25 Comments

That's literally an episode of Black Mirror: Nosedive.

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Anyone who creates a status score has some question they want answered. The Chinese score* is designed to measure loyalty; credit scores are designed to measure likeliness of repayment. Since there's no particular reason to expect all of these questions to be highly correlated, why use a single score? A winning NFL quarterback and a Supreme Court Justice have very different kinds of status.

*Either your impressions of China's system are outdated or mine are premature.

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China just has some ideas and trials, NOT a system. Yes today we have income, credit scores, and follower counts. Those would be useful inputs into a status score, but status is much broader than those indicators.

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On one level, I'm not seeing a difference between your social status app idea and China's social credit scoring system (except for the difference between Western and Chinese society, of course). Perhaps you could explain where you see the differences?

On another level, I don't understand why you seem to think management of social status by app is desirable. To the extent existing social media are sources of social status, they seem to lack desirable qualities in terms of stability and proportionate response to offense.

On a third level, we already have a social status tracking mechanism. It's called "money". It seems to be driving many desirable behaviors (like making goods and providing services), some less-desirable behaviors, and also quite a bit of undesirable and criminal behavior. It took us quite a while to get the "money" system working as well as it does (for all of its flaws), and any other mechanism would probably have a similarly ugly debugging period.

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No China doesn't have one yet, and if you don't live in China this is even more open for new options.

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China already has one. And setting up a competing system that doesn't agree with your repressive government's explicit status hierarchy is probably not consistent with success, so there's little room for a competitor.

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Sure, but modern society is full of products and services where it would be more impressive for you to make it yourself.

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Such an app would be most useful for those with lower innate ability to figure out people's status. Innate ability to perceive status is itself high-status. So people may wish to avoid using such apps as a way of signalling that they don't need it. This may be why people describe the idea of such an app as dystopian.

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Making signaling more affordable, in an attempt to make us not waste as much resources on a zero-sum game, always sounds like a great idea. But these gains probably aren't that big. Throughout history signaling has become increasingly affordable, but it's not like we've spent any less on signaling and donated the surplus to the homeless. We would probably still engage in the same costly signaling as before in addition to the app.

The increased resolution in data-driven signaling is probably the only real advantage to making it more affordable.

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That's not crazy, but still I'd bet against it. For example, status in chess today is very well measured and public, and yet chess groups exist.

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I don't think shared consensus on status exists today; not in fine detail. Maybe gossip is whispered to prevent common knowledge about people's relative status. In the Gervais Principle, Venkat Rao argues that status illegibility is necessary for groups to exist:

consider what happens when all you really know about the club is the range of status (lowest and highest). If you know you belong in the range (“that dude is cooler than me, but I am definitely cooler than that loser”), but have no idea whether your status is above or below the average, the uncertainty allows you to join. And your fealty to the group, and the group’s to you, will be in proportion to the legibility of your status. If events conspire to make status too legible, competitiveness is amplified, weakening group cohesion, and stabilizing dynamics kick in, restoring the illegibility, or the group breaks down.

We like groups, so we may not want to use software that establishes a clear status ranking of everybody.

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My initial thought was that people would game such a numerical estimate of status to the extent that it becomes useless. But I would have predicted that for credit scores, and it doesn't seem to have happened.

I still have questions about the target variable; with credit score it's something close to "probability of repaying a loan". What is it for status score? Relatedly, when would a company want to look up my status score?

I also believe there will always be a "rebel" form of status where having a low official status is one of the requirements.

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You want to raise the status of your known rivals who you think you can defeat! Japan drew accurate maps of the region which made Korea 3X larger than it was.

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i will sort by controversial to find my friends

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Sure, I'm not claiming to know of a great current investment . As I learned working on the web before there was a web, lots of people can foresee the rough outlines of the future, but few people try hard to do that because it doesn't pay well.

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From wikipedia: "Klout was a website and mobile app that used social media analytics to rate its users according to online social influence via the "Klout Score", which was a numerical value between 1 and 100. In determining the user score, Klout measured the size of a user's social media network and correlated the content created to measure how other users interact with that content. Klout launched in 2008.

Lithium Technologies, who acquired the site in March 2014, closed the service on May 25, 2018."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

There's a common meme in silicon valley that all the failed dot com companies from 1999, are now going concerns in 2019. eg WebVan reborn as Amazon Fresh. https://thenextweb.com/entr...

There's a related idea that "too soon is still wrong". That is, ideas for what may happen are far easier to come by than knowing when is the right exact time to do something, and which company will do it. Klout is an example of this. An idea whose time may come, but was tried to early.

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