[Noisebridge-discuss] Bringing Down the Credit Bureaus

[Sai Emrys]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 12:19 PM, Brian Molnar <brian.molnar at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's similar motivation as with the existing systems. It's used as a deterrent.
> If a creditor wants to get you to pay, they'll threaten to dent your credit. In
> fact, this could be used as a major selling point. If with initial adoption you
> can show that the service is effective in getting people to settle debts, then
> it becomes valuable to creditors because it saves them money on
> collections agencies.

That's actually very bad IMO. You do NOT want people to only report
events that make them emotional or interested in a particular outcome
relating to their reporting thereof. You want them to report ALL
events - including ones that are merely "meh, business as usual".
Otherwise you have a combination selection bias and base rate neglect
that renders your data useless.

> Yes, In general, I would expect this service to have a higher
> reader-to-contributor ratio, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. So long
> as you can get enough contributors to make it useful then it will be able to
> sustain itself. I look at this similarly to Wikipedia - it has a very high
> reader-to-contributor ratio, but it's still getting useful data and still
> driving tons of traffic.

I think this is a poor analogy.

For general information about stuff (i.e. encyclopedic), there is an
inherently large ratio between people who want to find out x and
people who know about x.

For loan qualifications however, the only people who give a shit about
your creditworthiness are people who will (after they make a decision
based on it) necessarily have something new to say about it also. If
they don't, then they're being mooches. Whereas with Wikipedia, I
don't know shit about (say) ribonucleic acid that isn't already in the
article, therefore my failure to contribute to the article after
having read it is not mooching (as I have nothing *to* contribute).

Therefore IMO a mandatory-reporting system is needed here.

Note though that 'mandatory' need not mean in the contractual sense;
if anything I always have a strong preference for having the design of
the system itself made such that people will behave the way you want
them to out of their own voluntary self-interest. This would probably
mean somehow incentivizing making reports… but I don't know how you'd
do that which wouldn't open up worse holes for gaming the system in a
destructive fashion.

Something to consider, anyway.

- Sai