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Comment by smackay | Hacker News Reader

This issue has nothing to do with the efficacy of the tests. In a perfect world having a list where 25% of the names are potential trouble-makers (for various definitions of trouble-maker) would be an enormous benefit and allow resources to be targeted more efficiently. The real problem is what happens in the imperfect world where law enforcement, government, self-imposed officers of authority get lazy or down-right malevolent. Do you really want to live in a world where your family members might be carted off, never to return, because their name came up on a list generated by a computer. Try asking the folks in North Korea, for example, whether this type of test is a good idea or not.

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The best outcome would be for these kind of traits to be passively detected and for the community to provide help and support as an emergent property of that community. In a way this already happens on sites like Reddit where suicide prevention emerged organically based on the dynamics of the community. This is in stark contrast to the "real world".

The internet is well known as a negative influence on certain people, but couldn't it be having a positive effect that is harder to measure and more an unintended side effect.

Yes, but what happens when your community find out that you no longer believe in God or that you think the Earth actually revolves around the Sun. It's not when things go right but when things go wrong that matter. The points of failure for this type of system are innumerable.

The real goal is building social/political systems that are robust and have checks and balances so that they cannot be perverted by special interests and are accessible to those who need them (child abuse support lines are a good example). Anything where a group intervenes on behalf of an individual is prone to disaster.

The system you describe is exactly what we have in the world now. The financial system has numerous checks and balances and is notoriously prone to non-virtuous behavior. Aren't hacker news or stackexchange examples of creating virtuous behavior using an algorithm, and a strong community? It is self regulating because if you suddenly have a deep opposition to the ethos of a community you can just leave (slashdot -> digg -> reddit).

You can 'just leave' pseudonymous communities because their aggregated judgment doesn't follow you to the next one. But if one's real identity is flagged as "(likely) sociopath" on a Real Name service, how does one 'just leave' that determination behind?

Are search engines and archives going to all willingly 'forget' that data when you 'just leave' Facebook? Are they going to not aggregate and correlate it to any new service you join?

This is one of the huge points of criticism of Real-Name-required services: a person can never escape an unjust judgment of such communities, due the long memory of the internet.

"We're here to help you. And watch you succeed, friend!"

> In a perfect world having a list where 25% of the names are potential trouble-makers [...]

... would be pointless, as a perfect world would have no concept of "trouble".

"in a perfect world" is an English phrase. It means, in this context, "if this worked perfectly".

It is not a statement about the world in general.

You say idiom, I say chronic lack of imagination.

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