and so it was obviously portrayed as kind of you know for the story and it worked and I like the episode and everything but it got me thinking in terms of a society like that of people could probably construct something that used that kind of a system but in a more regulated way and a more humane way and I think that's turns into the question of do we want to try and make this new thing or do we want to try and fix the old thing?
regardless, it got me thinking about some kind of a potential implementation of a formal social reputation system that essentially mirrors what goes on informally now, but makes it visible and makes the actions of affecting somebody's reputation visible.
My basic intuition here and for most things that deal with society or whatever is that Satan lives in the details and infinite potential dystopias and the potential for extreme inhumanity lurks in every crevice and corner. unknown unknowns and shit.
In general you can already get this by asking and taking feedback from others. I've seen a lot more people shoot or ignore the messenger in those cases then actually take the feedback. Everyone is the hero of their own story.
which makes me think that these kinds of systems are interesting to talk about and possibly productive. but when anybody gets a serious idea to start implementing them, I think it runs into the same problem that everybody that got really excited about Corey Doctorow's wuffie. while not an original idea, his description of it really catapulted the concept of social currency into the nerdosphere. at the same time that Reddit karma was becoming a thing. and so people were understandably irrationally exuberant.
at any rate, they figured out like many before them that trying to automatically manage reputation at scale is a socially difficult problem to solve, before even getting to the technical issues.
and yes it is one of those things that as I get older I just have to take a step back and use those kinds of people as an example of how not to be. I think AI psychosis as talked about when it was called chatgpt psychosis is maybe more properly classified as main character syndrome level 11 or something. I am not a psychologist. and it makes me wonder if that kind of main character syndrome is some kind of a social contagion. because in the modern incarnation that is everywhere it seemed to really get a foothold in podcast-o-sphere. though, like everything else, I'm sure that could easily be mapped into. people with opinions have high opinions of their own opinions and it inflates their egos and that has been going on since one person got in a room with themselves and started thinking.
Internet Right/WrongThink scoring should be an argument against any sort of formalized or standardized social credit, not for it.
But it's also worth pointing out that "consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" is already the world we live in and always have lived in. Hell, even Hacker News has karma points, downvoting, shadow banning, and the like. There's no such thing as a society with zero consequences and zero reputations. The only real question is a matter of degree, structure, severity, reach, and various idiosyncrasies that differ across cultures.
So it would be nice to have a more nuanced discussion about this instead of treating it like a 0 or 1 decision.