this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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I worked as an insurance agent. In the states I had my P&C licenses in, we were legally required to base rates on data. i.e statistically how much the company paid out in claims given certain factors. One of the things we based rates on was the breeds of dog people owned. Pitbulls and certain other dog breeds do not just have a bad reputation because people irrationally fear/hate them, they actually do pose a greater risk. Just like teenagers by and large, aren't as safe drivers. It isn't "fair" in that the dog didn't choose to be the breed it is and some of them really are good dogs but statistically, averaged over the whole, they are more of a risk than other dog breeds are.
This is a classic example of someone observing a statistical correlation between specific factors and using that to assert a direct causal relationship between them. It implies that an insurance agency is able to 1) accurately identify every single breed of dog in every single insurance related incident (which is definitely not the case, because I doubt every insurance company is doing genetic testing on every single dog it comes across) and 2) tie a causal relationship between dog breed and incident. If I were going by typical insurance metrics, and to borrow from your analogy of "teenagers as unsafe drivers," you would also assume that red Camarros, something more expensive to insure than your more conservative sedan, were statistically more dangerous than, say, a white Civic, as if they were what caused their drivers to get into car accidents, as opposed to young, reckless people interested in a fast sports car to simply go out and buy one. These are people who would be reckless behind the wheel of any car, but who are statistically correlated with a particular type of one. But you still mark the red Camaro as more expensive to insure regardless of who buys it because it's statistically correlated with a higher degree of accidents.
These are multibillion dollar companies (actually they insure trillions in assets) whose whole job is to be very very good at assessing risk. You thinking you know better is peak Dunning-Krueger.
Question: Does his company factor FBI crime stats into it too? Why not? "Despite being 12% of the population black people commit 50% of crime" and suddenly now since it's optically bad to charge black people higher rates "causation only equals correlation when we can't be called racist for it?"
That shit don't sit right with me tbh.
And what about German Shepherds that have bit 11 secret service agents? Secretly pits? Hating pits but not other large breeds is frankly silly imo (unless you hate black people too because the only important thing ever is statistics). At least hate Chows too, since they're arguably more aggressive, and German Shepherds, Presas, Boxers, Rotts, etc. Shit at the very least German Shepherds were the Nazis dogs and they're the ones the cops use now, and they're "not" "bred to attack" over pits? Come off it.
You can't just accuse me of what I'm accusing you of because I accused you of it, that isn't how this works.
I left out how the pit breed happens to be particularly popular with minorities as well btw, which makes irrational pit hate itself a racist dogwhistle (pun intended). I think I'll add that in now. Gotta have a white people dog like a Bichon Frise huh? None of those dogs "the rappers" like? You disgust me.
"If a big corporation says something is one way, it must be so. They have a lot of money, after all." Your argument is peak "Argument to Authority." I guess it's a good thing those insurance companies like AIG were able to effectively assess their degree of risk exposure in the housing markets in 2008 and avoid collapsing when the housing market imploded. Oh, wait...
OMFG there is no evil conspiracy by USAA and every other insurance company against pitbulls JFC. Pitbulls are just statistically much more dangerous than other animals.
They're statistically correlated with incidents of mauling. Nobody is denying the statistical correlation. But there is a difference between observing a statistical correlation between breed and maulings and asserting a causal relationship. My argument is that the assertion that "pit-bulls are innately, biologically predisposed towards violence against people and other animals" is not supported by meaningful evidence. If you are arguing that they are, then you're gonna have to convince me with more than "insurance companies say they are."
Quick thought experiment - magically replace every pitbull in the world with a chihuahua instead. Do the number of maulings go up or down?
The number of maulings would go down even if you replaced every Golden Retriever with a chihuahua. Replacing every member of a particular breed of dog capable of mauling someone with a member of a breed incapable of it would always cause a reduction in instances. Maybe you think we should go around Old Yellering every Golden Retriever in the world, just to be safe?
No one is ascribing any casual links here.
The causal link is implied. When someone says "Pitbulls and certain other dog breeds do not just have a bad reputation because people irrationally fear/hate them, they actually do pose a greater risk," this is another way of saying that a particular breed of dog is innately more dangerous than another. Not that it has the potential to be more dangerous, but objectively is. The only logical deduction from this statement is that there must be something about the animal's breed that makes it this way. It's literally the exact same logic used by people who cite FBI crime statistics in order to paint specific entire ethnic groups as innately "more criminal" than another ethnic group.