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How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

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Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#161

Post by energy123 »

dehrmann wrote: post #35
energy123 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethical issues of putting people out of a job? Please. This mindset has to be called out because it directly causes suffering via creating a societal permission structure for politicians to protect interest groups with protectionist trade policy and internal pork barreling policy. Economic productivity putting people out of jobs is both good and necessary and it is unethical to work against it.

My favorite example of complaints about "putting people out of jobs" is that's an argument against self-serve gas in New Jersey (and recently Oregon).

It's an argument against all innovation and progress.

There should be social safety nets to ease people's transition. Not protectionism of unproductive jobs.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#162

Post by Zanfa »

nradov wrote: post #107
alpha_squared wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI can (theoretically) be a lot more fair in dealing with claims Respectfully, no it can't. From a Western perspective, specifically American, and from an average middle-class person's perspective, specifically American, it only appears to be fair. However, LLMs are a codification of internet and written content, largely by English speakers for English speakers. There are <400m people in the US and ~8b in the world…

Nope. Claims adjudication LLMs aren't trained on random Internet content. If you're going to criticize then at least get your basic facts right.

Why wouldn't they be? LLMs need a lot of content for training and there's multiple orders of magnitude less to train on of if you limited it to insurance-specific content, so you'd probably get a really crappy LLM. And training from scratch is really expensive anyway.

At best they'll be using fine tuned enterprise OpenAI / Anthropic models, more likely a regular model with a custom prompt.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#163

Post by robertlagrant »

QuercusMax wrote: post #42
robertlagrant wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use people to deny as well. Or non-AI automation; just some business rules in a normal system.

United Healthcare was in the news last year because they had an AI claims "approval" process with a 90% error rate, all in favor of the insurance company. It's easy to describe a business process with written down rules, and those are easy to find in legal discovery. It's much easier to obfuscate with an AI model, because "nobody knows what it's actually doing - it's AI!".

> It's much easier to obfuscate with an AI model, because "nobody knows what it's actually doing - it's AI!".

Do you have actual knowledge of this? If not, the most obvious counterpoint is that the AI will need to give the reason or reasons for denial, and recording them for audit. Just like a human or a rules-based system.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#164

Post by vasco »

klank wrote: post #155
vasco wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So should we all be farming and collecting berries? Most advancements since have put people out of jobs in "competitors" that didn't adapt. Still the unemployment rate isn't 99.9%. Yet we displaced whole industries many times over the centuries. Obviously people move to better jobs and find other things to do. There's nothing particularly good about sitting on a computer denying people insurance all day, why not have…

If it is a choice between progress unfettered by concern for your "competitor's labor" or farming berries, I choose berries. However, I believe there's a middle ground and endeavor to find it. Based on your response it doesn't appear as though you believe a middle ground exists.

Choosing berries (ie not progressing to "protect jobs" - no jobs are protected, we have close to full employment worldwide) is choosing avoidable deaths. Child mortality rate in a "choose berries" world is just one example that makes me triggered by those that have that position.

And you get nothing in return for protecting those jobs, as I said, the world is "employed" and we've killed many industries already over the centuries. You're protecting nothing.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#165

Post by DrScientist »

throw10920 wrote: post #6

Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and a…

This comment is at the heart of many of the challenges tech companies face - they can scale the serving of content - but struggle to scale the content moderation and/or dispute resolution.

It's a common problem with automation - the focus is often on accelerating the 'happy' path, only to realise dealing with the exceptions is where the real challenges lie.

One tried and trust way around that is to cherry pick customers as part of your strategy. You sell insurance to people who will never claim ( and hence dispute), and shun those likely to.

However such market segmentation results in no insurance for people who would need it and the people who don't wondering why they are buying it - ie optimal efficiency for an insurance company is to simply offer no value at all.

ie you could argue the whole value proposition of an insurance company is to pool, not segmented risk, and critically to provide fair arbitration ( protecting the majority of the pool from those that would do insurance fraud, while still paying out ).

Buying 'peace of mind' requires a belief in a fair dealing insurer - that's the key scale challenge - not pricing or sales.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#166

Post by macrocyclo »

Raidion wrote: post #38
guywithahat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole business is nonsensical. The point of a consultant is they have a lot of experience in a specific domain, a recent Harvard grad is useless. From what I've heard, tons of their consultants are young people with minimal real industry experience

You pay for one or two people with real experience and 4 reasonably new hires whose job it is to answer questions posed by the senior team and to build documentation. You want the senior people focusing on the problems, strategy, and comms and not data aggregation and power point formatting. Half the time it doesn't actually matter who the consultant is, the business is just looking for an arbiter to provide a second…

>Half the time it doesn't actually matter who the consultant is, the business is just looking for an arbiter to provide a second opinion or justify a decision.

It's much easier to feel good about a decision if you can get some McKinsey people to hold your hand and tell you it will be ok while making it.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#167

Post by watwut »

throw10920 wrote: post #6

Article is interesting on the whole (I have no experience with "professional" work, and would love for suggestions as to how to be more familiar), but I latched onto this nugget: > Our vision at Meanwhile is to build the world's largest life insurer as measured by customer count, annual premiums sold, and total assets under management. We aim to serve a billion people, using digital money to reach policyholders and a…

I will tell it even more plainly - the plan is to find clever ways how to not pay insurance claims in an automated way.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#168

Post by watwut »

comrade1234 wrote: post #8

My wife made a McKinsey consultant cry… she hired McKinsey for some internal project. One person on the project was a recent Harvard grad. They were in a meeting going over the deliverables along with the McKinsey partner on the project and in the meeting my wife said something to the effect that their work wasn’t up to McKinsey standards. The junior guy started crying in the meeting. Like just blubbering. My wife st…

Are you genuinely surprised they dis not fired him for a single incident?

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#169

Post by [deleted] »

blitzar wrote: post #157
burningChrome wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> that the only way to provide dispute resolution and customer service to 1B people with only 100 employees is by depriving them of any chance to interact with a human. Real world evidence supporting your argument: United Health Group is currently embroiled in a class action lawsuit pertaining to using AI to auto-deny health care claims and procedures: The plaintiffs are members who were denied benefit coverage. The…

> has a 90% error rate, meaning nine of 10 appealed denials were ultimately reversed. feature, not bug working as intended, closing ticket

[deleted]

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#170

Post by Moomoomoo309 »

patmcc wrote: post #106
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it directly causes suffering via creating a societal permission structure for politicians to protect interest groups with protectionist trade policy and internal pork barreling policy What part of that is suffering, if it enables 100k constituents to put food on the table?

We could employ 100k people to dig holes and then fill them back in; should we? We shouldn't employ people in economically un-viable ways just because they need income. We can just give them money directly, or redirect them to other work, or a combination of the two.

"My father worked two jobs to have money to throw in the money pit!" - The Onion

I wonder if we were in a post-scarcity world, what we'd think of stuff like this.

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