Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

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I'm using "deadbeat" to refer to people who don't pay back their loans. That's both the literal dictionary use of the term and also a common term in the industry. Why do you consider it "inflammatory"?

Dang, I understand that you get a lot of flags whenever I point out unpleasant facts. I'm sorry if this bothers you. Should I just accept that HN is no longer a place where uncomfortable realities can be discussed, and move on?

If there are "deadbeats" being subsidized they would obviously not all be of one flavor.

They are disproportionately and predictably of one flavor. That's the entire reason this is a non-simple issue.

Let me take numbers from 7 of this paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-wQVEjH9yuhanpyQjUwQS1JOTQ...

Based on eyeballing the graph, consider a group which is 50% black and 50% Asian. Every person has a 600 FICO score. Blacks with a 600 FICO score have about a 40% default rate while Asians have about a 20% default rate.

To lend $100 to each member of this group at a fixed interest rate (i.e. we ignore race) and break even we need to charge a 43% interest rate to the mixed group.

The average Asian will pay back $114.40, while the average black will pay back $85.8.

Defaulters come in both flavors - in a group of 100 blacks and 100 Asians, there are 20 Asian defaulters and 40 black defaulters. So the 80 Asians who are not defaulters (using a more awkward word since you object to "deadbeat") are paying higher interest rates to make up for predictable losses caused by the 40 black defaulters.

If we did not bar the use of racial information then we'd charge blacks a 66% interest rate and Asians a 25% interest rate. This would be statistically unbiased (i.e. it removes omitted variable bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omitted-variable_bias ) and would not result in a predictable transfer of wealth from Asians to blacks. Individually this does seem unfair.

I am expressing no opinion on which policy is better. I'm pointing out that whatever we do will be in some sense unfair. The only position I'm pushing is numeracy and clear thinking that acknowledges the very real tradeoffs.

(To discuss examples in the article, one could repeat using similar calculations with ad delivery or recidivism. I just go with lending because it's mathematically equivalent and there's lots of published work on it that I can cite.)

Can I ask why you've opted to compare Asians and Blacks (thus maximizing the gap, without noting that the plurality population of White people fall inside that gap) and why you've opted to make your comparison at 600, a point that again works to increase the gap, while the paper itself pointedly focuses on the 620 prime-rate cutoff at which the "Black" default rate change sharply changes while the "Asian" default rate starts leveling off?

That's the fine art of eyeballing a graph; choose numbers that correspond to the ticks on the graph so you have an obvious place to put the ruler.

If you choose a different FICO cutoff or whites instead of Asians, the result remains directionally the same. You might get whites paying $110 vs blacks paying $90 (the gap narrows as FICO goes way up) but the same basic point arises.

Feel free to play with the numbers yourself if you think my arithmetic is wrong or nonrepresentative. If you find something I'd love to see your corrections.

But they already did that work for you. You put extra work into finding a new point of comparison that happens to be more unfavorable to Blacks. Why?

If the directional comparison was all you cared about, why not compare Asians to Whites?

A wise person once said this: "Which numbers do you disagree with? What do you think the more appropriate number would be? Change the numbers and rerun the script, so you can see if your argument even matters."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6726852

What happened to that guy? I miss him. He made HN a better place.

I didn't find black default rates at FICO=620, maybe you have sharper eyes than me. Feel free to change the numbers and redo the calculation. If you get something substantially different, lets discuss.

[edit, in response to your edit: Asians to whites is an equivalent comparison and the result is the same. Asian borrowers subsidize white deadbeats.]

He discovered that a lot of the time, the people whose calm rational-seeming posts he was occasionally sticking up for were really just taking pleasure in needling HN with edgy race and gender baiting. It was a disappointment.

The 620 default rate is on the very next page after the one you cited.

If you think I'm wrong, go ahead and post calculations showing it.

If you are simply expressing your distaste for me, your emotions are noted.

Chris, this is another thing you do. I tried to word my questions carefully, so as not to dismissively score points off you on this buried thread nobody is paying attention to you. It was you that personalized this, with your "where did that person go" rhetoric.

You asked a question --- orthogonal to my questions, which you really still haven't answered --- and then feigned offense when I answered it. If you didn't want to talk about "emotions", well, neither did I. Why'd you bring them up?

Here is another way to read the questions I asked: "perhaps the answers to these questions explain why a normal reader might snag on the way you worded your previous comment and have to ask themselves whether they were taking race-troll bait". Not: "Chris should make different points", but rather, "here are some tools Chris might think about using to avoid giving the impression that he's race-trolling."

So again, I'd ask:

* Why go through extra effort to find a data point less favorable to black people than the one the document already presents?

* If the point is that there are public policy debates to be had about fairness versus demographic blinding, why pick on black people in the first place? A comparison between Asians and whites makes the same point, without requiring you to ever write the words "deadbeat blacks".

Since you seem to be attempting to discuss things honestly, I'll give you my reply.

Answer 1: The document doesn't provide the number you claim it does, or if it does I still can't find it. Further, that number wouldn't substantively change my point and I'm pretty sure you know this.

Answer 2: Mainly because we all know a major chunk of the actual debate is about black people, and I don't see a reason to obscure what we are really discussing. But I freely acknowledge that you can get a similar gap between whites and Asians, particularly around FICO=500.

I'm very deliberately trying NOT to obscure the real issue, namely that you can't have both fairness and accuracy. You can't even have multiple kinds of fairness - pick one and you lose another. Unfortunately that's just how the math comes out.

Also, I do believe that in the contemporary US Asian people are directly discriminated against more than anyone else. They are also the highest performing on a variety of common metrics (academics, income, financial responsibility) and this is primarily due to difficult to change traits (some combination of culture and biology). Just mentioning it explicitly if you thought I was trying to obscure this point.

It's not my contention that the 600 number would substantively change your point. It's my contention that you went through extra effort to find a data point that put black people in a worse light. I was curious why you would have spent the effort to do that.

Meanwhile, you were ostensibly making a level-headed argument about how there may be tradeoffs between discrimination and fairness; that to entirely eliminate discrimination we mathematically might be required to force some (say) ethnicities subsidize others. You could have made that point in any number of ways without using the words "deadbeat blacks" --- as I pointed out, the same point was available to you in a comparison between whites and Asians.

As you can see from the thread, the objection wasn't to the underlying point you were trying to make, but to the way you chose to make it. Simply put: a reasonable reader could come to the conclusion that you were not only trying to make a point about a tension between non-discrimination and fairness/accuracy, but also trying to use that argument as a device to smuggle in an ethnic slur.

I don't think you're a racist, by the way. I think something else is going on with you. Maybe I'm wrong. But as you are to statistics, I am to the oeuvre of 'yummyfajitas comments on Hacker News: they are an area of my expertise.

My contention is that you are confusing yourself, and they don't really provide P(default|black, 620) and P(default|white,620) in the paper. The only number I could find is P(default|620)=82% which is not enough for my calculation.

I choose not to couch my facts in language meant to obscure the point, or avoid choosing factually correct examples that again hide the unpleasant bits of reality. We won't figure out the right way to deal with reality if we pretend the ugly bits aren't really there.

I don't think you're a racist, by the way. I think something else is going on with you.

It's very simple. On values I'm mainly an old school left wing individualist - I view ethnicity as holding no moral weight and groups as having no inherent rights that they don't inherit from their individual members.

Unfortunately, on racial issues, the white supremacists seem to be factually correct (mostly). The current left wing approach to this is to shame and ostracize anyone who dares to point out the emperor has no clothes. I originally interpreted your comments to be an attempt in that direction.

Meanwhile, UKIP/scary Hungarians/etc are pointing out the lies and people are following them.

I.e. I favor intellectualism and analytical philosophy over dogma and (secularized) religion.

Well, I guess I was wrong.

You are either missing, or deliberately ignoring the part where the word choice for your arguments matter.

Surely you know that, in current discourse, individually the word "deadbeat" means something, and the word "blacks" means something, but the combined "deadbeat blacks" means something much greater than the sum of its parts, because of the societal context in which it is uttered.

To claim that you are just using that combination as just the exact sum of its parts is disingenuous, especially from someone who claims to favor analytical philosophy. Go read Paul Grice.

I realize that people often choose to read more into their words than should be read. I'm explicitly arguing against this. The "social context" means that there are ideas we can't discuss without being socially lumped in with deplorable people - for instance the fact that blacks don't pay back their loans as much as whites, that they are more likely to be deadbeats/defaulters/etc. (As tptacek noted, there is no similar stigma about observing that whites are deadbeats relative to Asians.)

This creates a significant level of friction on one side of a discussion, and makes it harder for us to come to truth.

This also means that the only people who do discuss these issues are the deplorable folks. I explicitly want to reclaim the unpleasant facts so that the deplorable folks don't have a monopoly on truth.

I want to say "we should import hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, a few hundred white girls will be raped as a result, and tens of thousands of lives will be saved. Good tradeoff." I want to say "black on white crime is the most common form of interracial violence, but we should still treat black people as equal citizens with civil rights. However our expectations of equal levels of police violence against blacks and whites might be unreasonable."

Lying/shaming/attacking the people speaking the truth isn't sustainable. When you lie to people and they notice the truth, they start to turn to turn to UKIP/Jobbik/other such folks. As a globalist and a universalist I don't want to live in that world.

I know you realize that every street corner preacher, PizzaGate activist, and Zero Hedge writer uses the same line about how they're being punished for speaking the truth. Why is your special pleading so much more interesting than theirs?

I see. Sorry, you don't get a pass here.

Getting to truth is important. However, the way you want to go about it makes it very expensive for your audience.

You want to say things that are true in a socially unacceptable way, and then leave it to us to do the work of questioning you extensively to figure out whether you are someone who is well versed in statistics and meant "deadbeat" "blacks", or if you are a Stormfront-style white supremacist and meant "deadbeat blacks".

This thread is an example of that. If you want to be an effective persuader, you have to talk at your audience's level. If you want a giant thread on HN where your audience walks away believing exactly what they believed before they encountered you, keep doing what you are doing.

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