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In the EU exactly that kind of gender discrimination is illegal. Insurers are not allowed to charge men more than women, just for being men. The question is, d

by mantap 7y ago

In the EU exactly that kind of gender discrimination is illegal. Insurers are not allowed to charge men more than women, just for being men. The question is, do you want to live in a society where prices are set based on one's genes. I sure don't.

briandear 7y ago
So what the EU does is just charge more for everyone which means women pay higher rates for car insurance despite having lower accident rates. So in the goal of equality, women are being forced to pay more than they should based on their level of risk. That’s exactly the opposite of discrimination — women pay more despite lower risk, which makes that EU law, discriminatory.
missosoup 7y ago
In the age of ML this is almost impossible to police and very difficult to implement even if you want to. You blind your model to gender but it learns to infer it from names. You blind it to names, it learns to infer it from other inputs. By the time you've blinded your model to anything that gives away gender, it no longer has utility. If you instead intentionally alter the model to still have utility but impact both genders equally, it's no longer procedurally fair and does in fact discriminate. This is the trilemma mentioned above. You must choose which of those factors you care about and which one you'll sacrifice. If you're unable to make that choice and morally stand behind it, then probably you shouldn't be building said model/system in the first place. This is one of the major topics of the ML ethics conversation.
ahbyb 7y ago
>The question is, do you want to live in a society where prices are set based on one's genes. I sure don't. Those genes do clearly make us behave in different ways, so why not? I'm not a feminist, but it would be fairer for women to pay less for the same insurance since they are less likely to get in trouble with their cars. Why should they pay more?
- solotronics 7y ago
  I think the argument reduces to since we can get hyper accurate data on an individual level how can we treat people fairly? If an insurance algorithm charges one person who is higher risk 100x more than someone else is it really a fair form of insurance?
8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago
I think that's an interesting point, and I can't say I have a well thought out position on it, but I'm happy to have stumbled upon this conversation. One one hand, I feel ok paying extra for my health care to cover others who might have been left out previously because of individual pre-existing conditions. Us pooling all together to take care of every citizen makes sense. However in a purely hypothetical scenario where say men are 1000x worse at something than women, let's say driving, say car insurance for women is $100 and it's $100k for men, should we really charge women 50k just to make it fair based on the "we must ignore gender" principle? I realize in the real world there might be no such stark contrast between genders or ethnicities, in which case giving everybody the same higher rate would probably be more sensible.

by mantap 7y ago

briandear 7y ago

So what the EU does is just charge more for everyone which means women pay higher rates for car insurance despite having lower accident rates. So in the goal of equality, women are being forced to pay more than they should based on their level of risk. That’s exactly the opposite of discrimination — women pay more despite lower risk, which makes that EU law, discriminatory.

missosoup 7y ago

In the age of ML this is almost impossible to police and very difficult to implement even if you want to. You blind your model to gender but it learns to infer it from names. You blind it to names, it learns to infer it from other inputs. By the time you've blinded your model to anything that gives away gender, it no longer has utility. If you instead intentionally alter the model to still have utility but impact both genders equally, it's no longer procedurally fair and does in fact discriminate. This is the trilemma mentioned above. You must choose which of those factors you care about and which one you'll sacrifice. If you're unable to make that choice and morally stand behind it, then probably you shouldn't be building said model/system in the first place. This is one of the major topics of the ML ethics conversation.

ahbyb 7y ago

>The question is, do you want to live in a society where prices are set based on one's genes. I sure don't. Those genes do clearly make us behave in different ways, so why not? I'm not a feminist, but it would be fairer for women to pay less for the same insurance since they are less likely to get in trouble with their cars. Why should they pay more?

solotronics 7y ago
I think the argument reduces to since we can get hyper accurate data on an individual level how can we treat people fairly? If an insurance algorithm charges one person who is higher risk 100x more than someone else is it really a fair form of insurance?

8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago

I think that's an interesting point, and I can't say I have a well thought out position on it, but I'm happy to have stumbled upon this conversation. One one hand, I feel ok paying extra for my health care to cover others who might have been left out previously because of individual pre-existing conditions. Us pooling all together to take care of every citizen makes sense. However in a purely hypothetical scenario where say men are 1000x worse at something than women, let's say driving, say car insurance for women is $100 and it's $100k for men, should we really charge women 50k just to make it fair based on the "we must ignore gender" principle? I realize in the real world there might be no such stark contrast between genders or ethnicities, in which case giving everybody the same higher rate would probably be more sensible.