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Someone that has relatively many friends that play football is probably someone that likes, and plays, football. Categorizing him as such is neither prejudiced
by Confusion 17y ago
Someone that has relatively many friends that play football is probably someone that likes, and plays, football. Categorizing him as such is neither prejudiced nor discriminatory: it's a reasonable extrapolation. The same holds for more sensitive facts about someone: someone with many gay friends is more likely than average to be gay.
There already are insurance companies that only insure people with a university degree. Their rates are lower than those of other companies. They aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate: they estimate risk based on solid information about a person and the mere fact that they can stay in business suggests there is indeed a good correlation between their estimates risk and the actual risk.
If they could determine who has many university educated friends, then they would perhaps want to extend their service to those people, because they have determined that those people share the characteristics of university educated people that cause the insured risks to be smaller. (Assuming these reasons that are independent of the reasons for not doing/finishing a university education, etc.)
- barrkel 17y agoInsurance is explicitly about pooling risk, and treating individuals along group lines. If the insurance companies could isolate, to the individual level, what the exact risk is for that person, it wouldn't be insurance any more.
- gizmo 17y agoNope, it doesn't work like that. Insurance is about reducing variance. If I know the chance of crashing my car and losing a leg is exactly 1 / 50000 (per year), and if I can insure against that at roughly that rate, I would still get insurance, because $20 bucks a year doesn't affect my life, but a million will help a lot when I do lose that leg. In this case risk is still pooled and the insurance company can still function because the misfortune of the individual is paid for by the more fortunate. There is still a need for insurance companies exist in a world with perfect information. Of course the insurance rates would shift. For example, when in a large group of people a few have a high chance of an expensive disease the insurance company wouldn't give the same rate to everybody. You'd still want to get insurance, though.
- kiba 17y agoThey aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate I am pretty sure that picking only people with a university degree is called discrimination. Now, is it a good discrimination is a whole another matter.
- Confusion 17y agoTrue. It would be nice if we would have different words for 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' discrimination, because I'm not the only one that keeps falling in the trap of using the word to mean a specific kind of discrimination.