Would you want to bet that there’s no social science research that can be harnessed by repressive governments to keep their subjects in line?
Possible example: the Chinese government is proposing to introduce a “social credit” scheme that gives each citizen a credit rating based on all kinds of things, sometimes (I don’t know how credibly) alleged to include reducing your creditworthiness if your friends post politically-disapproved-of things on social media. (The idea being to make people police one another’s behaviour.) It’s not perfectly clear whether they’re actually going to do that, nor where they got the idea from if so—but it seems like exactly the kind of thing that social science will help them judge the likely effectiveness of. (Is this relevant research? It’s hard to tell given the low quality of the text there, which I assume is the result of automatic translation.)
It seems pretty bad to me, and everyone else I’ve heard talk about the idea has found it pretty chilling. One more way for an already quite totalitarian state to exercise control over its citizens. Of course there may be some selection bias—maybe the people who talk about it tend to be the people who find it scary.
Would you want to bet that there’s no social science research that can be harnessed by repressive governments to keep their subjects in line?
Possible example: the Chinese government is proposing to introduce a “social credit” scheme that gives each citizen a credit rating based on all kinds of things, sometimes (I don’t know how credibly) alleged to include reducing your creditworthiness if your friends post politically-disapproved-of things on social media. (The idea being to make people police one another’s behaviour.) It’s not perfectly clear whether they’re actually going to do that, nor where they got the idea from if so—but it seems like exactly the kind of thing that social science will help them judge the likely effectiveness of. (Is this relevant research? It’s hard to tell given the low quality of the text there, which I assume is the result of automatic translation.)
Is that bad?
It seems pretty bad to me, and everyone else I’ve heard talk about the idea has found it pretty chilling. One more way for an already quite totalitarian state to exercise control over its citizens. Of course there may be some selection bias—maybe the people who talk about it tend to be the people who find it scary.
Perhaps you need to clarify what you would consider bad or harmful if people are to try to give examples of bad or harmful things.
That’s a very good point. I’ll think about this and get back to us.