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Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe

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Re: Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe

#91

Post by eropple »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #62
xenihn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your argument for opposing full exposure, other than the potential impact on your personal livelihood?

The model is not your property. Do you plan on releasing all of your company’s code on Github gratis? Unlikely. As long as the model doesn’t violate the law, you have no right to it, unless you’re a regulator. Regulators and oversight bodies get full (audited and logged) access. And while it’s none of your business, I don’t need my job, or a job at all. I work for projects I enjoy.

In the modern economy it’s impossible to not be constantly and pervasively impacted by these data models. I think it’s reasonable to assert that it is in society’s best interest to make sure that the effects and impacts of these models are communicated as perfectly as possible to those who are forced to live under their purview. What way is this done besides viewing the model? (And given the state of regulatory capture, I’m not sure you can rely on regulators as proxies, no?)

It’s totally possible that those models could then be “gamed”, sure—but it’s more important that people are able to live than for lenders and the like to make yet another buck, isn’t it?

Re: Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe

#92

Post by judge2020 »

Terretta wrote: post #76
tootie wrote: post #25

One data point really isn't enough to draw a conclusion and I actually doubt it's true. GS is extremely scrupulous when it comes to avoiding liability and they probably put a ton of diligence into their risk model. It's possible there's some emergent gender bias but we'd need a better show of proof.

> One data point really isn't enough to draw a conclusion My wife's credit history is longer and historically her score higher because I used no revolving credit until recently, and not using credit cards counts against you. Also married filing jointly... For the Apple Card, I was given her limit several times over. I did notice that the expected limit is shown before the hard pull on credit. This means they've got a…

> To your point about the risk model, I generally think the credit score the bureaus give us is wrong, while I think the decision GS made on the card limits is probably plausible

I find this likely too, the first time I applied I got denied and the credit score in the email was considerably lower (-100 points) that what is shown on Credit Karma.

Re: Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe

#93

Post by School-Cotton »

gyc wrote: post #75
School-Cotton wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I am missing something, but wouldn't it make perfect sense if they have dramatically different income? I think even if two people have their property in common (and if the algorithm even knows about that), it is still not unreasonable to believe that there is a higher probability of the one with higher income paying off his or her loans.

DHH said his wife actually had a higher credit score than him.

So what? Credit score and income are two separate things. Credit applications look at both.

Re: Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe

#95

Post by defen »

gyc wrote: post #75
School-Cotton wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I am missing something, but wouldn't it make perfect sense if they have dramatically different income? I think even if two people have their property in common (and if the algorithm even knows about that), it is still not unreasonable to believe that there is a higher probability of the one with higher income paying off his or her loans.

DHH said his wife actually had a higher credit score than him.

Doesn’t that concede the point that married couples can have different credit profiles? How much higher is her score? What is the max amount of credit GS will issue to a household? DHH has a history of acting righteously angry without having all the relevant facts.

Re: Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe

#96

Post by toomuchtodo »

eropple wrote: post #91
toomuchtodo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model is not your property. Do you plan on releasing all of your company’s code on Github gratis? Unlikely. As long as the model doesn’t violate the law, you have no right to it, unless you’re a regulator. Regulators and oversight bodies get full (audited and logged) access. And while it’s none of your business, I don’t need my job, or a job at all. I work for projects I enjoy.

In the modern economy it’s impossible to not be constantly and pervasively impacted by these data models. I think it’s reasonable to assert that it is in society’s best interest to make sure that the effects and impacts of these models are communicated as perfectly as possible to those who are forced to live under their purview. What way is this done besides viewing the model? (And given the state of regulatory captu…

Lenders can still realize a reasonable profit while ensuring people are not improperly discriminated against by machine intelligence.

Effective regulation is possible. I would even be willing to serve a tour of duty standing up such a regulatory body, perhaps as a division of the CFPB. Throwing up your hands that government is ineffective entirely is unreasonable, just as asking for all models to be public is.

Re: Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe

#97

Post by DoreenMichele »

w4 wrote: post #90
DoreenMichele wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read the whole thread, but I am seeing him bitch about her credit score being higher -- from a single agency. There are other agencies which may have different info. I know nothing about this particular credit card. I'm not as up on credit stuff as I once was (and the world has changed a lot since then). But when I was a homemaker, I had a credit card in my name with a much higher limit than my husband had…

> I haven't read the whole thread, but I am seeing him bitch about her credit score being higher -- from a single agency. There are other agencies which may have different info. If you read the thread, he was specifically told the Apple Card uses Transunion, which is why they checked with Transunion, and found her score was higher on that report: https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1192945415538106369?s=21

He was also repeatedly told "It's the algorithm, man! And I have no clue what's in it!"

I worked for a Fortune 500 company at one time. Lots of entry level employees were not exactly reliable sources of info about how decisions got made there.

You may or may not be talking with an entry level employee in their call center, but you probably aren't talking to a departmental head or member of the C suite.

Re: Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe

#98

Post by esotericn »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #82
esotericn wrote: post #54

It strikes me that longer term, we're just going to end up playing a cat and mouse game with people continually inventing different categories that businesses aren't permitted to 'discriminate' on. Today it might be gender and race. That makes a lot of sense, because the alternative is to further entrench what are basically inheritances. But aren't we just going to rattle on through and have the algorithms discover (…

That’s not a great argument though - essentially “we can’t prevent an ML model from being biased so we should embrace it.” Western society has mostly accepted the idea that—outside of some specific cases—we should avoid building systems and processes that systematically discriminate against people on the basis of a selection of characteristics which have historically attracted it. The exact application of this concep…

I think you've mistaken me.

My argument is that if we take the standpoint that we don't just want the metric to be whatever is short-term economically optimal for the designer of the model, we should just stop/ban it now, because we already know that we're going to have to kill it once we actually understand it properly.

It's only allowed now because we haven't figured out the bad things that are happening.

Inventing more and more categories that businesses are not permitted to discriminate upon is precisely the wrong approach - if we're talking about huge companies and not the bakery down the road, we need something that's more like 'you need a very good reason to exclude someone', rather than 'you can exclude someone for whatever reason they like, unless they're a member of the set of continually extending list of protected categories'.

Re: Viral Tweet About Apple Card Leads to Goldman Sachs Probe

#99

Post by burnte »

kyrieeschaton wrote: post #57

I guess it worked for him to throw a hissy fit, but there's absolutely no reason to actually believe they're conditioning on gender. It could be "it's a new product, we randomly assign credit limits to see how it affects behavior". It could be "it's a community property state and we're overexposed to this household if we give the second card the same limit as the first". It could, realistically, be almost anything ex…

> I guess it worked for him to throw a hissy fit, but there's absolutely no reason to actually believe they're conditioning on gender.

There certainly is. Ignoring the anecdotal data of people replying to him who saw the same outcome, credit scores for women skew lower than for men.

One of many sources: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/gend...

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