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Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

Its obvious why this is happening; some form of statistical modeling or AI correlated having a hotmail account with being higher risk.

This is a serious problem with all AI that makes decisions like this. Having a Hotmail account is a symptom of a problem which could lead to higher risk, but it is judging that symptom as if it is a cause which leads to risk.

Its exactly similar to the supposition that black people statistically commit more crime, and thus should pre-emptively receive harsher bail or be profiled. Unless you can scientifically prove that ethnicity causes crime to happen, its disgusting. This is obvious to us.

In year's past, correlation fallacies might have meant that black people were profiled by police more. Today, it means that we build AIs which make life-ending decisions like determining repeat offender risk, visa status, employment decisions, all of which predetermines an unknown outcome by correlating your known qualities with the known outcome of people with similar qualities to you.

We need regulation in place to stop any punitive decision making, public and private, which can be found in court to be based on correlation instead of causation.

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I'd say there's a one really important difference between being Black and using Hotmail, and that difference is the same reason why one is a protected class and one isn't.

The real concern here isn't discriminating against people with Hotmail accounts. On the surface level, there's nothing wrong with that. This does become an issue if the property of having a Hotmail account is used as an avenue to discriminate against people based on their membership in a protected class -- a sort of actuarial parallel construction, if you will. At that point, we do have a bit of a problem.

> We need regulation in place to stop any punitive decision making, public and private, which can be found in court to be based on correlation instead of causation.

So, young men could not be charged more for insurance than young women? In fact, young people in general would have to get the same price as everyone else? People in New York would have to pay the same as someone in rural Alaska? Someone who's been driving a year gets charged the same as someone who has been driving fifteen, etc.? Even being in an accident doesn't cause you to get in another accident. It's just correlated with that outcome. Throw out the entire actuarial aspect of insurance? These "punitive" charges are all based on correlation. I don't see this happening.

----

That said, as a non-statistician, I'm interested in what kinds of tests can be run on signals to verify that they're not proxies for selecting and discriminating against protected classes. Is there a way to modify a signal using its correlation with membership in these classes such that you can marginalize the attributes you're not allowed to discriminate based on?

For example, it seems reasonable to believe that hotmail use is correlated with age, race, gender, etc. As an insurance company, I would have information on hand to inform me as to the extent of this correlation, at least among my customer base, and I would in turn know the correlations of those factors with risk. Could I somehow remove the racial, gender, and age components of the Hotmail risk signal to obtain a signal that only conveys the portion of the risk correlation that is not based on those classes? If so, what is that statistical technique called?

There's a simple technique to "control for" those factors. First you split your population into groups that each have a similar race, gender, and age. Then within those groups you make comparisons of the hotmail users to the others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlling_for_a_variable

You would need to keep in mind xkcd #882 (https://xkcd.com/882/).

Let me ask some clarifying questions, because I think I understand the broad strokes of what you're saying, but I'm not clear on some details.

OK, so I find that among Black users, Hotmail is associated with a 1.05 relative risk to the baseline, and among white users, 1.15 relative risk. How do I then apply this knowledge to an incoming user of an unknown race with a Hotmail account? Do I give them the population weighted average of of the relative risks among all my buckets? What if I do know their race? Do Black users get assigned 1.05 as much risk and white users get 1.15?

Also, what if some of my buckets aren't full enough to get a high confidence of the relative Hotmail risk in that bucket? Let's say I don't have enough gay Hispanic women in my cohort. Do I just drop them from the analysis and hope they're similar to the other populations?

Also, what if Hotmail is associated with a 1.15 relative risk for both black and white users, but a black user is significantly more likely to have a Hotmail account than a white user?

If you can explain why it is OK for car insurance to charge differently by gender, but by race is not OK, I will be impressed.

I can't say for certain, because I wasn't involved in the decision. ;) My gut reaction is that it only ends up being seen as OK because the group being penalized has historically been at an advantage in most other areas financially. I am aware that some European countries are moving to do away with charging by gender.

Well, then women will be forced to pay more than their fair share for car insurance, putting them at even more of a disadvantage. Right?

And this observation is downvoted because? It's just stating obviously true facts as far as I can tell.

edit And then I get downvoted for sticking my neck out. Let me break the parent post down.

It asserts that charging genders equally will shift more burden to women. This is clearly true because premiums are higher for men because we have more accidents (so much for all the female driver jokes).

It also asserts women were a previously disadvantaged class. Also clearly true.

So to the downvoters out there, you might have found something disagreeable about the parent post, but you're wrong and he's right.

Look at my other reply to the parent post for my explanation as to why I disagree.

I see two things wrong in the post:

> fair share

Male drivers and female drivers don't have a "fair share" of insurance costs. No one should be obligated to pay for the actions of others simply because they're the same sex.

Driving risk should be evaluated on an individual basis based on those individuals' behavior.

> putting them at even more of a disadvantage

Young women are no longer at a disadvantage. Young women graduate college more often and earn more than young men.

I focus on young women and young men in this case because those are the people most affected by gender discrimination in auto insurance pricing, because they lack individual driving records on which to base insurance rates.

I've heard there's an app for that in the US, you drive with it for a week or two and then they adjust your premiums according to how you drive. That would be a more fair system. We're not discussing that though, we're discussing the current system vs one where insurance companies can't discriminate on the basis of gender - clearly that advantages men unfairly and disadvantages women unfairly. Yeah the system is still unfair the way it is, but this change would make it more so.

Women graduate from college more often, but college is not what it once was - I'm a college dropout and I'm sure I earn more than most graduates (plus I don't have the debt.) Women still earn less than men. Your claim that they earn more is just false.

Young women earn more than young men, I said.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...

http://fortune.com/2016/04/12/women-are-out-earning-men/

http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274...

That's interesting, although as those sources indicate, the pay gap increases with age so that by the time women hit their mid thirties they're substantially behind men in compensation (for the same work.) It's an improvement to be sure, but I wouldn't go so far as to call the problem solved and say that women aren't still a disadvantaged class, when it comes to compensation.

This is a common mistake. Reducing inequality is not morally equivalent to penalizing the person who was previously in a superior position.

Don’t worry about downvotes; oppression by the status quo for random and varying reasons is a discriminatory mechanism to make our words invisible. Keep commenting!

I suspect few HN users could provide sound logic to support their anonymous downvotes. Downvotes are good — at least it means there’s a chance someone eventually modulates their current viewpoint.

The issue here is the phrase "fair share" - why is it a fair share? Because women get into fewer accidents? Cool, what if we get out of the statistical data that black people have more accidents(this is just an example, I don't know if they really do)? Should it be justified to charge them more?

But maybe if you look beneath the surface you will find out that minorities are more likely to drive older, less safe cars, which leads to them having more accidents - they don't have more accidents because they are black, they have more accidents because of other factors.

The same with men and women - I think it's fair to say that men drive more powerful, larger cars(on average) than women do. So....they get into more accidents because the cars they drive are objectively more difficult to drive. Which obviously means that you should calculate your premium based on the type of vehicle being insured, not on the gender of the driver - and, by extension, insurance for a man and a woman, on the same vehicle, should be identical. Penalizing a man in this situation because men as a group get into more accidents is absolutely unfair.

> I think it's fair to say that men drive more powerful, larger cars(on average) than women do

I know you're sorta spitballing here, but at least in my experience that's a bit backwards. Around here, I'd guess women drive SUVs more than men do. Growing up, fathers would buy their daughters SUVs because they were safer. Now, husbands have their wives drive the family SUV for the same reason. Plus, moms and minivans, etc. That might just be a thing in the area I grew up, though. It's probably different in downtown Seattle.

> So....they get into more accidents because the cars they drive are objectively more difficult to drive.

I'd bet the testosterone doesn't help much, either :-)

Maybe it's different in US, but over here in UK with everyone I know the ratio I see is a man with an SUV/large powerful sedan, woman with a small city car to get to work and back. Moms in minivans isn't as much of a stereotype because kids just walk to school or take the bus/metro. I suspect it's more common in rural areas but in my experience taking kids to school by car is still not the primary way of getting to school. But obviously that's just my experience, my perspective.

I'd love to see actual data on this , especially power and size of cars grouped by gender.

>>I'd bet the testosterone doesn't help much, either :-)

Women have their own behaviour-affecting hormones too, you know.

Heh. It's always interesting seeing the differences between countries.

> Women have their own behaviour-affecting hormones too, you know.

Of course. I was making a half-joke.

over here in UK with everyone I know the ratio I see is a man with an SUV/large powerful sedan, woman with a small city car to get to work and back. Moms in minivans isn't as much of a stereotype

Also in the UK and can report that mothers driving “Chelsea tractors” is totally a thing.

Sure, but most mothers in the UK are not driving Range Rovers :-) It's very much a rich people thing. Working-class mothers don't drive massive SUVs in general, even if they drop off their kids at school - tiny city cars seem far more common than tanks.

Moms in minivans isn't as much of a stereotype because kids just walk to school or take the bus/metro

Where in the UK are you? I lived several years in England as a teenager and went to a 'nice' school in the suburbs of Surrey and almost everybody drove their kids to school.

> I'd bet the testosterone doesn't help much, either :-)

Whoa there. Someone might infer from this that you believe men might generally make decisions / respond to situations differently than women with biological reasons being a contributing factor. That's a dangerous line of thought.

>The same with men and women - I think it's fair to say that men drive more powerful, larger cars(on average) than women do. So....they get into more accidents because the cars they drive are objectively more difficult to drive. Which obviously means that you should calculate your premium based on the type of vehicle being insured, not on the gender of the driver - and, by extension, insurance for a man and a woman, on the same vehicle, should be identical. Penalizing a man in this situation because men as a group get into more accidents is absolutely unfair.

The simplest "AI" (linear regression) will already factor this out if it has the data about the car driven and gender. Any remaining gender imbalance is attributable either to another factor or it is actually gender related (e.g. increased road rage, high speed driving and risky following behavior due to testosterone might be a stronger accident predictor than too careful driving (not speed matching fast enough when merging on the highway), too slow driving or worse spatial reasoning which are usually correlated with higher estrogen levels.)

In general the AI will just become a better predictor the more data it has available and the more detailed the data is. But an effeminate man or a manly woman might behave more than the opposite gender and thus be treated wrongly. We could probably solve this by tacking on a recent endocrinological report to every application, but this gets quite privacy invasive at some point.

In general if you get insurance you want to be part of a larger risk group to mitigate your effects. Having no insurance just means you have the most fair risk group, which is just yourself.

I think it's fair to say that men drive more powerful, larger cars(on average) than women do. So....they get into more accidents because the cars they drive are objectively more difficult to drive. [...] Penalizing a man in this situation because men as a group get into more accidents is absolutely unfair.

Oh, come on, do you really think insurance companies don't break out all the different factors? They're in a cutthroat business where every tiny margin they make over their competitors is a big advantage. But if they guess wrong, they'll cut premiums too aggressively and lose money on accident claims.

Car size and gender are both factors. It's possible they're partly correlated, but actuaries can still incorporate both factors into their models.

Charging higher premiums for men is fair if you only care about accident rates. If you feel it's a form of discrimination and want to level the playing field, that has to be done via government regulation.

> The issue here is the phrase "fair share" - why is it a fair share? Because women get into fewer accidents? Cool, what if we get out of the statistical data that black people have more accidents(this is just an example, I don't know if they really do)?

Because actuarial tables say so. Insurance companies that decided it did not matter folded or changed their opinion after the losses

So every insurance company in the EU collapsed after charging people more depending on gender was banned EU-wide?

They leveled the prices at the higher rates.

Not some - as far as I am aware, all of EU has now banned charging men more for car insurance.

Not only car insurance, but also eg life insurance. Men used to pay up 50% more, now they pay less and women pay more - all tariffs are "unisex" now.

The US did the same thing with health insurance. It seems the moral debate is over; charging different rates for insurance based on gender has been deemed discrimination throughout the first world.

All that remains to do in the US is find the political will to outlaw discrimination that favors women.

Because differential treatment between the sexes doesn't aggregate and self-amplify negative economic outcomes across generations to create distinct economic disparities between minorities?

Feminists have argued that differential treatment between the sexes has aggregated and self-amplified across generations, to the detriment of women.

Why wouldn't the same be true of differential treatment to the detriment of men?

>Feminists have argued

Do you? Because you're going to actually have to make this argument for me - I don't think I've ever seen feminists say that capital accumulation mechanics are the cause of misogyny.

Not capital accumulation, but social expectations. In this case, one obvious candidate would be that the stereotype that young men are more dangerous drivers creates a social pressure for young men to take more risks to prove their manhood.

In this case auto insurance rates are both a consequence of the stereotype and a mechanism that imposes it on new drivers.

>In this case auto insurance rates are ... a mechanism that imposes [the stereotype] on new drivers.

The argument for restricting discrimination on a gendered basis relies on the socially instructive nature of vehicular insurance to teenagers.

That feels exceptionally weak.

One of many factors. Movies and other fiction are no doubt the most powerful force communicating that expectation that young men should act like race car drivers.

Here's one reason: In most countries people have an official sex, shown on official documents. (That will change one day: sex should be treated as potentially confidential medical data.) However, most countries have never had an official concept of "race". So if an insurer asked people for their race they could answer whatever gives them the lowest premium and they could not be accused of lying.

That's not true. Most countries don't have an official concept of social classes, so that makes it okay to say that you earn above X (e.g. to someone lending you money) even though you're not making anything? It's still lying.

Most countries have an official concept of annual income. It's used to assess income tax.

Most countries also have laws that prohibit the employer from asking for this information, it's still not OK to lie. Refuse to disclose, yes, but don't lie.

Edit: guys, you should probably consult a lawyer. If you don't refuse to disclose but lie instead, that's called deception and at least in the EU it's a criminal offense. Also, morality, huh?

Is deception in general illegal in the EU? I don't think that is the case in the US. Fraud in the US requires that the person being deceived suffers an injury as a result of their reliance on a misrepresentation of a fact. That would be the case if you were applying for a loan because your income affects your ability to repay the loan, but I don't think it would be the case for an employer because they aren't harmed by your income being lower than what you tell them it is.

Yes, deception is illegal even if no one was, is or will be harmed; the rule is that it's illegal if the deception was made for profit (not just monetary). There are many situations where you profit from deception even though no one is harmed, and that's illegal.

What if insurer asks for the applicant's passport photo and then uses artificial or human intelligence to classify the applicant by race?

That's an interesting question. Of course, not everyone has a passport, but that's a nit: people applying for car insurance typically do have a driving licence with a photo. What would an AI make of a huge database of photos and insurance claims? I'd love it if someone would try the experiment! I doubt the AI would invent the concept of "race" (whatever that means), but it might decide that people with tattoos or piercings should pay more, for example.

If the insurers have everyone's photo, the AI can directly correlate the photos to accident rates and discriminate based on whatever mysterious aspect of the image appearance causes the correlation.

> That will change one day: sex should be treated as potentially confidential medical data.

Why “should” it? Don’t hold your breath.

Because it has not been shown that any indicator of causation of insurance risk due to race is anything other than a correlated symptom of other factors, where many properly peer-reviewed studies do seem to show that women, particularly within certain age and economic groups, are slightly safer drivers by an amount that is not small enough to be random noise in the stats. The effect is general enough for it to be defensible to say it is at least in part due to gender. Of course, other properties such as age, location, and profession, are much more significant factors.

While some studies show that it is true that Mexicans/African-Americans/insert-other-group-here are a higher insurance risk due to crime and to a smaller extent due to accidents, this is not because of their ethnic background but because of other perhaps correlated but not causally linked factors - they are more likely to live in poor areas with higher crime rates and not be able to afford better security measures. Being Mexican/black/other is not a causal factor despite there being some correlation, so it is not fair to discriminate based on that property, any discrimination should be based upon the causal factors, rather than the lazy correlation, to avoid being unfair to those said factors do not apply to.

(FYI: male here, with many an anecdotal tale to support us being worse drivers generally, if only by a little bit)

lt;cbatr: correlation does not imply causation. It is not fair to discriminate based on factors that are merely correlated with the risk, but it is fair to discriminate based on factors that can be shown to be causally related to the insurance risk.

Of course in the UK (and the EU more generally?) it has gone the other way: insurance companies were forced to stop discriminating by gender which means they can no longer give women lower premiums. Did they lower male premiums at the same time to make up the difference, or just bump female premiums up and pocket the extra? Go on, guess...

If there is no basis for being higher risk, why wouldn't an insurance company want to make more money?

Are you suggesting that their "inherent racism" is causing them to forgo shareholder profits?

They need to be as cheap as possible to remain competitive. This means identifying risky clients and either charging them more or worse refusing their business to make sure they are not taking on too much risk while trying to be competitive. If this were not the case then they would keep it simple and just charge a flat rate (that covers the highest risk they are willing to accept) to all customers.

Using discriminating factors that are simply correlated rather than causal is unfair as it penalises some people within a given profiled group for no good reason. This may not be due to inherent racism, but merely due to not properly understanding the statistics. Or not due to inherent racism now but because of lazy "it has always been done this way" reasoning. It may in part be due to racism, of course, as people are less likely to question results that agree with their worldview.

Identifying the correct causal factors and using the as discriminators is fair, and can be demonstrated to be better for the business too by allowing lower prices for some groups aiding competitiveness, but it can be harder work leading to the less effective and less fair option being used - saving effort now at the expense of being fair (and some potential longer-term business benefits).

And young women (girls to me) drive less because young men (boys) tend to drive when they are dating. So maybe it's not because of their gender (or perhaps more properly sex here) but because of other "perhaps correlated but not causally linked factors."

With a lot of states changing the requirements for drivers permits to require more training and disallowing multiple occupants under certain conditions when the driver is newly licensed it will be interesting to see if this changes.

Something I see come up regularly in discussions about women in tech is that women are often treated differently in their upbringing. For instance, many report an implicit (or even sometimes explicit) "computers are for boys" message that came from their caregivers, which shaped their connection to the tech industry. The causation here is not being a woman, it is being exposed to an environment that treats women in a certain way.

A similar norm I often see from caregivers is that they consider boys to be "rough and tumble" and girls "soft and dainty". It is easy to see how those behaviour classes could extend to insurance risk.

Is being a woman/man really the causation? Or is it something like the environment that the genders are brought up in? If it is the latter, how is that any different than a minority being brought up in a poor neighbourhood (and, statistically, stay there)? After all, in both cases, you are penalizing those who had an upbringing that is outside of the statistical norm due to a presence of correlation.

> It is not fair to discriminate based on factors that are merely correlated with the risk, but it is fair to discriminate based on factors that can be shown to be causally related to the insurance risk.

Why should an actuary care about cause? The correlation is what matters for that purpose.

In the case of life insurance or auto insurance, if charge the same by gender, it basically means subsidization of male by female. Given the female was the more disadvantaged group historically, it felt wrong.

Race is the other way around.

I'll take a swing.

Insurance companies have a strong incentive to price policies accurately, so you have to assume that discriminatory decisions are made with that goal in mind. Any restriction on factors that make the model less accurate (like forbidding race) will lead to higher volatility and a lower stock price (insurance companies are prized in portfolio management for their low volatility).

The government, however, recognizes that most people are forced to buy car insurance, which means that they are being forced to pay for those profit-maximizing decisions. And to the extent that being forced to pay can creates a downward spiral of high costs leading to poor decision making and even higher costs, that is something to be prevented.

So where to draw the line? Well, the people most at risk of getting into a downward spiral are the already economically disadvantaged (read:poor). The government already prevents considering whether the insured is poor (either explicitly or implicitly by not allowing questions about income/net worth on applications).

But really, any factor which would tend to disproportionately target the already-poor would need to be limited as well, since that can often become an end-run around the limitation. If you consider the factors that would do that at the population level, race would be very strong indicator of income, but gender would not be. (yes, I know women make less in the same jobs, but we're talking about the macro here, including women who are heads of household, 2-income families, and stay-at-home moms).

Now, it doesn't explain why other factors that would seem to be associated with low income like zipcode are allowed. But to answer your question about why gender is ok to price discriminate against while race is not, I think the answer is we try not to force poor people to pay more for government-mandated things just because they are poor or otherwise exhibit a feature that would characterize them that way to an uninformed observer.

Because they are different things (in the US).

Racial discrimination requires "strict scrutiny" to be legal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny

Sex discrimination requires "intermediate scrutiny" to be legal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_scrutiny

This podcast gives a wonderful history:

https://www.wnyc.org/story/sex-appeal/

What happens in your case if an entity is not in any way "aware" of people's protected class (they don't collect that info) but using these other properties coincidentally affect a protected class?

Say you _don't_ collect info on people's religiousness but other properties you collect in effect result in you either discriminating for or against either religious people or perhaps against atheists.

If there is no awareness, is there still liability?

I'm not a lawyer, but I'd say if you make a good faith effort to prevent that eventuality, it would probably at least mitigate liability. That's a great question, though.

Yes, you can still be liable even if you're not aware:

"Where a disparate impact is shown, the plaintiff can prevail without the necessity of showing intentional discrimination unless the defendant employer demonstrates that the practice or policy in question has a demonstrable relationship to the requirements of the job in question"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

> In fact, young people in general would have to get the same price as everyone else?

I really enjoy the fact that young people pay for car "insurance" more because of their increased risk at driving, but old people don't pay for health "insurance" more (if they pay at all) because of their increased risk at getting ill. Because one of those would be totally unfair while the other one is totally OK. You understand which one is which, right?

It is basically youth serfdom.

Here in the UK, if you elect to get private health cover in addition to the NHS-provided general care, older people do pay more.

I think they pay more in the US as well? I thought the aspect of ACA limits how much more they have to pay (and the Republican drafts had similar rules, but allowed a greater differential).

The reasoning being, over your lifetime you pay a bit more when young, which acts as a virtual savings account for when your older and need more care.

If you relied on people saving, they wouldn't and you'd have old people dying in the streets. Similar logic applies to enforcing pension savings.

But it's not savings it's redistribution, i.e. extortion.

Young generation is guaranteed nothing for their contribution.

It could only be sound if population is to grow organically and indefinitely, which will obviously be unsustainable either.

The society getting richer is probably the defining property that makes it sustainable, not the number of bodies in it.

Unfortunately that's not how modern economy works. And we don't know how to make it work that way.

Modern economy works in this way: you give up ~40% of your income, which is then redistributed between retirees. Infrastructure and all other kinds of social programs also take their cut. This works when there's two workers for every retired person

If there would be as many retirees as workers, you will end up giving 80% of your income. But it is totally unsustainable. Imagine that you pay $10 for a coffee, and the barista only gets $2 towards his account, post-tax. She won't be able to make decent living. You strangle life out of economy and make it go to grey zone.

Yes we may be able to produce endless amount of wealth, but we are not able to make this sheet balance itself. There's just 100 of percents and they don't make those anymore.

> I really enjoy the fact that young people pay for car "insurance" more because of their increased risk at driving, but old people don't pay for health "insurance" more (if they pay at all) because of their increased risk at getting ill

My health plan, purchased through my state's ACA exchange in the US, costs me as a 57 year old 2.71x what it would have cost a 23 year old purchasing the exact same plan.

I would happily take a 23 year old's car insurance premiums if I could get a 23 year old's health insurance premiums in exchange.

> old people don't pay for health "insurance" more

They do in fact pay much more for health insurance. US law does now limit how large of a difference there can be to lower than the natural amount, though, so young people are subsidizing older people's health insurance.

> Having a Hotmail account is a symptom of a problem which could lead to higher risk, but it is judging that symptom as if it is a cause which leads to risk.

No, it's not. Insurance is not about establishing causality. Insurance is about assessing risk. If you are correctly assessing risk via proxy signals, you are still correctly predicting the losses that will have to be covered by your insurance, it's completely irrelevant how the losses are causally connected to the signals that you use for the risk assessment. If careless people are more likely to both cause accidents and to have hotmail accounts, then use of a hotmail account does correctly predict an increased risk.

> Its exactly similar to the supposition that black people statistically commit more crime, and thus should pre-emptively receive harsher bail or be profiled.

No, insurance is not about influencing people, it is about assessing risk. Insurance companies ultimately don't care about how much losses they have to cover, they only care about pricing their premiums such that they do have the money to pay for it. Insurance companies don't raise premiums to incentivize people to reduce risk. Insurance companies raise premiums because there are more losses to cover where the risk is higher. That that might also sometimes incentivize people to reduce risk is a side effect, but not an intention of the insurer.

that's sort of how insurance pricing works though. An actuarial process groups you with others based on similar attributes, and works out an overall risk value for you based on the combined risk profiles of the "groups" to which you belong.

Historically, insurance companies only had things like postcode, gender, age, accident history to go off... but they're always interested in other data sets that could be used to modify pricing (or select less risky customers).

Clearly someone or something has identified email domain as a factor (presumably based on data).

They don't want "less risky customers" in car insurance and similar markets they want:

More customers (full stop, if you have customers then your competitors don't have them, so you grow and they fail) Customers who pay more money

Correctly assessing risk is not irrelevant but it's a small factor. You will not go out of business if you get the risk factors slightly wrong, you will if you can't attract customers or if they don't pay.

In markets where you insurer fewer, bigger customers you care even less about accurately computing their individual risk, and more about a problem called aggregate risk - if you ensure all the residential blocks in San Francisco against earthquake damage, the Big One wipes you out. Insure one such block in every US city and you're fine, the Big One means you take a loss in SF but not in New York or Seattle. But if they're all built from Newsteel and then it turns out Newsteel turns into mush after 25 years you're back to big problems. So you are suddenly very interested in understanding what is the Same about things you insure.

Even the obvious one, your insurance changes based on the type of car you're insuring.. because it's not all about cost.

It's no secret that sports cars are more costly to insure, specifically because people are more likely to drive recklessly in them.

If we didn't discriminate against people's car preferences, everyone's insurance would increase overnight.

> Having a Hotmail account is a symptom of a problem which could lead to higher risk, but it is judging that symptom as if it is a cause which leads to risk.

No, it's not judging that symptom as a cause. It doesn't even matter if it's a cause or a symptom, as long as it is statistically sound. Hotmail, like [not] smoking, [not] exercising, [not] drinking alcohol, is a choice. Having chosen one way or the other does, statistically, imply other things.

Whether we, as a society, want to allow this kind of statistical inference to meaningfully impact things like insurance costs, prison terms and other important decisions is a completely different issue.

gosh. no, having a hotmail account correlation it doesn't imply anything at all. is not causation, that's worth repeating 1000 times.

> Hotmail, like [not] smoking, [not] exercising, [not] drinking alcohol, is a choice.

lol.

Yelling that correlation is not causation 1000 times is ignorant when the effectiveness of a method depends only on correlation, and does not depend on the existence of a causal link. And in the case of filtering, that is the case.

Think screening for a virus vs trying to cure the virus. If warts are a symptom of the virus, having warts absolutely matters in screening. However, cutting off the warts will not remove the virus.

> correlation it doesn't imply anything at all. is not causation, that's worth repeating 1000 times.

You might want to understand correlation, causation and dependence, and implication before repeating that 1000 times. I specifically used the term "statistically imply", which is correct, and means "has predictive power", which is true in this case of correlation whether or not causation is involved.

Correlation actually implies a lot of things. At the very least, it implies statistical dependence (to the confidence attainable with the data). The converse is NOT true -- lack of correlation does not imply independence. But as independence implies LACK of correlation, correlation necessarily implies dependence. This is very basic probability, and is relevant to estimation of which insurance is an application. Causation is a completely different subject.

> lol

Care to elaborate? What exactly do you disagree with? Is any of the listed things not a choice?

That's correct on all counts except it's also irrelevant whether the variable is a choice or not.

It's a philosophical/ethical/legal question what should be allowed to go into insurance rates, so relevance is determined by the framework in which you evaluate things.

I am personally ok with higher car insurance premiums for people with a prior DUI conviction, and higher health insurance premiums for smokers; I'm not ok with higher health insurance premiums for albinos, or people with a family history of cardiac problems or family history of type I diabetes -- even though they are mathematically justified (which means that -- not being in either group -- my own premiums are higher as a result).

Yes, but that is a different issue as you said in your original comment. Statistically it is irrelevant. The "is it a choice" part also belongs in the "completely different issue" basket, so to speak.

Then it needs to be clear what the effects of the choice are, so you can choose. Then the effect will disappear because it's not a true predictor. Each of your examples have a clear explanation, hotmail doesn't.

What's a "true predictor"? Statistics deals with useful predictors (biased/unbiased, efficient/inefficient, sufficient/insufficient etc), and in that sense, it's likely that a hotmail account is a good predictor of (not) being good or up to date with modern computer technology; that's definitely true of my sample anecdata (and AOL is a stronger predictor of the same).

Now, assume for a second that ability to use modern technology (like touch screens and digital displays) correlates with safer driving -- an assumption that could actually be tested. If that's the case, then you would probably accept that a score on some objective[0] test of tech savvy could affect car insurance rates, right? An objective, though slightly less accurate, estimator of tech savvy is the domain name - "@microsoft.com" or "@google.com" means likely savvy, "@aol.com" or "@hotmail.com" likely less so.

Age, Gender and Religion are other predictors of the same kind; e.g. observant Jews have significantly lower (~15% in some stats) chance of being in a car accident. That's not because they are better drivers or drive better cars - it's because they refrain from driving for one day a week. Knowing someone is Jewish therefore implies lower chance of being in a car accident - maybe only 3%, because 80% do not observe. So "being Jewish" is, statistically, an informative predictor.

Again, I am not saying these SHOULD be legal - but that's a philosophical/legal issue. Where I now reside, the legally approved predictors are: (a) age, (b) accidents in the last 5 years, (c) most recent validity period of drivers license, and (d) age and safety rating of car. It's not as "free" a market, but it is much saner.

[0] but objectivity is subjective... http://wiki.c2.com/?ObjectivityIsAnIllusion

Let's say a true predictor is causal. Because each example you give is causal: age causes defects, smoking causes sickness, alcohol impairs, religion causes behaviour. Using hotmail versus gmail will not cause something -- private domains are outliers. If you make the predictor transparent the effect should disappear because no one will use a hotmail address unless they are technically inept.

I know some non-causal predictors, yet they're all controversial: various data as predictors for race, for example an address to determine which part of the city one lives.

This is my argument: it could be a `good` predictor but it's a proxy and it only works because there is no transparency. As such I don't think it's ethical for two different reasons.

I'd also like to add to your anecdata: I still use my first hotmail email as primary. I'm a young technical and safe driver (I hope).

> Let's say a true predictor is causal.

That's your definition. "Causal" is well defined, "true predictor" isn't. Let's adopt your definition for the sake of argument ...

> age causes defects, smoking causes sickness, alcohol impairs

Age is correlated with defects but does not directly cause it. Some people at 40 have less "age related defects" than other people at 30.

Smoking causes sickness, but is also correlated with less obesity, and -- in the minutes/hours after smoking, is correlated with being more alert (possibly caused by a nicotine response, I don't remember the biology).

Religion _sometimes_ causes behavior, the only thing you can say are that they are correlated - the vast majority of Jewish people I know are NOT observant, and yet - over the general population - it does correlate with less time on the roads even for the general population.

Yes, it's a proxy, but so is age, or "time since you got your license" - Some new drivers are way better than other drivers who have been driving for 20 years.

Whether it works only because of (no) transparency is up for debate - my great uncle could not switch from AOL to gmail on his own without my help, and does not want to. He might want to if he knew it saved him $100/year in insurance costs, true, but it would cost me time in support costs (gmail is easier; but he's been using AOL for over 20 years and it's hard for him to change his ways).

> As such I don't think it's ethical for two different reasons.

I don't think it's ethical either. And I would thus like it to be made illegal - because, statistically speaking, right now it is likely[0] a good proxy and predictor for a lot of things, and therefore as long as it's legal it will be used.

We have "blacklisted" other things, like race -- e.g., in the US, unfortunately "skin darkness" is a good predictor for the question "having spent time in jail" (about 10% of black people vs. 1% of white people). It is illegal to use as a predictor -- but it turns out that other "legal" predictors such as "lives in a high crime neighborhood" correlate strongly with "skin darkness" and ARE used to determine sentences.

The right thing, IMO, is to whitelist acceptable predictors, not blacklist unacceptable ones because you can always find proxies for the unacceptable ones, and it is easy to game one of those proxies, but hard to game 20 of them at the same time. But that's an ethical, legal and philosophical debate. Statistically, proxies are sound.

[0] I have no access to real data, I'm just assuming for the sake of argument

You seem to keep arguing that your examples are not causal but only correlated. Because something does not happen 100% of the time does not mean it's not causal. Smoking causes cancer, not everyone that smokes actually gets cancer.

I'm actually not satisfied with that definition, but for now it works well enough for the sake of argument. I would like to define it as a predictor whose strength does not change when it's used transparently. But that definition is too vague for now.

And you're right that when used transparently, the predictor will probably become more accurate.

> Smoking causes sickness, but is also correlated with less obesity, and -- in the minutes/hours after smoking, is correlated with being more alert (possibly caused by a nicotine response, I don't remember the biology).

In [0]: [Since] nicotine is a metabolic stimulant and appetite suppressant, quitting or reducing smoking could lead to weight gain.

I didn't know that smoking caused less obesity. I would have thought it was because of monetary reasons.

[0] http://www.nber.org/papers/w21937

I am using this definition of causality[0], which is precise, and you use it in a much more general sense.

> I didn't know that smoking caused less obesity. I would have thought it was because of monetary reasons.

It does not cause less obesity. It is correlated with less obesity, possibly through suppressed appetite -- but it's also possible that it's actually a reflection of economic background which is also correlated with obesity.

It apparently does cause more alertness (in the same way that coffee does -- enough of it will make you awake and alert, too much will kill you).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality#Probabilistic_causat...

What would you define as "scientifically proven"? In general, an observation that is observable, repeatable, and predictive is considered the criteria there. Take for instance genetics. The entire field is, with a few exceptions, built on nothing but correlations. And social science is 100% built on correlations.

If a geneticist were to state that some gene or another were linked to the unibrow [1] would you consider this scientifically dubious? After all, in that case all they did was look at people who have unibrows and look to find characteristics that were more common to this group than others. What if that genetic indicator did show up disproportionately among all people with unibrows and was relatively less common among those without a unibrow?

[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10815

> Unless you can scientifically prove that ethnicity causes crime to happen, its disgusting.

If someone was to prove such a fact (say, a gene prevalent in some ethnicity that causes propensity for fraud) would you support decision making based on the ethnicity? How about based on the presence of the gene?

You should watch Gattaca.

And then consider the alternate ending: his heart condition lead him to die halfway through the mission, and without a pilot everyone else onboard died.

I came away from the film with the impression that he didn't have and never had any heart condition. He was assumed to be super unhealthy because he was a natural birth (a kind of superstition, if you will), but that makes him like us. Do we all have heart conditions?

IIRC heart disease is the second most common cause of death, something in the region of 20%. So not all, but a substantial fraction of us have heart conditions.

Which might be why they thought that he had it. They seemed to be incorrect about something or he wouldn't routinely outperform his brother in physical sports.

Many athletes die young from heart conditions - a heart that's overperforming is one that's wearing itself out faster.

He had to fake the heart-monitoring test when he was running on a treadmill.

Did he have to or did he assume he had to?

Both of those are already happening in health insurance. Not a "gene" that causes "crime", but you're higher risk under certain conditions depending on genes and ethnicity.

Is it fair? No. Will legislation be put in place to fix it? No. The only thing that levels the playing field is .. Nevermind, let's not get into politics.

I disagree completely. Why does it matter whether it's just correlation or causation?

Let's imagine that being black was actually what caused black people to commit more crimes and this was scientifically proven, how does this make it less bad to discriminate against some black guy who may or may not be a criminal?

From a business perspective, correlation is a good measure and making decisions based on it is perfectly fine (if the correlation is real).

From a moral perspective, it is not OK to discriminate based on correlation or causation.

The distinction between correlation and causation matters when you are attempting to affect the outcome. For example you can't cure someone's sickle cell anemia by painting them white.

That makes the assumption that you have modelled all the variables that make up the solution space. For the example the real, underlying reason might be poverty. So while for the purposes of the application the solution might be "good enough" but in the broader context (society) there are going to be serious consequences.

No, I do not make any such assumption. And I already covered for which purposes the "underlying cause" matters and for which it doesn't.

Let's assume that higher crime rates are caused by poverty and not by the color of your skin.

Let's say you accept the answer you've received based on your heuristic that black people will statistically commit more crimes.

If a policy was based upon this heuristic, then you would have people living in poverty that would not be subject to the same policy. This is what discrimination is about. Citizens would thus not have the same rights / opportunity.

And the only reason you are accepting this heuristic as "good enough", is because you make the assumption that "you have modelled [enough of] the variables that make up the solution space".

This is not acceptable for policy makers and should be watched for closely in a democracy.

I don't understand what you're arguing against, which part of my comment do you consider incorrect?

Going back to your original post:

> and this was scientifically proven

which renders moot any discussion as you simply did not use the same assumptions. The discussion was about specialist decision systems using correlation as a heuristic for causation. You cannot explore the merit (or shortfalls) of this common practice and its possible effect on policy-making when positing that causation has been proven. This is nonsense.

Have a good day.

I said that even if it was scientifically proven it still wouldn't be OK to discriminate. Reading comprehension.

And the discussion was NOT about systems using correlation as a heuristic for causation. If a company filters users based on something, only correlation matters for their purposes. Believing correlation is only useful as a heuristic for causation is ignorant. For some purposes, correlation matters. For some purposes, the root cause matters. Not everything is the same.

>Unless you can scientifically prove that ethnicity causes crime to happen, its disgusting. This is obvious to us.

Whether or not ethnicity is a causal factor is irrelevant. Even if it is a causal factor, it is still an injustice to act on it.

And if you didn't care about justice and just wanted to achieve an optimal prediction, whether or not it's a causal factor doesn't actually matter. Probability theory does not require a causal link.

"If it is rainy then it is cloudy." Is a valid inference despite the fact that rain does not cause clouds.

> "If it is rainy then it is cloudy." Is a valid deduction

It is not, at least locally (because sunshowers happen.)

I thought I could sneak that fix in before anyone would notice. Yes, it's a valid inference, true with a high probability, but not a probability of 1.

>scientifically prove

That's not how the scientific method works.

> We need regulation in place to stop any punitive decision making, public and private, which can be found in court to be based on correlation instead of causation.

Actuarial analysis for insurance to exercise a privilege (i.e. driving) is not something that needs to be more heavily regulated. This is not health care/insurance, food, housing, or other critical necessities.

Correlation is a core part of actuarial science. You'd actually destroy the insurance business if you regulated that into nonexistence as you desire.

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