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Comment by ppod | Hacker News Reader

Societies that willingly forego privacy in order to allow things like social credit scores will have a large competitive advantage. The effect on social interaction and interaction with the state will be similar to the effect that tripadvisor has on restaurants, or that uber and lyft have on taxi customer service.

Our historical models of losing privacy emphasise the state at the centre of the panoptican observing all citizens while remaining hidden themselves. Correctly implemented, technological tracking of services and employees and bureaucrats has the potential to be much more like true transparency, with everyone having a more accurate picture of everyone else's history of behaviour.

Whether you think that this is desirable or not is really about values and preferences, not an objective question. But I think it is objectively likely that a society like this would enjoy a competitive advantage in terms of organising its economy and society.

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I doubt it. A credit score is a good implementation of your material value to capitalism. If you have a bad credit score, you are punished exactly to the extent it makes sense from a statistical perspective.

'Social credit scores' muddy this system with a bunch of basically peripheral values: filial piety, political opinions, and so on. It undermines the basic efficiency of a system that only cares about you insofar as you matter - i.e. insofar as you're economically active.

The only way a 'social credit score' will help the system that institutes it is if the society is more stable as a result. I don't really see this happening, unless people like it. If everybody hates a society, you tend to get a kind of creeping malaise, where nobody believes in the system, and everybody's just trying to steal as much as they can from it - sort of like Russia in the 80's. No amount of repression will help you if all of your secret police are busy trying to sell every state asset they can get their hands on.

A social credi score will be more accurate in predicting credit worthiness. It has economic value.

There is no such thing and I submit to you that there can be no such thing without adopting of a more feudal model of society.

Knowing what I know about credit scores, it's a bad example.

But I agree that the fundamental struggle with legible societies is asymmetry of access to data and a fair and open access leads to fairer outcomes.

As for a "competitive advantage" personally I think such concepts are nonsensical and over prioritize the personal experience of those at the top of huge social hierarchies rather than any reality.

A short-term competitive advantage can come with long-term fragility and susceptibility to disaster. For instance, imagine two countries with identical resources, one increases its population so that yearly food production can barely sustain it, while the other has a smaller rate of growth. The first will have a competitive advantage every year until a drought comes, when it will be hit by disaster.

Similarly the competitive advantages you describe may come with long-term risks that are harder to measure or predict, especially those that come from the government itself.

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