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Why are credit scores “racist” (as claimed by Sanders and Vox)? The outcomes being distributed differently among races does not make the methodology “racist”. T
by throwawaysea 7y ago
Why are credit scores “racist” (as claimed by Sanders and Vox)? The outcomes being distributed differently among races does not make the methodology “racist”. The input factors into credit scores do not include race. Correlation to race, even if strong, is not causation.
- reureu 7y agoIf you're interested in this topic, you should look at "Weapons of Math Destruction." It's a question of if the outcomes are distributed differently among races because the races represent truly different probabilities, or because the inputs to the model were already tainted against some race. For example, let's say you judge creditworthiness based on membership in a particular honors society, but that honors society doesn't exist at historically black colleges.
- gizmo686 7y agoIn the latter case, the solution is racism. If the non racial signals are biased against group X, then, when used in the context of those other signals, membership in group X becomes a positive signal, regardless of its independent signal. I believe there was a time when the military did precisly this for black SAT (or simmilar) score, because they found the same score tender to be smarter when it was a black person.