IMF researchers: digital footprint yields better credit assessment

Again: not everyone carries a phone.

"An one" in my earlier reply should have been "And one"

Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In this case, the problem is an excess of bureaucratese, euphemism, jargon, and vagueness.

As Orwell wrote in "Politics and the English Language" on five badly written English passages:

[T]wo qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...

It's very common to see this tactic used in communications from* organisations or institutions about matters of significant import. Take the recent " Email from Jeff Bezos to employees", as a classic example:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/email-from-jef... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26006656). The title entirely fails to adequately describe the actual subject.

As is the case with the IMF's blog entry.

If there's a systematic financial disadvantage experienced by black people, possibly as a result of racism, then continuing to financially disenfranchise them will hardly help, will it? Access to liquid capital is pretty critical if you want to make money, isn't it?

Judgement is notoriously self-fulfilling. The best way to keep someone poor is to treat them like a poor person. The best way to drive someone to crime is to treat them like a criminal. The best way to keep someone ignorant is to treat them like an idiot.

Maybe someone is objectively less likely to pay back their loans, less likely to succeed in school and more likely to be arrested for a crime, but when those predictions end up forcing them to live in a worse neighborhood because they can't qualify for a loan in the better one, go to a worse school because they aren't expected to succeed in the better one and live with a higher police presence because they're more likely to be arrested, maybe those predictions aren't just predicting worse outcomes but are actually reinforcing them.

Do we want a society where it is okay to charge red heads more for car insurance because they are red heads? Why should people have to bear the sins of others who happen to look like them?

[0]And isn't intrinsic, e.g. people with big feet might pay more for shoes, but not for mortgages.

It’s like applying for home fire insurance and saying you burned down your previous 3 homes and will likely burn down this one.

This is a strange take. If you had to "consent" to laws there would be utter chaos. The places where you can pick and choose which laws apply to you have no real laws. And all of those places are dangerous and destitute. That's why laws are decided by the majority, there will always be dissenters for every law out there. Some harmless, but others that want to pillage, burn things down, and worse.

There will always be laws that you don't like, unless there's no laws at all.

Which one of the causes was first in history seems academic and immaterial if we're at t>0 and wanting to devise a strategy to slow it down or stop it.

Depending on the situation the same people behave differently. So it's not the skin color in itself but the different context that makes races behave differently. Being poor or uneducated for example is a better prediction of defaulting on payments, but race, wealth and education are correlated.

The affordances of the context influence choices - how many good options vs bad options you have in your situation. For example, people who would behave perfectly OK in normal life might try to cheat the system to get vaccinated sooner. Because they only got bad options, they might pick a bad behavior. "I got no choice!" Equality of opportunity, and not of outcomes, seems to me the best approach.

The reverse of this is also happening - in the more developed and feminist leaning cultures fewer women choose to do scientific research. Why? They got better options, so many great choices to pick from. It's insulting to question people's choices when they are made in an abundance of good options, as if they were children who can't make their own decisions.

- May be based on bad, inaccurate, or nonrepresentative data.

- May be based on factors intrinsic to individuals which they cannot change.

- May mask underlying bias factors (as in the NBA example above.)

- May reflect existing biases in behaviours. E.g., arrest, promotion, recruitment, or admissions data used to encode an AI selector, which merely codify biases reflected in the underlying historical data.

- May reverse causality, implying A causes B, when in fact B results in A.

- Amplify existing inequalities. Starting points in life matter, and an algorithm which simply amplifies the existing inequities of wealth, race, place of birth, religion, health, etc., compound rather than address these issues.

- Fail to consider fairness or equity in decisionmaking. This is the underlying fundamental problem in credit-based resource allocation. People need access to resources regardless of their creditworthiness, though there might well be cases in which allocations are modified or managed given behavioural issues. Reinforcing standing biases does not address the underlying inequities.

Because it makes health insurance impossible to get when you need it most. It makes health insurance a scam because any serious illness and your company will fire you and you won't be able to get any other insurance. Insurance becomes cheap because it's useless.

Wealth inequality is a problem because money = power. Extreme wealth concentration is not compatible with democracy because eventually these people and corporations are so wealthy they can just buy votes. Spiraling wealth inequality gets you a Russia situation, an Oligarchy in everything but name.

Your argument is not a far stretch from "why don't we just let poor and sick people die". It's pretty much equivalent to "why don't we allow anyone to discriminate however they want", which got us great things like slavery

Basically, loans should only be given to those who are 99% likely to pay them back. Anyone who is at risk of default, say because they lost their job should be denied, making a permanent descent into poverty and misery even more likely.

Health insurance should only be given to those who are already healthy. Anyone who is sick enough to significantly benefit from insurance should be rejected. Even if they have an easily treatable condition that costs $50 in medicine a month, they should be rejected, guaranteeing their health gets worse.

In a world that worked so hard over centuries to create modern healthcare, we should only use it for people who barely need it. We may have literally figured out how to transplant organs and save lives, but nah its too expensive so why bother?

In your world, the slightest shock in someone's life would mean all safety nets get pulled, guaranteeing they will never recover. Then that data gets fed back to an ML model, confirming that yes indeed, people who need money or healthcare never do well anyways, so why bother with a lost cause?

Anyways, your worldview is fucked. Hope you think much more deeply about it. Or just grow old in the world you wish for, maybe one day you will need surgery, insurance will reject you, banks will not loan you the $200k it costs, and you will die for the sake of the algorithms and profit maximization.

TDR-TB.

If you think it is, that's fine. We might as well just taking the same approach to crime, and start locking individuals up or not extending job offers, NOT because they've done a single thing wrong, but simply because they're statistically more likely to.

Consider a sample size of 10/1million with height value of 7m. And somehow 7/10 had poor ability to repay loans. With such a small sample size of this relevant factor be a good thing to rely on?

Would you be OK if banks started charging you 4% more interest because say you have irish heritage? Your behaviour hasn't changed and nobody can explain why it matters that your father was irish, but the models determined it's statistically significant,

What if at some point 30 years down the line it's determined it wasn't even related to irish heritage. There was just coincidentally long running extreme predatory lending by banks in cities with large irish populations.

Would you still feel there's nothing wrong with it?

There's a fundamental misunderstanding of power, its dynamics, and technology's relationship to it.