5 ms·

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 choos

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.

tptacek 10y ago
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?
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  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 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.]
  - tptacek 10y ago
    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.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      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.
      - tptacek 10y ago
        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".
        yummyfajitas 10y ago
        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.

tptacek 10y ago

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?

yummyfajitas 10y ago
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 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.]
- tptacek 10y ago
  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.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    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.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      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".
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        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.