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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

#81

Post by Muromec »

alpha_squared wrote: post #36
guywithahat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as inherently a problem; AI can (theoretically) be a lot more fair in dealing with claims, and responds a lot sooner. That said I suspect the founder is seriously overestimating the number of highly intelligent, competent people he can hire, and underestimating how much bureaucratic nonsense comes with insurance, but that's a problem he'll run into later down the road. Sometimes you have to hire three…

> 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…

On the other hand, once the claim is mishandled by AI, one can use the normal process to discover the juiced prompt and all the papertrail that comes with implementing it.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#82

Post by throw10920 »

matwood wrote: post #49
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?

The problem is that it's a misallocation of human capital which slows progress for all of society. We should be providing social safety nets for people, not fake jobs.

Claims handling is fake jobs?

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#83

Post by Muromec »

SoftTalker wrote: post #52
QuercusMax wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're incredibly naive if you think AI will be used to pay out claims more fairly instead of being used as a deny-bot.

This is life insurance specifically. It's not very hard to prove someone is dead, is there really much room for argument over paying out the policy benefit?

Of course! One can die by suicide or as a result of drug abuse, preexisting conditions and all that. Otherwise somebody discovering or suspecting they have an incurable disease would be able to get a policy after that.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#84

Post by thwarted »

throw10920 wrote: post #78
bee_rider wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is replying to the sentiment: > Completely separate from the potential ethical issues and economic implications of putting 100k people out of a job, […] I’m pretty sure. Although, the original comment was basically putting that issue aside, so I’m not sure what there is to say about it.

You got that right, and yes, I was putting that issue aside, although my counterpoint to GGP argument would be "the ethical issues aren't from the competitor's perspective, it's from the perspective of the whole workforce, industry, and/or economy as a whole".

The impact to the whole workforce, industry and/or economy as a whole is a second order effect of the real ethical issue of providing a worse service for so cheap it's almost free such that the market won't bear significantly better service provided by humans. As I see it, the ethical concerns are not about specific people being out of a job, but with setting an expectation that it's not worth providing real, useful service (using actual people) because to do so would be a cost higher than phoning it in with AI.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#86

Post by andrewflnr »

matwood wrote: post #67
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

> The point of a consultant is they have a lot of experience in a specific domain This is your mistake. The point of a consultant is to tell the business to do what the business was already planning to do anyway. This way the consultant takes the risk/blame of the decision. It's similar to the classic 'no one was ever fired for buying IBM' "I did what the McKinsey consultant told me" is CYA. The last piece is that si…

This is specifically addressed in the article. At minimum reality seems to be more complicated than this.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#87

Post by thwarted »

nathan_compton wrote: post #62
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.

I think the commenter was definitely somewhat glib in their statement, but I don't think the case is as clear cut as you think. The way I've come to think of the current moment in history is that capitalism allocates resources via markets and we use this system because in many situations its highly efficient. But governments allocate resources democratically exactly because we do not always want to allocate resources…

One might argue that the government allocating some resources is more efficient than the market doing so purely because specific outcomes are desired that the invisible hand is not motivated or incentivized to provide. If the goal is to keep people healthy, efficiency is based on how successful that is, not on the monetary cost. Few people seem to understand it this way, though.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#88

Post by w10-1 »

Key claim: "disruption" is impossible for BigCompany. SmallCo can do it, but only if they both (1) have something technically hard to replicate, and (2) target a marketing niche that is a irremediable blind spot for BigCompany's. Since his venture now is life insurance, Geico is likely the comparable case in point.

I really think every founder (and startup worker) needs to take seriously the marketing side of the business, and not just believe that new technology will win.

(While I, too, am allergic to bitcoin scams, given increasing levels of political corruption monkeying with markets, rates, and regulation, I can also see it as an enticing alternative for those looking to get long-term investments off the dollar. For insurance, the main question is, will the money be there and be made available? Having seen even highly-regulated pensions fail (without federal insurance recourse in the case of religious hospital behemoths), I can see how technical guarantees independent of regulation or law could be compelling.)

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#89

Post by ghaff »

thwarted wrote: post #84
throw10920 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got that right, and yes, I was putting that issue aside, although my counterpoint to GGP argument would be "the ethical issues aren't from the competitor's perspective, it's from the perspective of the whole workforce, industry, and/or economy as a whole".

The impact to the whole workforce, industry and/or economy as a whole is a second order effect of the real ethical issue of providing a worse service for so cheap it's almost free such that the market won't bear significantly better service provided by humans. As I see it, the ethical concerns are not about specific people being out of a job, but with setting an expectation that it's not worth providing real, useful…

I've had travel insurance from time to time and the consensus in online forums seems to be Allianz. But, in spite of anecdotal stories, relatively few people have any real world experience with the claims process. So it's really hard to tell what the true story is especially given that different people have different tolerances for out of pocket costs--especially below extreme amounts related to evacuation and the like.

Re: How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup

#90

Post by bee_rider »

SoftTalker wrote: post #75
bee_rider wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the plan is to just pay out after confirming the person is dead, what’s the AI doing? It could be replaced by a “upload your death certificate here” box.

It is kind of weird. Why does a life insurer have 100,000 employees. I'm really only familiar with term life. All the "customer service" is pre-purchase. Once you buy it, you forget it other than making the annual payment. There's nothing to manage, no real customer service required until and unless you die. I suppose whole life where there is a cash value and investments being managed might have a more ongoing servi…

I think that must be somebody’s estimate or maybe just guess as to the total number of employees in the industry.

I seems a bit high to me, but I don’t know anything about the industry. FWIW, around 170k people die per day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43918053

This doesn’t establish any sort of mathematical bounds, but it gives an idea of the size of the problem. I suspect 100k employees is an over-estimate just because a lot of people are uninsured…

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