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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

#132
post #90

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

The score you get from any of the credit reporting agencies is not necessarily the score that will be used to determine your credit by any lender. That is a representative score based on one metric, I think Transunion is Vantage 3.0, but lenders can use any scoring system they want, the credit report will be the same but the score may be different. It really does show a complete lack of understanding of the credit scoring system on his part, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score_in_the_United_Sta...

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

#133

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…

It could also very well be "We trained our neural net on historical allocations of credit limits by professional analysts, who had a subconscious gender bias". The point is there's no way to know.

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

#134

The original Twitter thread is still being updated, and it's a doozy. This is not an isolated incident. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1193240508845510656 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1193242909111398401

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,"

Seriously, please read before commenting!

The thread is not that long.

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

#135

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…

It could, realistically, be almost anything except for evil bankers deciding to use illegal criteria FTA: “My belief isn’t there was some nefarious person wanting to discriminate. But that doesn’t matter. How do you know there isn’t an issue with the machine-learning algo when no one can explain how this decision was made?”

They can explain, they most likely don't want to. Also how does this guy know this is a "machine-learning algo" and not just a series of ifs and elses?

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

#136
post #99

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...

Except for

1) according to him, the bureau they were using for underwriting data indicated she had higher credit score

2) "conditioning on credit score which is correlated with gender" is not conditioning on gender. The algorithms that derive credit score from a set of credit data do not condition on gender.

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

#137
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

> credit scores for women skew lower than for men. Which is crazy, because for most of my guy friends (myself included), saying that their significant others/women make significantly better financial decisions is putting it far too lightly. I basically wasn't making decisions at all (besides savings) until my s/o set me right. This discrimination is tragic and disgusting.

"Good financial decisions" are only at a very specific margin associated with credit score. If you have an underwater car loan you can't really afford comfortably that you nonetheless make the minimums on whilst eating rice and beans, you'll have great credit after a couple years. If you strategically defaulted immediately after buying your ridiculously underwater condo in 2008 and it took them 3 years to foreclose on you, you made a great financial decision and your credit is trashed for the next six years.

Credit scores specifically correlate with default risk, not some abstracted measure of financial health.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> credit scores for women skew lower than for men. Which is crazy, because for most of my guy friends (myself included), saying that their significant others/women make significantly better financial decisions is putting it far too lightly. I basically wasn't making decisions at all (besides savings) until my s/o set me right. This discrimination is tragic and disgusting.

Women tend to have lower incomes and lower net worths. Here is a recent article squeeing about women finally being willing to buy homes on their own: https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/the-rise-... One of the statistics in it: Single women can only afford about 39% of homes. Single men can afford more than half. Historically, couples with traditional marriages (primary breadwinner husband, wife whose…

Yeah. It wasn't that long ago the mortgage industry was rife with blatant gender discrimination, which contributed to this issue. I've learned this from the compliance training at the mortgage lender where I currently work.

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

#139
post #3

Maybe these CC issuers should just take gender out of the equation and solely base their credit extension on economic and behavioral data points.

That would be the obvious first step and an absolute minimal requirement. The problem is that as these systems get more black-box-y there is little to stop them making predictions that are affected by inferred hidden characteristics. Like, “we don’t take race or ethnicity into account, but our insurance algorithm says that if you have black hair and brown eyes and a name commonly found in black communities and you li…

To the extent there exists a correlation between some characteristic and the outcome, models that exhibit the correlation will be more accurate than models that don't, irrespective whether the characteristic is used as a model feature or not. In the context of risk assessment, "more accurate" means "more likely to survive in the market place".

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s assume that the tweet author is reasonably well-versed in business operations, since he is himself a very successful businessman.

Sure. Let's assume I am very well versed in other pertinent domains of knowledge, like social psychology and the tendency for people to get mad as hell about social justice issues and leap to ugly conclusions that fit their SJW narrative about evil in the world that can be conveniently lumped under a one word heading, like sexism. Let's further assume that this is actually actively counterproductive, so it's reasonab…

Also in compliance training, as mentioned in a different reply to you, we talk about disparate impact. As I'm sure you can guess, this principle implies that sexism can be thought of as an outcome, not just the result of explicitly "evil" attitudes.

In other words, I think he's right to say that Apple should be accountable for the issue he has pointed out, regardless of how it happened, which you rightly point out that he can't possibly know for sure.

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