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Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then

Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. Secondly, you seem to be implying that only aggressive drivers are getting flagged by the data. But the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it. Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges. Finally, this kind of surveillance changes behavior in ways that may make things less safe. If you're driving down a street and a ball bounces out from behind a parked car do you slam on your brakes out of fear that there is a child chasing after it, or do you think that hitting the brakes might make your premiums go up so you just hope that there isn't a child coming.

kube-system 2y ago
Also, the surveillance is bad because of the inherent breach of privacy.
- pc86 2y ago
  I think these systems are bad and I think vehicle manufacturers piping data directly to insurance companies should be illegal whether you consent or not. That being said, "but privacy" has always struck me as a weird argument. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when a vehicle with a particular license plate is at a particular intersection or on a particular public street. Some jurisdictions extend some privacy rights to whether or not a particular person is driving it but many don't. So when it's in public, the location of your car is not "private" information. How is acceleration, braking, or other engine telemetry data private?
  - kube-system 2y ago
    The right to privacy is not boolean. There is a spectrum of reasonable expectations of privacy. Also, the right to privacy in public is not necessarily zero. The varying degree of rights to privacy in public are less than in private settings, but often greater than zero. While your insurer may, by happenstance, see your license plate while you are driving around, they certainly are not following you 100% of the time. The degree to which your location is tracked when your license plate is plainly visible, is different than degree of privacy expectation when that location is being automatically recorded. > So when it's in public, the location of your car is not "private" information. It's just not that simple. It would be nice and convenient if "private" was a boolean value. But it is very much a float type: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
    - fn-mote 2y ago
      > they certainly are not following you 100% of the time I don’t follow the argument being made here. The state of modern surveillance is different from what is described. People are consenting to precise monitoring for slightly lower insurance premiums. The question is: should it be illegal (should we fight against monitoring) for some moral/philosophical reason, or are we accepting it because that’s the way things are.
      - kube-system 2y ago
        There is not necessarily informed consent with the type of informatics data collection described in these suits. This isn’t a lawsuit about a “progressive snapshot” type of device. It has been described by many that these vehicles had been opted in at the dealer with little to no notification, and the data subsequently sold to brokers, who then sold the data to insurers.
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    If I personally attach a GPS tracker to your car or follow you everywhere with a camera, I will get charged and thrown in prison despite it all being in public. This behaviour will be considered stalking and threatening. People on here argue about laws as if they are universal, but if you actually try to do the exact same thing as these companies do, you will find out the difference very quickly.
lotsofpulp 2y ago
>Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. Insurance is a business, where the insured pays an insurer to pay for costs for damages that the insured cannot afford to pay. The insurer's job is to calculate the amount of premium necessary to ensure they can afford to pay for the damages, but they also have to sell the insurance at competitive prices, so they probably have to calculate premiums based on the risks that each insured represents. >Secondly, you seem to be implying that only aggressive drivers are getting flagged by the data. But the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it. Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges. The goal is not to label drivers as aggressive or not aggressive. The goal is to tease out the factors that lead to claims. With a sufficiently large dataset, it should be possible to tease out whether or not characteristics such as stop and go traffic is an indication of higher likelihood of claims. If an insurer does not calculate this property, then a competing insurer probably will and hence be able to offer lower premiums to less risky customers. >Finally, this kind of surveillance changes behavior in ways that may make things less safe. If you're driving down a street and a ball bounces out from behind a parked car do you slam on your brakes out of fear that there is a child chasing after it, or do you think that hitting the brakes might make your premiums go up so you just hope that there isn't a child coming. If a single event of slamming brakes is causing premiums to go up, I doubt that insurer is pricing premiums accurately. However, if the insurer experiences greater losses in neighborhoods where people are slamming their brakes more often, then obviously the risks are higher in that neighborhood and premiums need to reflect that. The higher premiums themselves would tell people in the neighborhood that either they are driving too fast, or they are not looking after the children. And if people are choosing to risk plowing into a child for the sake of their premiums, then that is more of a moral quandary than a problem with insurance pricing. If the goal is to subsidize a specific population, then that should be a government function via taxes.
- kube-system 2y ago
  > If the goal is to subsidize a specific population, then that should be a government function via taxes. As I understand, all 50 states require insurers to write high risk drivers policies through assigned risk plans. I guess you could shuffle the money through the state as well, but it seems like an inefficient way to accomplish the same. But really, car insurance and their respective mandates exist to protect the innocent, not drivers themselves. e.g. No state requires that you insure your property.
itsoktocry 2y ago
>Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. This might be definitionally correct, but that doesn't mean it's right. There's no reason you shouldn't rewarded for being a better-than-average driver (or conversely, punished for being worse). >Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges. You don't think we have the technical ability to determine this, to some degree? We have self driving cars for crying out loud. >If you're driving down a street and a ball bounces out from behind a parked car do you slam on your brakes out of fear that there is a child chasing after it, or do you think that hitting the brakes might make your premiums go up so you just hope that there isn't a child coming. What a reach. You hit the brakes, because if there is a child, and you hit them, your premiums will be even higher.
- gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
  > You don't think we have the technical ability to determine this, to some degree? We have self driving cars for crying out loud. Depends on how granular the data is. If it’s second by second telemetry, you could tell this. If it’s an aggregate report for a month, you can’t.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  > You don't think we have the technical ability to determine this, to some degree? We have self driving cars for crying out loud. I actually work on self-driving cars, so I have some experience on this. Trying to predict safety performance based on more easily measured metrics like hard stops is hard. AV companies spend a lot of time thinking about it. I don't think they get it perfect either.
vel0city 2y ago
> the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it Preface: I'm not strongly for these hyper monitoring systems of driving patterns for insurance. Often being in a situation where you have to slam on your brakes means even if you're a good driver you're in a lot more riskier environments than a driver who doesn't often have to. A good driver that is rarely in a situation where he has to slam on his brakes probably gets into fewer collisions than the same driver in an environment where he needs to do it often. Often having to brake hard is still potentially an indicator of higher claim likliehood.
- jajko 2y ago
  Yeah but if you really optimize it to ad absurdum, everybody will pay according to damages they will cause, negating whole point of 'socialized' spread-across-variable-population insurance. End users shouldn't generally want insurance to run over-optimally, that benefits just shareholders of given insurance and not population overall. That I consider myself above-average driver changes absolutely nothing in this. And those stupid enough who think similarly and think they should therefore pay less can and will be easily hit from unexpected angles and end up same or worse (age, old injuries/mental diagnoses, family history and gazillion other params which are/should be mostly illegal to optimize against, and you have little to no control of).
  - devman0 2y ago
    Hot take: maybe that is actually desirable? If insurance has a plethora of good actuarial information and risk modeling, and one's insurance costs are high, that's the market telling that person that they probably shouldn't be driving. If high insurance costs promote alternate means of transportation for highly risky drivers, that's a net win for everyone on the road.
    - bobthepanda 2y ago
      the point of insurance is to make sure if you get into a crash with somebody else and they are at fault, that they even have the means to pay you in the first place. if forced to, people make the decision to drive uninsured because it is nigh impossible to travel around this country otherwise, and then it's worse when they do get into an accident and cannot pay the other driver's costs. you can't squeeze blood from a stone. this is also partially the reasoning behind ACA requiring health insurance; hospitals were struggling because they could not collect from people with no money that were winding up in the ER.
shagie 2y ago
> But the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it. Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges. I would contend that this doesn't matter in terms of risk. It doesn't matter if the risk is caused by the person being a bad driver or if the risk is caused by the commute route that you take at a certain time of day. In either case, there's risk that is shown by the data. If you are driving a route that is stressful and risky, it doesn't matter if you're a good driver or a bad driver - you're doing something that is risky. In days of old this was done by looking at the commute distance and likely route (the insurance company has home address and work address).
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > In either case, there's risk that is shown by the data Somebody this there is risk in the data. Big difference. In any case, you can buy insurance that does this, they install telematics box and sends them data -it’s available, and not popular. So the market has spoken
  - tekknik 2y ago
    Did you read the article?
hansvm 2y ago
> If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. Then we need to break whatever that social function is away from the umbrella of "insurance." Mandatory car insurance is predicated on the fact that you can pay enough on average to cover your damages to others but might not be able to do so in the worst case. If we're in a world where somebody's driving exceeds the external damage bounds they can afford _even on average_, subsidizing those people is no longer the job of insurance.
- jltsiren 2y ago
  Mandatory car insurance is essentially a welfare benefit. The benefit is just administered by insurance companies, because they are believed to be more efficient than the government. (This is pretty common for all kinds of benefits around the world.) Mandatory insurance is not a private contract two parties have reached at their own initiative, and the usual business considerations don't apply. If an insurance company wants to provide mandatory car insurance, they must follow government policies, not their own policies. If someone drives recklessly and causes excessive damage, the government has other tools beyond insurance premiums. They can, for example, revoke the license and confiscate the car. Or issue a fine or put the driver in prison.
  - hansvm 2y ago
    Mandatory car insurance, in theory, moves money from drivers (proportional to the risk they represent) to victims (proportional to the damages caused), plus a cut for the insurance company. I'm missing something in your flow of ideas. Is it a welfare benefit because that idealized theory of insurance is itself a welfare benefit or because when insurance is mandated it doesn't live up to expectations?
    - jltsiren 2y ago
      The insurance is mandated, and the focus is more on guaranteed benefits to the victims than on fairness for the people paying them. If you can't afford to pay for the damages you caused, that's your problem. You took the risk, and now you face the consequences. There is no reason to make the insurance mandatory to prevent that. But if the victim doesn't get any compensation because you can't afford to pay, that's a public problem. Now there is a reason to make the insurance mandatory, and it's particularly important that the riskiest drivers have insurance. If you make it too expensive for them, they may choose to drive without insurance. Which is exactly what you wanted to avoid in the first place.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Terr_ 2y ago
> Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. I think that definition is incomplete: Insurance is to spread risk equitably. That means accounting for disparate probabilities and disparate impacts. For example, consider "house burns down" insurance, where premiums depend on whether the house is/isn't near a wooded area, and whether it is a cheap/expensive house... And yes, also whether or not the homeowner has a passion for homemade fireworks. > If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. While I agree that various dystopic outcomes are possible, the problem is not better knowledge about risks itself. Improved information about the dangers we're trying to avoid or fix is--all else being equal--always a good thing. The real problems stem from those other no-so-equal factors like: 1. Imbalanced power relationships. (Strongly implicated in the rest of the list.) 2. Opaque decision-making that cannot be reviewed or appealed. 3. Information not being fairly discovered/shared. (Customer hides known higher risk, insurer hides lower-than-expected risks to squeeze out more profit, etc.) 4. Bad contracts which pull the rug out from under people because of how they handle changes in knowledge even when risks haven't actually changed. Imagine health-insurance which covers Giant Monsterification, but later a test reveals patient has Godzilla genes, and now the customer is dropped... Even though the originally-covered probability itself hasn't changed, only our knowledge about it.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Insurance is to spread risk equitably. That means accounting for disparate probabilities Everyone defines equitably according to their whims. Does it mean the riskier pay more? Those can afford it pay more? The unsympathetic pay more? Et cetera
  - fn-mote 2y ago
    I think that the real purpose of government is to negotiate these meanings. That it is difficult does not mean that we should not attempt it. And then you see the other factors mentioned up-comment… If the government does not work out this ambiguity, it gets worked out other ways - which is why we are having this discussion.
  - 2y ago
philwelch 2y ago
> Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. Not necessarily! If you’re a physician, you have liability insurance against malpractice claims. If the insurer can correctly determine that you are a particularly incompetent physician and your premiums should be so high that you’re effectively just pre-paying the future settlements for your inevitable future malpractice cases, you will not be able to afford those premiums and will be forced to stop practicing medicine. In this scenario, the insurance market has satisfied its social function. In principle, incompetent and unsafe drivers could similarly be identified and priced out of being able to drive, and the act of doing so would serve a purpose of making the roads safer for everyone else.
AbrahamParangi 2y ago
Insurance spreads risk over outcomes. The social function of spreading risk over people (subsidizing risky behavior) is both incidental, accidental, and a clear moral hazard. Insurance would still be extremely useful even if we knew with perfect certainty the probability that you would have a car accident in the next 5 years.
- deltaburnt 2y ago
  Seems dangerous when the "risky behavior" is outside the control of the person being insured. Or if what you infer as risky behavior isn't actually risky. Is being born with a heart defect risky behavior? We have regulations to avoid discriminating over pre-existing conditions for a reason, and I could easily see these methods leading to similar bias. Doubly dangerous when insurance across multiple industries are essentially or literally required. It'd be easy if we had a magic ball that could pinpoint risky immoral behavior, but I don't think we're anywhere near there yet. I barely trust the sensors in these cars to not report bad data, let alone trust the company to not extrapolate cynical conclusions that help their bottom line at the expense of people's wellbeing.

kube-system 2y ago

Also, the surveillance is bad because of the inherent breach of privacy.

pc86 2y ago
I think these systems are bad and I think vehicle manufacturers piping data directly to insurance companies should be illegal whether you consent or not. That being said, "but privacy" has always struck me as a weird argument. There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when a vehicle with a particular license plate is at a particular intersection or on a particular public street. Some jurisdictions extend some privacy rights to whether or not a particular person is driving it but many don't. So when it's in public, the location of your car is not "private" information. How is acceleration, braking, or other engine telemetry data private?
- kube-system 2y ago
  The right to privacy is not boolean. There is a spectrum of reasonable expectations of privacy. Also, the right to privacy in public is not necessarily zero. The varying degree of rights to privacy in public are less than in private settings, but often greater than zero. While your insurer may, by happenstance, see your license plate while you are driving around, they certainly are not following you 100% of the time. The degree to which your location is tracked when your license plate is plainly visible, is different than degree of privacy expectation when that location is being automatically recorded. > So when it's in public, the location of your car is not "private" information. It's just not that simple. It would be nice and convenient if "private" was a boolean value. But it is very much a float type: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)
  - fn-mote 2y ago
    > they certainly are not following you 100% of the time I don’t follow the argument being made here. The state of modern surveillance is different from what is described. People are consenting to precise monitoring for slightly lower insurance premiums. The question is: should it be illegal (should we fight against monitoring) for some moral/philosophical reason, or are we accepting it because that’s the way things are.
    - kube-system 2y ago
      There is not necessarily informed consent with the type of informatics data collection described in these suits. This isn’t a lawsuit about a “progressive snapshot” type of device. It has been described by many that these vehicles had been opted in at the dealer with little to no notification, and the data subsequently sold to brokers, who then sold the data to insurers.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  If I personally attach a GPS tracker to your car or follow you everywhere with a camera, I will get charged and thrown in prison despite it all being in public. This behaviour will be considered stalking and threatening. People on here argue about laws as if they are universal, but if you actually try to do the exact same thing as these companies do, you will find out the difference very quickly.

lotsofpulp 2y ago

>Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. Insurance is a business, where the insured pays an insurer to pay for costs for damages that the insured cannot afford to pay. The insurer's job is to calculate the amount of premium necessary to ensure they can afford to pay for the damages, but they also have to sell the insurance at competitive prices, so they probably have to calculate premiums based on the risks that each insured represents. >Secondly, you seem to be implying that only aggressive drivers are getting flagged by the data. But the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it. Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges. The goal is not to label drivers as aggressive or not aggressive. The goal is to tease out the factors that lead to claims. With a sufficiently large dataset, it should be possible to tease out whether or not characteristics such as stop and go traffic is an indication of higher likelihood of claims. If an insurer does not calculate this property, then a competing insurer probably will and hence be able to offer lower premiums to less risky customers. >Finally, this kind of surveillance changes behavior in ways that may make things less safe. If you're driving down a street and a ball bounces out from behind a parked car do you slam on your brakes out of fear that there is a child chasing after it, or do you think that hitting the brakes might make your premiums go up so you just hope that there isn't a child coming. If a single event of slamming brakes is causing premiums to go up, I doubt that insurer is pricing premiums accurately. However, if the insurer experiences greater losses in neighborhoods where people are slamming their brakes more often, then obviously the risks are higher in that neighborhood and premiums need to reflect that. The higher premiums themselves would tell people in the neighborhood that either they are driving too fast, or they are not looking after the children. And if people are choosing to risk plowing into a child for the sake of their premiums, then that is more of a moral quandary than a problem with insurance pricing. If the goal is to subsidize a specific population, then that should be a government function via taxes.

kube-system 2y ago
> If the goal is to subsidize a specific population, then that should be a government function via taxes. As I understand, all 50 states require insurers to write high risk drivers policies through assigned risk plans. I guess you could shuffle the money through the state as well, but it seems like an inefficient way to accomplish the same. But really, car insurance and their respective mandates exist to protect the innocent, not drivers themselves. e.g. No state requires that you insure your property.

itsoktocry 2y ago

>Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. This might be definitionally correct, but that doesn't mean it's right. There's no reason you shouldn't rewarded for being a better-than-average driver (or conversely, punished for being worse). >Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges. You don't think we have the technical ability to determine this, to some degree? We have self driving cars for crying out loud. >If you're driving down a street and a ball bounces out from behind a parked car do you slam on your brakes out of fear that there is a child chasing after it, or do you think that hitting the brakes might make your premiums go up so you just hope that there isn't a child coming. What a reach. You hit the brakes, because if there is a child, and you hit them, your premiums will be even higher.

gadflyinyoureye 2y ago
> You don't think we have the technical ability to determine this, to some degree? We have self driving cars for crying out loud. Depends on how granular the data is. If it’s second by second telemetry, you could tell this. If it’s an aggregate report for a month, you can’t.
AlotOfReading 2y ago
> You don't think we have the technical ability to determine this, to some degree? We have self driving cars for crying out loud. I actually work on self-driving cars, so I have some experience on this. Trying to predict safety performance based on more easily measured metrics like hard stops is hard. AV companies spend a lot of time thinking about it. I don't think they get it perfect either.

vel0city 2y ago

> the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it Preface: I'm not strongly for these hyper monitoring systems of driving patterns for insurance. Often being in a situation where you have to slam on your brakes means even if you're a good driver you're in a lot more riskier environments than a driver who doesn't often have to. A good driver that is rarely in a situation where he has to slam on his brakes probably gets into fewer collisions than the same driver in an environment where he needs to do it often. Often having to brake hard is still potentially an indicator of higher claim likliehood.

jajko 2y ago
Yeah but if you really optimize it to ad absurdum, everybody will pay according to damages they will cause, negating whole point of 'socialized' spread-across-variable-population insurance. End users shouldn't generally want insurance to run over-optimally, that benefits just shareholders of given insurance and not population overall. That I consider myself above-average driver changes absolutely nothing in this. And those stupid enough who think similarly and think they should therefore pay less can and will be easily hit from unexpected angles and end up same or worse (age, old injuries/mental diagnoses, family history and gazillion other params which are/should be mostly illegal to optimize against, and you have little to no control of).
- devman0 2y ago
  Hot take: maybe that is actually desirable? If insurance has a plethora of good actuarial information and risk modeling, and one's insurance costs are high, that's the market telling that person that they probably shouldn't be driving. If high insurance costs promote alternate means of transportation for highly risky drivers, that's a net win for everyone on the road.
  - bobthepanda 2y ago
    the point of insurance is to make sure if you get into a crash with somebody else and they are at fault, that they even have the means to pay you in the first place. if forced to, people make the decision to drive uninsured because it is nigh impossible to travel around this country otherwise, and then it's worse when they do get into an accident and cannot pay the other driver's costs. you can't squeeze blood from a stone. this is also partially the reasoning behind ACA requiring health insurance; hospitals were struggling because they could not collect from people with no money that were winding up in the ER.

shagie 2y ago

> But the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it. Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges. I would contend that this doesn't matter in terms of risk. It doesn't matter if the risk is caused by the person being a bad driver or if the risk is caused by the commute route that you take at a certain time of day. In either case, there's risk that is shown by the data. If you are driving a route that is stressful and risky, it doesn't matter if you're a good driver or a bad driver - you're doing something that is risky. In days of old this was done by looking at the commute distance and likely route (the insurance company has home address and work address).

ClumsyPilot 2y ago
> In either case, there's risk that is shown by the data Somebody this there is risk in the data. Big difference. In any case, you can buy insurance that does this, they install telematics box and sends them data -it’s available, and not popular. So the market has spoken
- tekknik 2y ago
  Did you read the article?

hansvm 2y ago

> If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. Then we need to break whatever that social function is away from the umbrella of "insurance." Mandatory car insurance is predicated on the fact that you can pay enough on average to cover your damages to others but might not be able to do so in the worst case. If we're in a world where somebody's driving exceeds the external damage bounds they can afford _even on average_, subsidizing those people is no longer the job of insurance.

jltsiren 2y ago
Mandatory car insurance is essentially a welfare benefit. The benefit is just administered by insurance companies, because they are believed to be more efficient than the government. (This is pretty common for all kinds of benefits around the world.) Mandatory insurance is not a private contract two parties have reached at their own initiative, and the usual business considerations don't apply. If an insurance company wants to provide mandatory car insurance, they must follow government policies, not their own policies. If someone drives recklessly and causes excessive damage, the government has other tools beyond insurance premiums. They can, for example, revoke the license and confiscate the car. Or issue a fine or put the driver in prison.
- hansvm 2y ago
  Mandatory car insurance, in theory, moves money from drivers (proportional to the risk they represent) to victims (proportional to the damages caused), plus a cut for the insurance company. I'm missing something in your flow of ideas. Is it a welfare benefit because that idealized theory of insurance is itself a welfare benefit or because when insurance is mandated it doesn't live up to expectations?
  - jltsiren 2y ago
    The insurance is mandated, and the focus is more on guaranteed benefits to the victims than on fairness for the people paying them. If you can't afford to pay for the damages you caused, that's your problem. You took the risk, and now you face the consequences. There is no reason to make the insurance mandatory to prevent that. But if the victim doesn't get any compensation because you can't afford to pay, that's a public problem. Now there is a reason to make the insurance mandatory, and it's particularly important that the riskiest drivers have insurance. If you make it too expensive for them, they may choose to drive without insurance. Which is exactly what you wanted to avoid in the first place.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Terr_ 2y ago

> Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. I think that definition is incomplete: Insurance is to spread risk equitably. That means accounting for disparate probabilities and disparate impacts. For example, consider "house burns down" insurance, where premiums depend on whether the house is/isn't near a wooded area, and whether it is a cheap/expensive house... And yes, also whether or not the homeowner has a passion for homemade fireworks. > If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. While I agree that various dystopic outcomes are possible, the problem is not better knowledge about risks itself. Improved information about the dangers we're trying to avoid or fix is--all else being equal--always a good thing. The real problems stem from those other no-so-equal factors like: 1. Imbalanced power relationships. (Strongly implicated in the rest of the list.) 2. Opaque decision-making that cannot be reviewed or appealed. 3. Information not being fairly discovered/shared. (Customer hides known higher risk, insurer hides lower-than-expected risks to squeeze out more profit, etc.) 4. Bad contracts which pull the rug out from under people because of how they handle changes in knowledge even when risks haven't actually changed. Imagine health-insurance which covers Giant Monsterification, but later a test reveals patient has Godzilla genes, and now the customer is dropped... Even though the originally-covered probability itself hasn't changed, only our knowledge about it.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Insurance is to spread risk equitably. That means accounting for disparate probabilities Everyone defines equitably according to their whims. Does it mean the riskier pay more? Those can afford it pay more? The unsympathetic pay more? Et cetera
- fn-mote 2y ago
  I think that the real purpose of government is to negotiate these meanings. That it is difficult does not mean that we should not attempt it. And then you see the other factors mentioned up-comment… If the government does not work out this ambiguity, it gets worked out other ways - which is why we are having this discussion.
- 2y ago

philwelch 2y ago

> Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function. Not necessarily! If you’re a physician, you have liability insurance against malpractice claims. If the insurer can correctly determine that you are a particularly incompetent physician and your premiums should be so high that you’re effectively just pre-paying the future settlements for your inevitable future malpractice cases, you will not be able to afford those premiums and will be forced to stop practicing medicine. In this scenario, the insurance market has satisfied its social function. In principle, incompetent and unsafe drivers could similarly be identified and priced out of being able to drive, and the act of doing so would serve a purpose of making the roads safer for everyone else.

AbrahamParangi 2y ago

Insurance spreads risk over outcomes. The social function of spreading risk over people (subsidizing risky behavior) is both incidental, accidental, and a clear moral hazard. Insurance would still be extremely useful even if we knew with perfect certainty the probability that you would have a car accident in the next 5 years.

deltaburnt 2y ago
Seems dangerous when the "risky behavior" is outside the control of the person being insured. Or if what you infer as risky behavior isn't actually risky. Is being born with a heart defect risky behavior? We have regulations to avoid discriminating over pre-existing conditions for a reason, and I could easily see these methods leading to similar bias. Doubly dangerous when insurance across multiple industries are essentially or literally required. It'd be easy if we had a magic ball that could pinpoint risky immoral behavior, but I don't think we're anywhere near there yet. I barely trust the sensors in these cars to not report bad data, let alone trust the company to not extrapolate cynical conclusions that help their bottom line at the expense of people's wellbeing.