Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking • Hacker News Board

Re: Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking

#51

Post by bsanderson » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 4:51 PM UTC

volgo wrote: post #27

whytaka wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that is called prejudice. Prejudiced people frighten me, their moral considerations so unthorough, and this makes me think I wouldn’t want to deal with someone like you. But I’d give you a chance first.

It's not prejudice. And big surprise, you're exactly like me, just unwilling to vocalize it. The fact that people are rushing to downvote me for voicing a contrary opinion (and emboldening others to disagree and downvoting me too) is the exact embodiment of what I just described. Like it or not, human beings don't like outsiders and people that others dislike

It is a very nearsighted view of individuals and grossly oversimplifies people as intrinsically good or bad without considering how people change over time, or how they're ahead of their time and seen as right later.

Especially in the context of cultural production. We wouldn't have the Beatles ("more popular than Jesus" controversy, drugs, bed-in for peace) or probably any other rock/punk related music... also anti-racism, LGBT rights, feminism, and other social movements we look back on as positive would all have significant impediment to making progress if possible at all.

In a very narrow per-use-case context like rating a contractor on quality of work, or restaurants on quality it's obviously not a problem but the key difference is social-wide aggregation and enforcement of norms that sound good at the time (to a critical mass of people) but leave no room for society to evolve and improve through new ideas and beliefs.

Re: Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking

#52

Post by bsanderson » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 4:55 PM UTC

volgo wrote: post #28

semperdark wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post gave me a negative opinion of you. See how this works?

Exactly. Thanks for proving my point.

Does it really prove your point?

What you said you'd find helpful is a "global database of opinions" whereas being down-voted on this particular site is a very limited context.

Would you find it helpful if I happened to be in the key interviewer for a job that you really want and are fully qualified for and reject you based on my perception of you here, bubbling up through data processing and aggregation into a "global" system that's totally opaque to you? And further, that my negative reaction adds more data and pushes your score down?

Up/Down voting comments here is totally appropriate as limited to this context. Applying that type of data, invisibly aggregated across all aspects of your life is what's seen as a problem, correctly in my view.

Re: Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking

#53

Post by cheapsteak » Sun, Dec 17, 2017, 5:11 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #48

cheapsteak wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any references to Cultural Revolution in that quote?

I don't know your background, so I'm not sure if you're being coy or genuinely don't know. But the gist is: mass persecution, made possible by citizens spying on each other. OK fair, nobody has been singled out or publicly humiliated (yet), but it's the same setup. Forgive me if the Cultural Revolution means something different to you; I'm going based on the description given to me by one of my close friends, whose p…

Appreciate the benefit of doubt, I honestly didn't see a connection and thought you might have conflated Cultural Revolution with Communist Revolution.

I think that I can understand where your interpretation came from, but wouldn't really draw that connection here

Neighbors and friends and family "whistleblowing" each other to the government certainly was an aspect of Cultural Revolution, but it never really struck me as a distinctive/defining feature. The same things happened before Cultural Revolution as well (note that the time period pointed out in the article is 1949, which is the year Communist China was established and revolutionary zeal was high, but 17 years before the Cultural Revolution began), and the same tattling can also be found during McCarthy-era America, and briefly in post-9-11 America ("If You See Something, Say Something")

The more defining features of the Cultural Revolution (at least to Chinese) is the persecution specifically of educated people (professors being harassed and shamed into committing suicide. "the more educated, the more reactionary"), the shunning of education (My grandpa had to shut the doors and teach his kids in secret at home, quite a risky move if anyone found out), the scheduled public demonstrations of loyalty to the party via everyone getting together to dance the loyalty dance every morning, and a dogmatic adherence to party lines, no rational or logic debate allowed (you will be shunned and reported). Don't really see those features in this policy.

Re: Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking

#54

Post by akvadrako » Mon, Dec 18, 2017, 8:57 AM UTC

crdb wrote: post #41

dqpb wrote: post #8

Obligatory reference to Black Mirror's Nosedive episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive

Whilst real world events have caused many people to focus on the social ranking aspect of the story, when I watched it, I thought it was more concerned with privilege (and the loss thereof). The main character actually worsens her fate by acting entitled and being self-centered. Had she maintained her higher status, she both wouldn't have been in situations of pain in the first place, nor found it necessary to make a…

You're claiming the Chinese system optimises the right things, which might even be true for now. But my experience is that any system optimising some metrics eventually drifts from it's intended real goal as people and systems learn to game those metrics.

In the Black Mirror episode, there just isn't room for being genuine and maintaining a nice lifestyle because of social pressure. But it probably worked a lot better when the system just started.