Comment by peoplewindow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peoplewindow | Hacker News Reader

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Frankly maybe they should just be allowed to charge differential prices based on race. If race correlates with different insurance outcomes for some reason then covering up the symptoms doesn't change anything, the same link might just end up being discovered by an ML system via other signals. I've seen ML repeatedly discover inconvenient truths in other (non individual related) contexts and suppressing the feature it was using to make the connection just caused it to find worse equivalents based on combinations of other features.

My sympathy is somewhat limited because in recent times it feels like there's plenty of explicit racism in the world against whites, like the BBC constantly posting internships and job ads that specifically forbid white people from applying. If western societies have somehow concluded that it's OK to engage in that sort of thing, then why shouldn't race be a factor in insurance contributions? At least that has some sort of coherent argument for why it's a good thing (more accurate premiums for everyone).

Firstly, it's correlation not causation though, at the moment certain names are associated with lower economic status and poor education, purely because immigrants take time to accrue assets and move up the ladder, and certain races have been historically heavily discriminated against and so were forced into lower economic statuses and worse schools.

Secondly, you seem to be against positive discrimination (which I was for a time).

All you have to do to change your mind is look at the actual statistics. We've been trying to not discriminate for over a generation, for over 30/40 years.

For example, how many female executives are there? How many female politicians are there? In the UK, for example, both those numbers were terrible. No, for politicians, we've got all-women short lists, and it's working, the numbers are starting to approach an even balance. We've even just got our second female Prime Minister, before the US even managed one.

It's basically a tiny percentage. People like employing people in their "club". People just like them. For well paid people, that's the white, male club. Maybe it's subconscious racism, maybe it's concious racism, maybe it's simply network effects, it doesn't matter.

What matters is that we've tried the "we don't discriminate" path for over a generation, it didn't work and therefore positive discrimination is necessary to correct imbalances in many fields. At some point we'll be able to stop, but simply saying that as a society we wouldn't discriminate any more didn't work.

I'm not sure your British example shows what you think.

The Labour party in the UK has all women shortlists, as befitting its left wing policies. It has never had a female leader, let alone a female prime minister.

The Conservative party refuses to use gender quotas, and has given the UK both its female prime ministers, who won fair elections, in which neither campaigned on a Clintonesque "vote for me because I'm a woman and that'd be neat" line.

To me, it doesn't seem like "positive discrimination" even works there, and by the way, let's call it what it is, sexism and racism against majorities. Nothing positive about it. The British Empire oppressed all sorts of ethnic majorities (in the countries that were conquered), because they believed the conquered people were savages/lesser people/etc. We don't hesitate to call that racism do we?

I think those claims are fundamentally based on the belief that in a truly fair society, we'd see proportionate representations of all genders, ethnicities, etc. in all places. That's just a belief, though. There's no evidence or science supporting that. It is at least as possible (if not more so) that cultural factors, individuals' own decisions, and other factors are contributing more.

The reality is that you can draw lines anywhere between large groups of people and see different outcomes. You will see different outcomes between people born in New York or LA. People with brown eyes and people with hazel eyes. People in Kansas and people in Arkansas. We can openly acknowledge differences in outcomes between these groups will happen despite a lack of systemic oppression keeping one or the other down, yet as soon as race or gender come up, people insist we have to put blinders on and pretend we're all identical robots all the way up into the board room / Congress.

When you outright assume that differences in outcomes are caused by oppression, you're making an unfalsifiable claim. Nothing has been proven, and you could just be wrong. And if you're wrong, then you're just rationalizing racism against people you perceive are unfairly oppressive. But since it's unfalsifiable, you can never be called out on it.

We have clear evidence it's not working. That was my point.

Your entire point is predicated on the assumption we don't, and so your whole argument falls.

For example, what's unfalsifiable about "evidence shows racism and sexism is still rampant in executive appointments". It's verifiable and falsifiable. You can, in less than a minute with a search engine, find the percentages of women on executive boards.

> It's verifiable and falsifiable.

You can verify the representations are not proportionate. There is no evidence that, if no oppression existed, the representations would be proportionate. This is a very basic and clear difference.

The NBA has a very high representation of black men, and a very low representation of Jewish or Hispanic men. This in no way proves racism is rampant in the NBA. The cause is likely other factors, and if you decided to "positively discriminate" against black men to "fix" this problem, you wouldn't actually be "fixing" anything. You'd just be rationalizing discriminating on a racial basis.

Or maybe - and call me crazy here - men and women are different, and want different things, and therefore, as we reduce discrimination, nearly every job and hobby will end up with a huge gender imbalance as individuals sort themselves into groups doing what they truly, freely want to do.

Then your conviction that every job must be exactly 50% of each gender no matter how much power must be wielded to make it happen would be a massively misguided recipe for tyranny, harming both men and women.

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