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Yikes. Have you ever considered that you were hurting people?
by hiddencost 11mo ago
Yikes. Have you ever considered that you were hurting people?
- akerl_ 11mo agoThe paper is a study of an existing market. They looked at data about people who had requested loans and data about which of those loans were funded, with the intent of seeing whether or not lenders were being biased by requester photos. They found that they were. Say more about how studying that bias is hurting people?
- xwowsersx 11mo agoHow so? Read the paper. The methodology was entirely observational. They did not intervene in the prosper.com loan market or interact with the borrowers. If anything, the paper identified a form of bias that exists in the real world, namely that people commonly "perceived" as less trustworthy are penalized despite their actual creditworthiness.
- stevejb 11mo agoYeah, whenever there are human subjects there is an IRB which is necessary. But, beyond that, we didn't participate in the market in any way. We wanted to see if there was bias there, and how much of it. I think I may have used the word 'value' in a bad way in my description. Not 'value' as in 'can we exploit people?' but value as in statistical significance. E.g. if you applied for a loan and your profile picture contained yourself with a child, did that help you, hurt you, or was it neutral?