7Figures2Commas

Credit scores measure the risk of future default based on past borrowing behavior. A borrower's credit score is not "inaccurately low" if there is little to no past borrowing behavior to apply the credit scoring model to.

Lenders can and frequently do take into account criteria other than credit score, such as income, when underwriting loans. In some lending markets (mostly commercial), individual consumer credit scores aren't even used.

That Earnest and other upstart lenders are choosing to more heavily weigh factors other than credit score is not particularly interesting. The true test of their underwriting criteria will come in the next down cycle. Having worked in this space, I should point out that there are many consumers with high incomes (or high earning potential) who are vulnerable. As such, I'd suggest that income and earning potential alone are of limited use in underwriting. It's not uncommon to see borrowers with high incomes who also have very low credit scores because they were over-leveraged and had serious negative credit events occur.

Of course, you'll never win much sympathy profiting from sanity. If you want sympathy, help "grow the economy" by leveraging yourself to the hilt and blaming evil bankers when your debt catches up to you. But please recognize that you're not really growing the economy; you're just mortgaging your future.

I'm sure this comment will be downvoted, but there's just as much if not more money to make on the way down. When people, companies and governments take on too much debt, and capital is misallocated, incredible opportunities to profit are created.

> That said, this study doesn't surprise me. In terms of public posts everyone projects their "best life", so you're browsing through a catalogue of amazing experiences while you sit at home feeling a little fat.

> I'm not sure what the answer to that is.

I'm not on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. (and I'm probably one of a very small minority who has never had accounts) and I wouldn't consider myself "enlightened."

I think "the answer" is to reflect on what it is that adds value to your life and what subtracts value from your life.

If your personal use of social media is focused on activities that you conclude are beneficial, there's no reason you should stop using it. On the other hand, if your use of social media is making you less happy, you should treat it the same way you'd logically treat anything else that makes you less happy.

Unfortunately, as these studies demonstrate, a lot of the people using social media aren't happier for it, and more problematically, many clearly aren't reflecting on that.

This is social media.

There was an article about this in the Wall Street Journal last year[1]. Excerpt:

> But why open a branch on every corner? The blame, it turns out, lies with us. We're asking for it.

> TD, which has more than 1,300 branches in cities up and down the East Coast, conducted a customer survey and discovered that, compared to the rest of the nation, New Yorkers are obsessed with branch convenience. While folks in other towns value frivolities like friendly service, New Yorkers more often rank convenient ATMs and branches a top priority. They want locations near their homes, their offices and the offices of their spouses, says Mr. Giamo. They want to see their bank everywhere they go.

When it comes to the subject of community, a lot of people don't want to accept that communities are dynamic. The ways in which they change are almost always driven by the needs and wants of the people in those communities, even though you will always find vocal people in those communities who swear that can't be the case.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/all-those-banks-in-new-york-city...

> The former executive said he worried that Theranos’s finger-prick process was still a work in progress. “If the technology is fully developed, why would you need to do a venipuncture?” this person said, using the term for a traditional blood draw.

> The concerns deepened when Theranos’s test results for several Safeway employees differed from the results the same employees got from other laboratories, according to the former executive. Another former Safeway executive confirmed those recollections.

> Theranos also backed away from putting its blood analyzers in Safeway’s clinics so patients could get the results quickly, the current and former executives said.

> Instead, Theranos said blood samples collected at Safeway would have to be shipped to a central lab for analysis, according to the former executives.

Wow. The Theranos story just keeps getting worse.

In a career of 30 years, you found yourself working closely with a total of one woman who you were attracted to and who you thought might be "willing to become interested" in you. This co-worker was your equal, and you dealt with your feelings in what seems like a mature manner that caused no professional harm to you or her.

Where's the problem that needs solving?

Final comment: I am a heterosexual male in a committed relationship and I have never avoided a professional relationship with a woman out of fear of the "problems" you refer to. Interestingly, there are many women decision-makers today and the number of women in positions of power and influence will only grow, so men who avoid relationships with women as you suggest are just as likely to find their own professional and business interests harmed. Fortunately, I simply don't believe that most male professionals are operating the way you believe they are and I have met plenty of men and women with strong professional networks who reflect that.

2. How many times in your career have you found yourself working closely with a woman who you found attractive and who made it clear she was interested in you?

3. In these situations, how many times were you the woman's superior, equal or direct report?

I think answers to the above would be more beneficial to this discussion than the admission that you could theoretically be tempted by a co-worker to cheat on your wife.

The mere fact that there exist statistical inequalities between the sexes does not in any way prove that your world view is the root cause of these inequalities.

You previously wrote:

> My experience has been that men who aren't attracted react really negatively to me giving off signals that I am interested.

I'm genuinely confused. If you are not giving signals of interest to men you are interacting with in a professional capacity, how do the reactions of men who you're ostensibly interacting with in a personal capacity relate at all to your professional ambitions?

> When I try to make professional contacts, I am asking individual men to trust me as an individual. Many of them have far more reason to decline taking that bet than to accept the risks involved.

Our backgrounds and experiences might very well be quite different, but I think attitude plays a big role in how your efforts pan out and going into interactions with this kind of world view is not healthy in my opinion.

I am an adult male professional. If there's a good reason we should do business together or help each other professionally, I don't care if you're half squirrel. I don't know what you're asking of the folks you meet, and when and how you're asking, but in my experience, most professionals, male and female, don't harbor irrational reservations about building strong working relationships with colleagues of the opposite sex.

While there is nothing fundamentally wrong with professionally-appropriate "close collaboration" between two colleagues, "close collaboration" is possible without "working late together" or "having dinner together."

In my experience the vast majority of working professionals, even those who forge close ties with their colleagues, don't see working late or dining frequently with colleagues after work hours as being fundamental to "close collaboration." They have their own lives and don't want to be spending their evenings with co-workers, male or female.

> My experience has been that men who aren't attracted react really negatively to me giving off signals that I am interested. So men who are not hoping to sleep with me can have powerful reasons to just not want to work closely with me in the kind of manner that could dramatically further my professional goals.

If a man or woman takes the risk of signalling romantic interest in a co-worker, he or she should be prepared for the possibility that the co-worker will react "negatively." While most adults are capable of handling this situation maturely and kindly, for obvious reasons the rebuffed party will almost certainly experience some level of discomfort after being rebuffed. This is the primary reason folks should be careful about expressing interest in somebody they have to work with. Are you prepared for the potential of self-inflicted awkwardness?

Unless you are frequently signalling romantic interest in the co-workers you are hoping will work most closely with you, I don't understand why you believe men who are not hoping to sleep with you are generally disincentivized from building a healthy and mutually-beneficial working relationship with you.

The only thing I can surmise is that your expectations around what "working closely" with a colleague looks like are unrealistic.

I see. So you're not a real lawyer, you just pretend to be one on HN.

You are ignoring the practical realities of landlord-tenant relationships.

Let's say you rent an apartment from me and I add a liquidated damages clause to the lease. It states that you will owe me $50,000 if you are found to be subletting your apartment using a service like AirBnB. Unless you have $50,000, the liquidated damages clause is effectively worthless and you can easily choose to break the lease ("my landlord can't get blood from a stone"). If I increase the liquidated damages to $100,000, the deterrent effect likely doesn't increase.

From the author's referenced post[1]:

> My experience is that men are either not very willing to talk to me one-on-one or, if they are, talking shop is the last thing they had in mind. They are looking for romance, not looking to help me professionally. When I say this to other women, they generally express immediate agreement. Men often deny it, criticize it or just stop talking when I say such things.

Most people are not attracted to most people. What this means is that most of the people you are attracted to won't find you attractive, and most of the people who are attracted to you are not going to be attractive to you.

Given this simple fact, believing that most of your interactions with members of the opposite sex are motivated by romantic interest is simply not realistic, no matter how handsome/beautiful or charming you are.

Maybe the tech industry (or a particular subset of the tech industry) is completely dysfunctional, but in my experience, most adult women and men are capable of interacting professionally without believing that all these interactions are somehow romantic in nature or fearing that they will be interpreted as such.

[1] http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gray-zon...