrorism and banned from using ALL forms of public transport.

Given the opaque nature of the US no-fly list, in practice you can be blacklisted from flying for any -- or no -- reason, and no one is accountable for that choice. If -- and that's a big "if" -- you have the connections required to appeal that decision, the end result is just "oops, sorry, it was an accident", with no consequences to the government for their "error".

The key question is "is this subject to judicial oversight such that an ordinary citizen can challenge it"

The US is better in that id can be challenged. However, there are significant difficulties with this in practice[1]. This is still better than the situation in China where there is no legal means to challenge it.

[1] eg, https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2019/01/02/no...

Apparently with the SCS, if you were to be blacklisted there is possibility to challenge the decision. Liu Hu appealed his decision but is still on the blacklist and has problems due to his low SCS.

Another case is listed below:

In Xie’s case, he didn’t have time.

“No one notified me that I was on the blacklist. Then court officials detained me, so I had to pay the fine,” he said. Xie is now off the blacklist.

Lawyer Li Xiaolin was also not given advanced notice that he was blacklisted.

In 2014, Li was sued for defamation and lost. A judge ordered Li to make an apology, which he submitted in writing in April 2015. Ten months later, when he was away on a work trip, he was blocked from buying a return flight home to Beijing. That’s when he found out he was blacklisted.

It took him another three weeks before an official told him why.

“The court said my apology was not sincere. I asked officials how they determined what is sincere.” Li said.

Eventually Li wrote a second apology and the court removed him from the blacklist in 2016. Then last year, he tried to get a credit card.

“The bank denied my application. I figured out that the bank might still have my name blacklisted and I was right,” Li said.

The bank updated its records the next day, but by that point, he had spent almost a year to fully clear his name.

“The social credit system gives a very powerful weapon to officials, in a country with very unbalanced relations between citizens and the government,” she said.

For now, Liu is still on the blacklist, which the Chinese state media refers to as the list of “laolai” or deadbeats.

He is still trying to get off it.

https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/13/social-credit-score-c...

Interesting. For all the valid criticism of the Chinese court system, that is still faster than the case I linked in the US.

Not sure what that shows...

It should hopefully show, that once you get blacklisted on the SCS system, getting off it and living a normal life is extraordinarily difficult.

Yes, that's true. But it doesn't seem orders of magnitude worse than getting off the no fly list (and I expected it to be impossible).

Guess we'll find that out soon enough

It means nothing. These are all trivial charges that could be brought against you or your family without a second thought. Since the same people that bring the charges control the credit system, it's easy to create any story that's needed to destroy someone's life permanently.

"Negative factors: dishonest and fraudulent financial behavior, playing loud music, violating traffic rules, making reservations at restaurants and not showing up, failing to correctly sort your waste, fraudulently using other people's public transportation ID cards"

Some of these things are not like the others.

Because the author did not really study the so called social credit system, instead they just quote everything from wikipedia without double checking the facts.

wiki link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System.

That wiki try to associate every thing related to credit in China to the social credit system, which is terribly wrong.

For example, playing loud music may get you blacklisted by the beijing subway company, not the national credit system.

Violating traffic rules only affects two citie's own credit system, again not the national.

"Making reservations at restaurants and not showing up" is from a news hub site.

This is frightening stuff. It would be justified to kill in order to avoid such a system.

The powerful in any society seek that. Some don't even realize it. What do you think the oft-sought "passive income" comes from. That's when your wealth reaches a point where you can use it to derive more wealth off of others' work.

You give them too much credit. There is no such fine grained control. Its more like an ant hill or an endocrine system.

Once a person has a score, all their credit behavior in life is recorded and can be evaluated by that number. The goal is to force people to obey out of fear of punishment in the reduction of this number and the resulting restrictions, which ultimately is expressed by the CCP in the following manner:

"It will allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step"

It’s even worse than that: no direct fine-grained control, because the system trains the grains to control themselves and each other.

> what would such a system be optimized for?

Power and control of the population at large. The SCS willbe the largest spy network and intelligence gathering system outside of the NSA.

Through its massive data collection ability, the CCP will be able to spy on dissidents, minority groups such as the Uighur, protestors of the party regime, political opponents, and any other undesirables the party so chooses.

Anyone can be a target and will be punished by disobeying the party rules both financially (directly through the score) and also physically with imprisonment.

What is the Social Credit Score at its most basic level? Control. It is a computer generated prison built to keep people under control in order to change a once free human being into a slave.

But you have to think the CCP know what to optimize for. Which history shows us govts rarely know more than people faced with issues daily.

I think you need to differentiate. Some issues can't be optimized by the people facing them daily, because game theory forbids them. Issues involving coordinated action are basically unsolvable bottom up.

I think history disagrees with that. With deregulation and incentive and because how the resource pool in human civilization according to Pareto distributions. You can have a individual coordinate most things bottom up if you let them. Like people thought private space flight was impossible, but it ended up being more impossible from a top down process than a bottoms up on via elon musk.

>Ultimately, what would such a system be optimized for?

You're completely right. The purpose of such a system shall be used to maintain power but that's not the sole purpose of such a system. More than just benefiting the ruling class China wants to be better than and more powerful than the United States of America in every possible way. In order to do this their policies must benefit the working class as well as it is the working class that will be responsible for building a society that supasses the United States economically and technologically.

It's naive to think that China sole purpose is just to have a fat happy ruling class... as the status quo pretty much supports that already. Like all humans no one stays satisfied forever and China's ruling class wants to be better than the United States. Given the state of things China of course has ambitions far greater than your presumptions.

That being said there is a more immediate purpose for the system that involves changing people's' behavior so that they can avoid the tragedy of the commons. If you ever been to China you'll notice that people in general just don't care about the common good. Such systems stop people from pissing on the sidewalk or shitting out in an open field, spitting everywhere and littering cigarette butts wherever they please as this is much of what chinese people do without care.

Improving society is not just a gimmicky cover for consolidating power. It is an actual goal to be used in conjunction with consolidating power. Chinas' goal is to build a happy society that is more affluent and happy than the US but has less freedoms.

A similar system has already been tried in another country successfully. They used extreme punishment in place of extreme monitoring. See Singapore. In Singapore you can get the death penalty for possessing weed, not kidding.

"Chinas' goal is to build a happy society that is more affluent and happy than the US but has less freedoms."

It seems this is the case if you're Han Chinese only.

The government isn't targeting people by race. It's targeting people by culture and behavior. You either conform to the affluent chinese westernized lifestyle or they will force you Assimilate. Very similar to what happened to much of the Americas.

Race is just a correlation, the causative factor is the culture associated with the race as practitioners of falun gong (who include the Han people) are also targeted.

In America, I have the freedom to brainwash people into following Scientology, in China such cults cannot exist. The line of demarcation is blurry, when does a religion become a cult? How is the fantasmic stories of walking on water or coming back from the dead in christianity make it any different from scientology?

When China sees serfdom as part of the Tibetan culture do they label it backwards and raze the entire belief system or do they leave it alone? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/feb/10/tibet-...

> Race is just a correlation, the causative factor is the culture associated with the race as practitioners of falun gong (who include the Han people) are also targeted.

This also happens in America today

> The government isn't targeting people by race. It's targeting people by culture and behavior.

Are you saying that the Chinese government force abortion by culture and behavior [1], not by race?

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7g8m8/forced-abortions-a...

This is horrid. What's going on here is that the targeting is going in both directions. They target the race because of the culture.

In general if you live in the big cities but follow the cultural standards you will not be touched regardless of your race.

Until a few years ago the Uighurs were exempt- as minority- from the one-child policy applied to the rest of China. Would you say they were being racist against the Han then?

Not only that.

Not only non-Han Chinese face oppression (Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians [1]), but lower class Han are also not well treated [2].

Point is, we should not judge the progress of China based on its most affluent class. Things are much more messy behind the cover.

And when we try to see the full picture, China is less and less a role model for others to follow.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/31/world/asia/china-protest-...

[2]: https://international.thenewslens.com/article/136734

Since when you want to have a developing world as a model for others (developed world) for follow? There is a reason developing world is called developing world. And it doesn't mean a developing country should not follow China's approach to multiple issues.

This comes back to the article: we should not follow Chinese social credit system.

> China wants to be better than and more powerful than the United States of America in every possible way

Citation?

I don't think you need a citation for something that every country most likely aspires towards.

I... don't think many countries aspire to that.

If the aspiration is unrealistic than no, but when two superpowers are toe to toe in power, there of course will be a rivalry for the top spot.

What does those terms even mean, “better than and more powerful”?

What do this question means? Do you think they mess around with so many neighbor countries is just looking for love, peace and equality?

https://www.merriam-webster.com

Maybe this system is able to make sociopaths more accountable for the suffering they cause.

We have no data on people with this spectrum of mental illness because they do not report themselves. Estimations on the number of sociopaths in the wild are anywhere between 1% to 5 % of the population.

If this social credit score is able to limit the damage these people can cause during their lifetime I would say the experiment is successful.

It will also make minorities more accountable for being minorities. Also known as "driving while black".

"Enemy of the State (1998)" but as mundane everyday reality, not a blockbuster movie and with your jelaous neighbours reporting you for anything and everything.

I was talking about the possible positive goals from such a scoring system without projecting local extremes on a foreign system.

How much collateral damage from the system itself are you willing to accept?

Judging from tik toks and r/scriptedasiangifs: misogyny is one thing being optimized for.

A social credit system seems like the only logical and humane evolutionary solution for a nation with over a billion people and counting. There has to be a way to filter the signal from the noise.

If you want something different, go somewhere with a smaller population where you can afford that luxury. Quantity versus quality.

> From what I've seen, the powerful in China seek a stable, well behaved, productive workforce such that the profit from their labor can accrue to the benefit of the ruling class.

> Make the goals to get the most profit from the least investment into the work force, coerce their productivity with increasing restrictions and penalties, and you're moving towards virtual enslavement.

This seems like the polar opposite of my perception. If one looks at statistics [1], or simply spends a few hours (or years, as I have) watching China based YouTube vloggers, there seems to be an unmistakable and rapid increase of the common man's wealth and material well being. I can't really think of any observation I've experienced that contradicts this apparent trend.

What data sources are you using?

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages

If by common man you mean Han Chinese who live in major urban areas - then yes, your observation is mostly correct. But the expense seems to be the systematic oppression of rural populations and ethnic minorities (Uighurs, Tibetans, etc). The virtual (and physical) enslavement already exists [1], it's not really some hypothetical.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/24/china-has-buil...

> But the expense seems to be...

There does indeed seem to be signs of oppression of ethnic minorities in China, but to me this is a relatively unrelated anomaly on a statistical basis compared to the general question of where do the fruits of labour in China go: to those doing the work, or to the ruling class.

Most of what I have observed suggests that there is a "rising tide lifts all boats" phenomenon underway, although determining the degree to which the distribution is consistent with what is "fair" is obviously problematic, as with any other country.

As for the Uighur & Tibetan situation, this is starting to look like it's going to be just one of those very unfortunate facts of life, but my intuition is that once the distinctness of these cultures is sufficiently eliminated (wild guess: 20-100 years), the difference of treatment will be relatively minimal, provided standard of living continues to rise across the board. But then who knows, anything can happen.

"As for the Uighur & Tibetan situation, this is starting to look like it's going to be just one of those very unfortunate facts of life...

Ethnic cleansing with helping of re-education camps and forced labor are just "unfortunate facts of life." Just give them 20-100 years and nobody will remember anyway...

Well, that's certainly a take on how things are going there.

Rising tides can't life boats filled with dead and forgotten people, but sure, citizens who follow the strict and draconian credit system are stacking bank, amirite?

> Well, that's certainly a take on how things are going there.

It is indeed, I imagine you have your own. My prediction will be correct, or it will be incorrect. As much as people enjoy posting heartfelt support on the internet, I don't see much happening beyond that. Who is going to come to their aid? The US Government? Bill Gates? You?

As for the rest of my prediction: "...but my intuition is that once the distinctness of these cultures is sufficiently eliminated (wild guess: 20-100 years), the difference of treatment will be relatively minimal, provided standard of living continues to rise across the board."

If this comes to pass, they'll be better off than the First Nations people of Canada, who found out today that the Government of Canada once again has found it "necessary" to delay their plans to provide safe drinking water to the communities we forced them into decades ago:

https://news.knowledia.com/CA/en/articles/covid-19-may-delay...

> Rising tides can't life boats filled with dead and forgotten people, but sure, citizens who follow the strict and draconian credit system are stacking bank, amirite?

That seems to be a portion of actual reality, yes. Simultaneously, millions of people are also rising out of poverty at an unprecedented rate, including I would think the ethnic minorities who will gradually have their uniqueness eliminated over time. Whether this is a net benefit to them over time is a matter of opinion, but ultimately unknowable.

> this is starting to look like it's going to be just one of those very unfortunate facts of life

This reminds me of this quote:

"the Führer often informed those like Himmler tasked with implementing the Holocaust that extermination should be implemented as “humanely” as possible.... For Hitler, killing “impersonally” was, according to John Toland, synonymous with doing so “without cruelty.”"

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-97999-1_...

Ya, I can see the connection. If that's true, it's quite interesting, I'm not sure if that makes him seem better or worse.

The similarity I'd say is that I'm also emotionally detached from the situation (but intellectually attached - I perceive most people to have the opposite combo, fwiw). Differences I see are that I have no influence in the matter, and I have largely the opposite goals of Hitler.

My favorite relevant quote would probably be this one:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

"Moloch is introduced as the answer to a question – C. S. Lewis’ question in Hierarchy Of Philosophers – what does it? Earth could be fair, and all men glad and wise. Instead we have prisons, smokestacks, asylums. What sphinx of cement and aluminum breaks open their skulls and eats up their imagination?

And Ginsberg answers: Moloch does it.

There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”

The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”

Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”

Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”

The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent."

-------

I think this is a good estimate of what's going on. If everyone hates the system (maybe not unanimous, but likely pretty close), then instead of constantly fighting with people whose goals (as opposed to implementation preferences) are likely little different than our own, why don't we put down our weapons, come up with a mutually acceptable compromise, and make it happen?

And I think the answer to that question is: because we can't. Not that we don't want to, or "won't", but because we can't.

But it's just an armchair theory, odds are I don't have any better clue than anyone else.

I don't know how old you are, but I'm old enough to remember when the Berlin Wall fell. I'm sure you remember 2019, when it seemed impossible that international travel would essentially shut down.

The seeming inevitable isn't. Things change.

> this is starting to look like it's going to be just one of those very unfortunate facts of life

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

> The seeming inevitable isn't. Things change.

Sometimes some things change, sometimes they don't. It depends how you look at it. For example: there is change, and then there is rate of change. The latter typically doesn't get a lot of attention.

I wonder how the Uighurs look at it, or the millions of downtrodden and disenfranchised people now and throughout history - differently than IT folks like you and I who have the luxury of waxing philosophical about such things.

> The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

I would say that this is both profoundly true, but also little more than a catchy slogan to reinforce the egos of people who think they are good.

You are clearly very intelligent. You could do something else with that. Over a lifetime, you could have an impact on China, through sanctions or whatever.

That, is also, Moloch, of course. But if we can’t but fight, at least fight the good fight.

> You could do something else with that.

Perhaps I am.

> Over a lifetime, you could have an impact on China, through sanctions or whatever.

The status quo ("democracy", sanctions, "diplomatic talks") is what got us into this position in the first place. It's how the game is played.

> That, is also, Moloch, of course. But if we can’t but fight, at least fight the good fight.

What does the good fight consist of?

Genocide should not be an ‘unfortunate fact of life.’ And lets be clear ‘sufficiently eliminating cultural distinctions’ means genocide.

When western journalists use 'colonism', 'genocide', 'ethic cleaning', or 'racism' to describe things, I often feel that they are doing this on purpose to reduce the weight of things whatever people have done in the past. So now CCP is nazi, and suddenly kids look around and say, nazi is not that terrible. Are you guys (activists) redefining the world genocide whenever you want? Western media lost credibility immediately afterwards.

I vehemently agree. Do you have an idea of how to stop it? Perceiving and describing reality other than it actually is seems to be growing in popularity, but I don't see the advantage in that approach.

So your response is to participate?

Can you expand on "participate"?

Also, to tack back to economics, "rural ethnic minorities" means "third world subsistence farming with no health or dental care".

The approach the government is taking there is certainly heavy-handed, but I think we should be careful not to fetishize their poverty as something to be preserved.

> "rural ethnic minorities" means "third world subsistence farming with no health or dental care".

Are you sure? It doesn't mean it by semantic definition, so is there another ~authoritative source you're referring to that establishes that meaning?

Rural ethnic minorities in China live a life that consists solely of "third world subsistence farming with no health or dental care", or they do not. And then on top of this is the question of why, specifically, is it plausibly because they are ethnic minorities, as in: no non-minority Chinese exist that have a "third world subsistence farming with no health or dental care".

Is this not the point of contention?

I do not have this deep of knowledge of on the ground reality in China. Is there a data source of some kind we can turn to to resolve this uncertainty?

I should have been more specific. Rural, or cities below a certain tier, in general, often means very poor in China. The ethnic minority areas are very rural and far away from places that generate wealth.

It's not because they're minorities in an American sense, the government there actually gives ethnic minorities a lot of extra privileges, they get to have more kids, etc. There's a form of affirmative action where they're "bussed" to other areas, which of course gets reported in the west as yet another form of repression. Not speaking Chinese is going to be an obstacle to getting ahead in general.

I don't have a cite, this is all based on conversations I've had and what I've seen of rural reality in China (haven't been to Tibet, Xinjiang or Inner Mongolia, but I've seen some really crappy lifestyles for rural poor Han Chinese. And they thought things were going great! Much better than in past decades).

In the case of the Uighur, “rural ethnic minorities” isn’t really an apt name anyway. For the last several centuries, the Uighurs have broadly been towndwellers. (Other minorities in Xinjiang like the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz or the Iranian-speaking peoples maintain a more traditional rural life). Already on their own, the Uighur were on a path towards enjoying all the fruits of urban modernity. Most of the Chinese development brought to the area has been focused on making life better for Han Chinese settlers, not the indigenous population.

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