Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Unabridged)
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4.4 • 54 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A former Wall Street quant sounds the alarm on Big Data and the mathematical models that threaten to rip apart our social fabric—with a new afterword
“A manual for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . relevant and urgent.”—Financial Times
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Boston Globe • Wired • Fortune • Kirkus Reviews • The Guardian • Nature • On Point
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.
But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination—propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.
Customer Reviews
Lots of nitpicking, no solutions
As a math major myself, I’ve heard a lot of math-illiterate folks criticize these algorithms. Unconvinced by their reasoning, I figured I’d hear out the arguments of a former math professor. Her reasoning wasn’t any better.
The author at one point claims that the models are inaccurate, but then when she gets to places where the models are very accurate (car insurance) she shifts the goalposts. She says it’s unfair that certain people have to pay more because of their immutable traits. Then when she talk about the mode being refined to account for safe vs unsafe driving she complains about surveillance. Pick an argument and bloody well stick to it.
This book is a Gish Gallop of flimsy arguments. I wish I had the space for a point by point reputation.
Her book is not about mathematics. It’s a series of moral assertions. It’s unfair, she claims, that certain people who are shown to be higher risk have to pay more for car insurance or health insurance. Is it “fair” that somebody else be injured or killed when that bad driver is kept on the road?
She calls wellness programs “wage theft.” One could also say that it’s wage theft when people choose to eat healthy, avoid cigarettes and alcohol, yet our wage growth is eroded to pay for the health insurance of our colleagues that make poorer decisions. Granted my counterargument isn’t airtight, but I’m not turning my argument into a book.
She also romanticizes the pre-math period of human judgement. Maybe it’s unfair to be denied a loan by a bank based on an imperfect algorithm. What’s the alternative, human judgement? Who does she think will benefit from human judgement, the poor immigrant or the son of the banker’s golfing buddy?
She complains about stop and frisk, but a model didn’t give us stop and frisk. That was entirely a human endeavor.
The author did offer some critiques of certain models, and those models deserve criticism and refinement. Those valid criticisms don’t rise to the level of the book’s title and subtitle.
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