Weapons of Math Destruction

Posted on 04 March 2018 by Cathy O'Neil

A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on mathematical modeling a pervasive new force in society that threatens to undermine democracy and widen inequality We live in the age of the algorithm Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models In theory, this should lead to greater fairness Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated But as Cathy O Neil reveals in this shocking book, the opposite is true The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they re wrong Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination If a poor student can t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky by virtue of his race or neighborhood , he s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a toxic cocktail for democracy Welcome to the dark side of Big Data Tracing the arc of a person s life, from college to retirement, O Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society Models that score teachers and students, sort resumes, grant or deny loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health all have pernicious feedback loops They don t simply describe reality, as proponents claim, they change reality, by expanding or limiting the opportunities people have O Neil calls on modelers to take responsibility for how their algorithms are being used But in the end, it s up to us to become savvy about the models that govern our lives This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change. Best Download eBook Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil – kino-fada.fr O Neil deserves some credit right off the bat for not waiting until her retirement from the hedge fund where she worked to tell us the secrets of how corporations use big data our data Underlying the collection and use of big data is an attempt to utilize efficiencies in the market place for goods, money, and talent Big data ostensibly can also set us free from time constraints and uneven knowledge dispersal Conversely the opposite is often true We are at the mercy of how our own data is O Neil deserves some credit right off the bat for not waiting until her retirement from the hedge fund where she worked to tell us the secrets of how corporations use big data our data Underlying the collection and use of big data is an attempt to utilize efficiencies in the market place for goods, money, and talent Big data ostensibly can also set us free from time constraints and uneven knowledge dispersal Conversely the opposite is often true We are at the mercy of how our own data is shredded and packaged, and errors in the model can mean mutually ass...This was such a Malcolm Gladwell take on data science I think this book touches on an important subject, and people should be aware of the issues O Neil discusses But instead of doing a deep dive into the subject, it just felt like a list of bad algorithms with instances of the people they hurt It didn t contain many examples of WMDs that I had not already heard of, and that might be because she cited the New York Times for like all her case studies.As someone who works in the field, I do This was such a Malcolm Gladwell take on data science I think this book touches on an important subject, and people should be aware of the issues O Neil discusses But instead of doing a deep dive into the subject, it just felt like a list of bad algorithms with instances of the people they hurt It didn t contain many examples of WMDs that I had not already heard of, and that might be because she cited the New York Times for like all her case studies.As someone who works in the field, I don t think this book was geared towards me It wasn t technical or specific enough Knowing her background, I really wanted her to get into the nitty gritty of some of the mathematics behind the algorithms I know she is capable of doing this, but I think she instead chose to appeal to a wider audience That s cool except I don t think she did a great job of that either because this book lacked the context necessary to give people unfamiliar with the field a view of how ...Captivating Insightful And important A 50,000 foot view of how automated big data is a great tool for understanding human nature How it has great promise to make our lives easy And yet, a very real takedown of how systems engineers and corrupt power seekers, like corporate executives and for profit universities misuse this powerful tool And the even worse cases where people start with good intentions, like ridding school systems of bad teachers, only to toss out false negatives I f Captivating Insightful And important A 50,000 foot view of how automated big data is a great tool for understanding human nature How it has great promise to make our lives easy And yet, a very real takedown of how systems engineers and corrupt power seekers, like corporate executives and for profit universities misuse this powerful tool And the even worse cases where people start with good intentions, like ridding school systems of bad teachers, only to toss out false negatives I found Cathy O Neil s Weapons of Math Destruction a very important book that highlights a lot of what s been going on in America over the past 30 or 40 years For instance, I just finished The New Jim Crow, and wondered how the Supreme Court ...Welcome to the dark side of big data Thus the author concludes the Introduction section of this book Computers and the internet have enabled us to advance into the new world of algorithms and big data with ramifications that most people are unaware of Surfing the web, clicking like in Facebook, Googling i.e.searching on line , and making online purchases are common examples where big data is either tracking and potentially impacting our lives Some of these are benign and can be helpful Welcome to the dark side of big data Thus the author concludes the Introduction section of this book Computers and the internet have enabled us to advance into the new world of algorithms and big data with ramifications that most people are unaware of Surfing the web, clicking like in Faceb...This book did a nice job describing large scale data modeling and its pitfalls in a very accessible manner It is so easy to think of computer algorithms as unbiased however, the author demonstrates how they really do discriminate ...Big Data is opaque, complicated, managed by profit seeking corporations, and isanddictating certain societal conditions from getting a job to applying to college to receiving healthcare Data, on its own, seems amoral, a way to implement systems that arefair But O Neil s point in this book is that all algorithms include basic assumptions, and sometimes those basic assumptions are full of bias and not grounded in fact If the algorithms aren t regularly inspected, they creat Big Data is opaque, complicated, managed by profit seeking corporations, and isanddictating certain societal conditions from getting a job to applying to college to receiving healthcare Data, on its own, seems amoral, a way to implement systems that arefair But O Neil s point in this book is that all algorithms include basic assumptions, and sometimes those basic assumptions are full of bias and not grounded in fact If the algorithms aren t regularly inspected, they create their own feedback loops As O Neil says, In each case, we must ask not only who designed the model but also what that person or co...The subtitle of this book, How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy really says it all Big data has come into our lives in numerous ways, and many of them are a scourge on our lives Big data, in and of itself, is not to blame, but the uses to which it is put are often outrageous Take the case of automated teacher evaluations These are often based on the improvement of students scores It seems like a no brainer, and since the scores take into account the improvement rather The subtitle of this book, How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy really says it all Big data has come into our lives in numerous ways, and many of them are a scourge on our lives Big data, in and of itself, is not to blame, but the uses to which it is put are often outrageous Take the case of automated teacher evaluations These are often based on the improvement of students scores It seems like a no brainer, and since the scores take into account the improvement rather than the absolute scores, they seem to be very fair However, one New York teacher received an abysmal score of 6 out of 100 one year, and the following year received a wonderful score of 96 Obviously the teacher did not suddenly improve his teaching methods.If a mathematician were to analyze the scores from such evaluations, their random scatter would be instantly recognized as meaningless Yet, these automated...Forget those cute pastel illustrations from the fifties with their flying cars, robot servants and dreams of unlimited leisure Our future has finally arrived and for most of us, especially for the less rich and less privileged who won t qualify for individualized attention, the computer says No Weapons of Math Destruction is a timely book about the increasing influence of algorithms to control the news we see, the jobs we can get and the politicians we vote for algorithms working tirelessl Forget those cute pastel illustrations from the fifties with their flying cars, robot servants and dreams of unlimited leisure Our future has finally arrived and for most of us, especially for the less rich and less privileged who won t qualify for individualized attention, the computer says No Weapons of Math Destruction is a timely book about the increasing influence of algorithms to control the news we see, the jobs we can get and the politicians we vote for algorithms working tirelessly on someone s behalf not yours , unseen and unaccountable.The book explains statistical and methodological problems with these algorithms and illustrates how these same problems manifest themselves when they are applied to real world situations.An example gives a fl...Book reviews are all about expectations, and honestly I, as someone doing data science and grappling with issues, expectedWith a data scientist writing a full length book inditing data science one expects a deep dive revealing real points Instead it ends up being a very surface level essay without the deeper exploration and meaning one expects from a full length work Perhapsworrisomely, her own definition of a WMD it introduces is often worked around to bring in arguments she want Book reviews are all about expectations, and honestly I, as someone doing data science and grappling with issues, expectedWith a data scientist writing a full length book inditing data science one expects a deep dive revealing real points Instead it ends up being a very surface level essay without the deeper exploration and meaning one expects from a full length work Perhapsworri...I was really delighted to see this book on the list of nominations for the National Book Award O Neil was a math professor, then hedge fund analyst, then Occupy activist, now excellent non fiction explicator of the power that we ve given algorithms in daily life Certainly, the old way, in which a human bank manager or college admissions officer selected people for loans or Harvard reflected significant prejudices but have we gone too far in the other direction, thinking that hard data will er I was really delighted to see this book on the list of nominations for the National Book Award O Neil was a math professor, then hedge fund analyst, then Occupy activist, now excellent non fiction explicator of the power that we ve given algorithms in daily life Certainly, the old way, i...

English
04 March 2018

Cathy O'Neil