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Comment by craigzucchini | Hacker News Reader

Credit scores measures behaviour in the same way that financial standing measures character or skin colour tells you something useful about a person. It try's to proxy one with another and fails, because really they're two independent variables and life is complex. Someone's ability to pay down debt at any given time is not behaviour, at least it's a tenuous argument.

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> Credit scores measures behaviour in the same way that... skin colour tells you something useful about a person

Yeah no.

Credit scores, being a composite set of observations of recent financial behavior, are literally the opposite of an immutable genetic characteristic fixed from birth.

Credit scores are far, far, from perfect, but if you have a better way of judging the future actions of a human than compiling a list of their recent actions do speak up.

I don't dissagree, but the nature of them being "far, far, from perfect" includes things that don't fall under the actions or behaviour of a person and end up being fixed for a period of time, making the comparison in some ways apt. Assuming you don't explore further, knowing someone's number and using it to characterize a person is at least close to as stupid as age discrimination or racial. I'd grant you that there is a higher liklihood than others that the number is informed by poor decision making, but it's equally likely that the number is low due to unforseen circumstances.

>It try's to proxy one with another and fails, because really they're two independent variables and life is complex.

The use of data from credit reporting agencies is not to predict the outcome of lending to a specific person, but to predict the outcome of many, many loans to many, many people. For which I would say it succeeds, as the entities utilizing it seem to be economically successful due to making a smaller proportion of bad bets than entities who would not, for example in the linked article.

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