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Showing posts with label Big data. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Big data. Show all posts

Friday, December 9, 2016

Weapons of Math Destruction

One of the most stunning books I read in a college political science class was Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Michael Wheeler. Published in 1976--forty years ago!!!--it is about the manipulation of public opinion in America. It was scary stuff then and now, it feels eerily prescient.
The end-of-the-year "Best Books" lists are starting to come out and one that I'm seeing a lot is Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatans Democracy.

Here's the sales pitch:

A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life — and threaten to rip apart our social fabric

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.