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IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

extremetech.com

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Re: IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

#221

Post by andrekandre »

marcusverus wrote: post #197
II2II wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to say whether the problem is going to get better or worse. Many people live in an already precarious position, and this would only make matters worse. Both the left and the right already see the system as broken, even if they don't agree upon how it is broken or how to fix it. I would suggest that most of those people see themselves as moderates or at least representing the majority (whether or not they a…

The problem is that we're trying to achieve a goal which is not possible with the tools at hand. There is no way to satisfy the right of all people to self-govern in a nation where half of the population wants a secular society with a European-style welfare system, and the other half wants a laissez-faire system that imposes Christian social mores. The goals of the left and right are not reconcilable. The underlying…

  > To ensure that we are truly able to self-govern, we need to pick our governments, not just our representatives.
what does that mean in practice?

i guess im having a hard time imagining what that would look like in concrete terms...

Re: IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

#222

Post by benhurmarcel »

archildress wrote: post #48

Credit scores are so fundamentally broken anyway. In financial analysis of a company, the number one item you tend to look at is "free cash flow" - the "cash available for the company to repay creditors or pay dividends and interest to investors." [1] Why then do we not take income into account in credit worthiness? Why do I not periodically upload my W2 or tax return to the credit bureaus in order to show that yes,…

Is there any other country than the US that has a similar credit score system, based on repaying the most past debt possible?

Re: IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

#223

Post by benhurmarcel »

mig39 wrote: post #165
Ekaros wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in country where we don't have credit score it always seemed massive black box with very strange incentives... Here the loaning is based on income, other loans and possibly registry of past failed payments. I'm not really sure if more than last one is needed, maybe some overall registry of how much money single person has lend and what part is unguaranteed of it...

Sounds like you're describing a credit score :-)

No because in other countries, never having taken debt won’t make any difference compared to having repaid all your past debt.

Re: IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

#224

Post by Barrin92 »

People are very cynical about this but I honestly don't think there's in principle anything wrong with using such data to establish credit-worthiness, because as the article points out many people do not have a stable financial history and this creates a negative cycle.

Fact of the matter is if people want access to credit the creditor has a legitimate interest in making an informed decision about whether the individual is reliable to set a correct rate. There is no way around this.

The two other alternatives are, we don't give someone access to credit, or we hand out credit without any sort of metrics. The first one doesn't help anyone, the second one doesn't make any financial sense.

Consumer data (the article also mentions online shopping history, which makes more sense than 'browser history'), in contrast to institutional banking data is ubiquitous even in poor countries because people now have wide access to phones and services. It would enable a lot of people to get access to credit.

Re: IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

#225

Post by nanis »

regularfry wrote: post #214
nanis wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't see that domain, it's blocked on our corporate network, Notes: https://archive.ph/hwbSf App: https://archive.ph/ntqR3 > Lateral flow tests have a 0.3% false positive rate In the lab ... which is not the same as the real world. > which is that testing isn't uniformly distributed. The comments were in the context of efforts to test everyone at least once or twice a week whether symptomatic or not. > The dange…

> In the lab ... which is not the same as the real world No, I quoted the real-world value intentionally. The lab value is 0.06%. Depending on when you wrote the page it's understandable that you might not have had access to that yet, but it turns out that LFT's are really, really good at not throwing a false positive. > Only if you assume there is no cost to false positives. No, you don't need to assume there is no…

Stuff like this[1] ought to have some impact on the "real world" results, right?

> false positives have a linear cost.

That's a strong assumption. Assuming constant testing happens in an environment of quarantining of the person who tested positive and their contacts and possibly their contacts (which is the goal of the whole trace & quarantine fever of 2020), it is hard to argue that the costs of false positives do is linear in the number of false positives. They are hard to observe and record because they are mostly in foregone productive activities and negative impacts on mental health, but that does not make them go away.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/02/uk-pupils-oran...

Re: IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

#226

Post by regularfry »

nanis wrote: post #225
regularfry wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the lab ... which is not the same as the real world No, I quoted the real-world value intentionally. The lab value is 0.06%. Depending on when you wrote the page it's understandable that you might not have had access to that yet, but it turns out that LFT's are really, really good at not throwing a false positive. > Only if you assume there is no cost to false positives. No, you don't need to assume there is no…

Stuff like this[1] ought to have some impact on the "real world" results, right? > false positives have a linear cost. That's a strong assumption. Assuming constant testing happens in an environment of quarantining of the person who tested positive and their contacts and possibly their contacts (which is the goal of the whole trace & quarantine fever of 2020), it is hard to argue that the costs of false positives do…

> Stuff like this[1] ought to have some impact on the "real world" results, right?

The real world results, as measured, showed a 0.3% false positive rate. If your [1] has a measurable effect, it's included in that 0.3%.

> > false positives have a linear cost.

> That's a strong assumption. Assuming constant testing happens in an environment of quarantining of the person who tested positive and their contacts and possibly their contacts (which is the goal of the whole trace & quarantine fever of 2020), it is hard to argue that the costs of false positives do is linear in the number of false positives.

It's not hard at all. It literally follows from the problem setup. If one person has 4 contacts, and each of those contacts has 4 more, and you quarantine all of them, then that's 17 people quarantined from a single positive test. That "17" is a linear constant. There's no feedback mechanism: one positive test leads to 17 quarantines only, and you're done. It's linear. It might have a higher constant factor than you personally think is justified, but that's a very different question.

Re: IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

#227

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

jart wrote: post #102
cube00 wrote: post #60

From the IMF blog post[1]: > Even a well-paid expatriate moving to the United States can be caught in the conundrum of not getting a credit card for lack of credit record, and not having a credit record for lack of credit cards. > Fintech resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases. I enjoy the fr…

The fact that the IMF thinks your choice of operating system should impact your creditworthiness is something I've been warning people about for months because it shows why we need cosmopolitan software. Since it's nice to have the ability to pick up and move our apps elsewhere should we discover we're using the "wrong" one. Because political winds change, but good engineering endures. https://github.com/jart/cosmopo…

Time to link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_tag and because of where it came from, maybe to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheist_Quakers

Re: IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

#228

Post by irishsultan »

forgingahead wrote: post #189
Sanzig wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have fixed interest rate mortgages in Canada, but the fixed rate is only valid for a specific period (typically 5 years). After this, the mortgage needs to be either renewed for another term at then-current rates, or transferred to a new lender.

Sure, fixed term for a short period is normal everywhere. But a fixed term for the entire length of the mortgage, whereby mortgage terms are commonly 30 years long, are only seen in the US and Denmark. Here's some more detail on this: https://www.netinterest.co/p/financing-the-american-home

> But a fixed term for the entire length of the mortgage, whereby mortgage terms are commonly 30 years long, are only seen in the US and Denmark.

Strange, because I have a fixed term for the entire length of my mortgage and I'm not living in those countries. Admittedly it's for a length of time shorter than 30 years, but even at that timeframe it would be possible to get one.

There is however one additional modifier in the statement of the article: "fully prepayable", that may not exist anywhere outside of Denmark and the USA (but still, your source doesn't really explain where it got it's list of countries that have it, so I have no way to know it's correctness).

Re: IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

#229

Post by nanis »

regularfry wrote: post #226
nanis wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuff like this[1] ought to have some impact on the "real world" results, right? > false positives have a linear cost. That's a strong assumption. Assuming constant testing happens in an environment of quarantining of the person who tested positive and their contacts and possibly their contacts (which is the goal of the whole trace & quarantine fever of 2020), it is hard to argue that the costs of false positives do…

> Stuff like this[1] ought to have some impact on the "real world" results, right? The real world results, as measured, showed a 0.3% false positive rate. If your [1] has a measurable effect, it's included in that 0.3%. > > false positives have a linear cost. > That's a strong assumption. Assuming constant testing happens in an environment of quarantining of the person who tested positive and their contacts and possi…

> The real world results, as measured, showed a 0.3% false positive rate.

Try as I did, I can't find a source for this claim. The best I could find was[1] which seems to indicate a 1.1% false positive rate for people without symptoms (keep in mind my argument is against widespread, unconditional testing). PCR results in the real world seem to vary a lot, but a 3% false positive rate seems appropriate.

> 17 people quarantined from a single positive test. That "17" is a linear constant.

That is a faulty argument. You are assuming total costs of a trace/quarantine regime are linear in the number of people prevented from participating in society and productive activities.

[1]: https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/how-likely-positive-latera...

Re: IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

#230

Post by rangerdan »

msbarnett wrote: post #147
twiclo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch this get downvoted to prove his point.

1984 was not a novel about getting downvoted by other people because they didn’t feel your point was a particularly good or insightful contribution to a discussion board, nor is a downvote in any way equal to censorship in any meaningful sense, so it seems a bit hysterical to suggest it somehow “proves his point”.

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