EPTSexism... Against Men - Page 35
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HULKAMANIA
United States1219 Posts
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Signet
United States1718 Posts
On March 03 2011 15:27 Jones993 wrote: There is no link between medical claims and driving. You are using a strawman by bringing up specific gender medical problems and pretending they somehow transfer over to driving. Uh... no, not at all. Either you have terrible reading comprehension or you are just being combative at this point. The example I gave was for health insurance, not auto insurance. This entire time I've been talking about the health, auto, and life insurance industries. The link I posted when I bumped this thread applies to all three of those industries. The quote of mine that you originally responded to mentioned both health and auto insurance. Also please use better formatting in your posts. You quoted one of my lines along with RedMorning's without referencing who was saying what. | ||
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Comeh
United States18918 Posts
On March 03 2011 15:27 Jones993 wrote: Let's say a certain personality type was more likely to have accidents, and males were more likely to have such a personality, does that mean all males are more likely to have an accident? no. Would they all be charged more anyway? Yes. This is not fair, and is discrimination based on category instead of on individual merit. It would be quite easy however, to simply blame gender instead of the personality type, for example. It doesn't have to be personality type, that was an example. Simply put, you are avoiding the primary issue regarding this. You are simply trying to attribute some sort of personality type associated with sex regarding accidental probability and fairness. The big bullet point you seem to be avoiding is this: Young men are more likely to get into accidents then young women. It might be a culmination of different personality types and traits that EVENTUALLY lead to this conclusion. Is it fair if YOU are not likely to get into an accident? Sure, it's not fair, but they are simply playing by the numbers. Because you might happen to be thrown into this group, they will charge you more. It's not discrimination, it's price discrimination. These car insurance companies are looking to cover their costs and maximize profits, and deal with risk where risk is highest. Numbers show men are higher risk drivers. Unfortunately, you have to deal with this facet of being grouped in as a man. However, with numerous statistics and problems with being a woman (particularly in the workplace), you might have the longer end of the stick overall. | ||
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Signet
United States1718 Posts
On March 03 2011 15:43 Comeh wrote: Simply put, you are avoiding the primary issue regarding this. You are simply trying to attribute some sort of personality type associated with sex regarding accidental probability and fairness. The big bullet point you seem to be avoiding is this: Young men are more likely to get into accidents then young women. It might be a culmination of different personality types and traits that EVENTUALLY lead to this conclusion. Is it fair if YOU are not likely to get into an accident? Sure, it's not fair, but they are simply playing by the numbers. Because you might happen to be thrown into this group, they will charge you more. It's not discrimination, it's price discrimination. These car insurance companies are looking to cover their costs and maximize profits, and deal with risk where risk is highest. Numbers show men are higher risk drivers. Unfortunately, you have to deal with this facet of being grouped in as a man. However, with numerous statistics and problems with being a woman (particularly in the workplace), you might have the longer end of the stick overall. Going along this line, another important question to ask would be whether that trait (say, personality type) is caused by sex or correlated with sex. For example, if brain structure or biochemistry helps determine personality type, then you could have a situation where sex -> neurology -> personality -> risk I don't think anybody believes that the Y chromosome literally directly causes someone to be more aggressive. Of course it's phenotypical. And actually, auto insurance tries to give you as much of an individual rate as they can. If you have a good record, your rates drop. If you get into a lot of accidents or get tickets, your rate rises. There are direct financial consequences for being wrong about someone's expected claims in the insurance industry. If you undercharge somebody, you lose money on them. If you overcharge somebody in a way that your competitors do not, they switch companies. But when you're young, you don't have much of a driving record. It's tough to know which high school/college kid is going to be a safe driver. Age/sex/location/car type is about all they have to go on until you've racked up several years of driving history. This is the real "problem" with trying to rate a 16 year old boy vs a 16 year old girl in terms of risk. | ||
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Jones993
11 Posts
Uh... no, not at all. Either you have terrible reading comprehension or you are just being combative at this point. The example I gave was for health insurance, not auto insurance. False. You are being in irrelevant scenarios and pretending those scenarios debunk my argument - a strawman. Also, you have still refused to concede on discrimination, even with a dictionary definition under your very nose. I will just assume you don't wish to debate and just want to be combative at this point. The big bullet point you seem to be avoiding is this: Young men are more likely to get into accidents then young women. It might be a culmination of different personality types and traits that EVENTUALLY lead to this conclusion. Is it fair if YOU are not likely to get into an accident? Sure, it's not fair, but they are simply playing by the numbers False. I am not avoiding this at all. I am simply stating that not every single man is a higher risk, thus gender alone is not the cause of the higher accidents and cannot be used alone to charge an entire gender more. The point you refuse to address is the following: Instead of finding the cause, which may be linked to gender, but is certainly not present in everyone of that gender, you wish to charge everyone of that gender higher prices instead of just those who have whatever attribute causes the accident, whatever they may be. Not understanding the reason well enough is not a good enough reason to discriminate against an entire gender. | ||
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Hypnosis
United States2061 Posts
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Signet
United States1718 Posts
On March 03 2011 16:02 Jones993 wrote: False. You are being in irrelevant scenarios and pretending those scenarios debunk my argument - a strawman. How is the prevalence of medical conditions possibly irrelevant to the fact that women are charged more for health insurance than men? Also, you have still refused to concede on discrimination, even with a dictionary definition under your very nose. I will just assume you don't wish to debate and just want to be combative at this point. You haven't addressed me on this point. Again, you're mixed up between myself and RedMorning, which is the user you provided that definition to as well. You might want to properly use the "QUOTE" function to help yourself as well as make your posts more readable for others  | ||
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Blardy
United States290 Posts
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Signet
United States1718 Posts
edit: bah, I don't mean to sound harsh. But seriously, your personal experience is unique to you. Insurance companies are setting rates based on large claims databases, not what happened in somebody's homeroom class last semester. Unless you live in an extremely small town, I doubt you actually know all of the people who have been in an accident in the last year. And if your town is that small, you're probably being rated across a larger region. (it would be extremely costly to develop a separate model for each town in this country with, say, over 1000 people in it. Not to mention that this would be difficult to do with the small sample sizes) | ||
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CuriousMoose
United States73 Posts
On March 03 2011 15:27 Jones993 wrote: You don't need to be a lawyer to know racial profiling is illegal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_profiling Racial profiling refers to the use of an individual’s race or ethnicity by law enforcement personnel as a key factor in deciding whether to engage in enforcement (e.g. make a traffic stop or arrest). The practice is controversial and widely considered inappropriate and illegal. Considered illegal, but it isn't. Even the quote that you made refutes your own statement ("considered" does not mean "is.") The Supreme Court even stated in U.S. v. Weaver that police officers are allowed to racially profile if there is a distinct link between race and criminality ie suspicion that a black male in Los Angeles is a crip or a blood. http://www.soc.umn.edu/~samaha/courses/4337/usvweaver.htm Another Supreme Court example is Korematsu v. US where it was determined that racially profiling the entire Japanese race was okay as long as the least restrictive means are used and used for a reasonable purpose. Too bad nothing happened to stop them after putting every Japanese American into internment camps for suspecting even 4 year olds of blowing up the west coast. Racial profiling can be good, but it's highly controversial because of it's high potentiality to detract from equal protection under the law. Still, it's far from illegal. Please do more research before you make bold claims. And to go back to that initial statement that you made: yeah, you actually kind of need to be a lawyer to know whether racial profiling is actually illegal (or at least very well versed in the legal nuances of the subject.) | ||
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Jones993
11 Posts
The practice is controversial and widely considered inappropriate and illegal. Let me see if I understand. When you read the above sentence you interpret the following meaning from it: Racial profiling is legal. I also believe you are incorrectly interpreting the statistics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation Just because there appears to be a link between gender and accidents does not mean there actually is one | ||
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xM(Z
Romania5281 Posts
i just had to say it. using his logic to debunk his arguments. hahaha edit: if he'll try to go with the lesser evil blablabla (as far as profits go) itll be even easier. | ||
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Dugrok
Canada377 Posts
On March 03 2011 15:09 Jones993 wrote: What very well explained? He is being illiterate. Specifically here His argument is this "discrimination is being negative towards people without evidence". He does not know what discrimination means. Whether or not it is based on evidence is irrelevant. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/discrimination 2. treatment or consideration of, or making a distinction in favor of or against, a person or thing based on the group, class, or category to which that person or thing belongs rather than on individual merit: racial and religious intolerance and discrimination. Clearly it is discrimination as it is making a distinction against someone based on category instead of on individual merit. Precisely. Whether they have the stats to back it up or not, it's still discrimination. They might call it individualized rates, I call it discrimination. I'll come back to my initial argument: If you were to take all the rates, take the average of them, and then offer that same rate to everyone, you'd still make the same amount of money as you are actually. Spread the wealth! Of course, once someone starts getting tickets, making claims, or getting into accidents, then it's understandable and legitimate that your rate go up. Doing this before you do any of the above however, isn't. | ||
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Klive5ive
United Kingdom6056 Posts
On March 03 2011 22:18 Dugrok wrote: Precisely. Whether they have the stats to back it up or not, it's still discrimination. They might call it individualized rates, I call it discrimination. I'll come back to my initial argument: If you were to take all the rates, take the average of them, and then offer that same rate to everyone, you'd still make the same amount of money as you are actually. Spread the wealth! Of course, once someone starts getting tickets, making claims, or getting into accidents, then it's understandable and legitimate that your rate go up. Doing this before you do any of the above however, isn't. That wouldn't work at all. You'd only get the highest risk customers. If you forced companies to offer one rate they'd target low risk and not insure anyone else. You'd have to have public insurance. It would be a disaster. | ||
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nebffa
Australia776 Posts
So before I start I want to let you guys know I'm not here to argue against any of you or say you are wrong and stupid - what I am going to do, however, is give you a good idea of how statistics are being used in this context. I also want you to know that I was one of the top 10 mathematics students of my state cohort in year 12, out of about 10,000+. I am also at university, on a scholarship, studying a Bachelor of Science - doing a major in Statistics and Stochastic Processes (but the first half of that major is the one I want you to know  ), so when it comes to statistics I know what I'm talking about.Ok, now I'll start. We see the word "discrimination" flying around a lot in this thread - and yes, insurance companies do attempt to 'discriminate' between groups of society. This is actually how they deliver a more 'tailored' product. Now, some of you have the experience of not having a tailored product at all, hence the reason for the original poster starting the thread. And these are completely valid! However, despite some of you getting that feeling, overall more people are delivered a tailored product by this model, hence its use. To understand this, you have to look at the actual crash statistics (and not any of this first-hand experience about men and women drivers). Overall men cause more road accident damage than females, and hence they are more of a risk. It makes complete sense to charge men more than women. Let us say that if a female or male driver is a dangerous driver then they are satisfied with a higher premium cost. If a female or male driver is a safe driver then they are satisfied with a standard premium cost. For the higher cost, some men will think they are paying too much. Some will think they are paying a proper amount (I will not say if either group is of greater size, as I don't know and it doesn't matter). If both male and female drivers were charged the same premium (we're only looking at gender here, we'll disregard other risk factors at the moment), this means that the current male premiums would fall in price and the current female premiums would increase in price. For a safeand male driver this is a warranted change. For an unsafe and male driver this is an unwarranted change. For a safe and female driver this is an unwarranted change. For an unsafe and female driver this is a warranted change. Now, let's say we should make male and female premiums the same if it would result in more warranted changes than unwarranted changes. So we look at the probabilities as this is the only way to actually discern this (save for sampling the entire population... basically however many drivers there are in whichever country you're in, which is extremely expensive and is never done by a private company) is by probabilities. Pr(safe and female) > Pr(safe and male) Pr(unsafe and male) > Pr(unsafe and female) Therefore we will have more unwarranted changes than warranted changes, and so we should differentiate between the two groups when it comes to pricing the premiums so that the most people as possible are kept satisfied with their policies. Now, you may be able to tell from this example or thinking that you've done that the more you differentiate between groups, you will increase the maximum number of customers you can have satisfied with their policies. This is what insurance companies do by compiling as much data as possible and acting on this data to price their premiums! You may say, well why is doing this with gender ok and not with race? The reason is only the culture of the world these days where there is a stigma attached to doing this. However, it actually makes perfect sense to tailor insurance policies by race, so if you are saying this should happen then I actually agree with you! In general, it makes perfect sense to tailor insurance policies to any risk factor. It is only political correctness and a gut reaction to any sort of differentiation based on race as discrimination that prevents insurance companies from doing this. So really what you are dealing with is a system that is actually appeasing the most number of people possible. On average men are actually getting a good deal. What I would be angry with is how society has some 'sacred cows' that we don't touch (like the one I've talked about here - differentiating based on race for a perfectly legitimate reason), rather than the companies that are doing the best in the face of that. | ||
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lozarian
United Kingdom1043 Posts
This means that men are going to end up having less from the pension, since they are assumed to potentially live longer, hence their pension will pay out over a longer period of time (some of which they may well be dead for) So massive thumbs up for this. As a man who intends to live a long time, I'm all in favour of being worse off when I'm old. Yeah. | ||
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Signet
United States1718 Posts
Several decades ago, correlation vs causation was the central issue of a major health debate: does smoking cause cancer? Tobacco companies defended their product by arguing that smoking was merely correlated with cancer - that, since doctors had never split people into controlled groups where one was forced to smoke and the other was forced to not smoke, there was no way to tell if cigarettes were actually causing increased cancer rates or if there was another underlying variable. After all, cigarette users had a different age distribution, income distribution, different rates of alcoholism, etc versus non-smokers. How do you tell what variables are important in the underlying relationship and which are extraneous? The answer, which was accepted by the FDA and most governments, is that if you gather enough data and factor in all of the reasonable competing variables, if the correlation still remains then it is reasonable to assume that there is a causal relationship. From a college philosophy perspective, it would still be correct to say that it is not certain that smoking causes increased cancer risk. In the real world, we're willing to live with the remote chance that we're wrong on this one, because of the overwhelming evidence that we're right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_causation Just to be fair, though, even recently some congressmen have argued that lettuce is as dangerous as tobacco. At this point, insurance companies have collected so much data and considered so many other variables that could potentially confound with sex and insurance claims, but even when it is all factored in, age and sex are still important in assessing risk for health claims, auto claims, and life expectancy. Thus, while I wouldn't say that it is 100% guaranteed that being male causes one to be a riskier driver (or that being female causes one to have greater healthcare costs, or to live longer), I would say that the competing variables have been largely exhausted, and that therefore using age and sex as explanatory variables in an insurance model are the most sound way to estimate risk. And again, there is the practical problem that at the age of 16, an insurance company has no way of knowing any of the additional variables (such as how often you are going to drive, whether you have a history of accidents, etc) so therefore at a young age your sex is given greater weight. Back to the causation/correlation, it's equally true that no experiment has ever shown that getting into an accident in the past causes you to be more likely to get into an accident in the future. If we really take causation/correlation to its logical end, you'd have to charge everyone the same rate regardless of age/sex/history/etc. Again, this is not to say that the EU ruling is wrong or that insurance companies should be using these variables from a moral perspective. I'm only pointing out that price discrimination based on age and sex in insurance is based on sound reasoning and hard evidence in a way that hiring discrimination or the biases of some police officers or judges are not. | ||
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SharkSpider
Canada606 Posts
Essentially, no amount of "rights" talk can make a true statement false, pretending that it is doesn't serve anyone. Anyways, this doesn't just apply to insurance. What about other questions? Should clubs be allowed to charge women a lower cover or refuse admittance to people in order to get a better ratio? Should an all-you-can-eat burger joint charge more for men than for women, given that doing otherwise is costing them business? Should gyms have women-only areas but not men-only ones? | ||
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Weken
United Kingdom580 Posts
E.G: woman can get pregnet and men cannot, pregnancy is incomvenant for an employer because that have to give sick leave e.t.c, therfore they are more lickly to hire a man. OR: woman are less lickly to crash a car because they drink less and dont have peer pressure (when younger) to drive faster, so thier insurence is cheaper. Its just like how woman are more lickly to live older than men, it is because of the diffrences between the mind and body and males and females. Its just life, mabye its unfair on you but its not really discremination becaue ther is noramlly a valid reson to treat men and women diffrently. | ||
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Passion
Netherlands1486 Posts
On March 04 2011 03:53 SharkSpider wrote: Consider a country in which insurance companies were not allowed to discriminate based on sex. This would cause premiums for males on car insurance to decrease, and premiums for females to increase. This means that absent other factors, insurance companies with more female clients would be more profitable, and it would be beneficial to run a smaller company that markets to females and attempts to dissuade males from purchasing insurance. I might do this by offering benefits with car insurance that only really apply to females or that seem insulting to males. That way, we could afford to charge a lower "effective" price and make more money per car insured, on a macroscopic level. So if you want them to stop discriminating by sex, that means higher profit margins on females, meaning you would also probably have to legislate them to have quotas on male customers because no one would want them, and chances are that business-to-business ventures would have separate prices for male and female, even if publicly they can't charge the customers anything different. Essentially, no amount of "rights" talk can make a true statement false, pretending that it is doesn't serve anyone. Anyways, this doesn't just apply to insurance. What about other questions? Should clubs be allowed to charge women a lower cover or refuse admittance to people in order to get a better ratio? Should an all-you-can-eat burger joint charge more for men than for women, given that doing otherwise is costing them business? Should gyms have women-only areas but not men-only ones? Now lets imagine this country... Something like this? And can someone supply accident rates for different (ethnic) races? Should spice up this discussion a bit. | ||
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