Weapons of Math Destruction

How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

Paperback, 288 pages

English language

Published Sept. 5, 2017 by Broadway Books.

ISBN:
978-0-553-41883-5
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
932385614

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(91 reviews)

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.

But as Cathy O’Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary 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 zip code), he’s then cut off from the kind of …

12 editions

Review of 'Weapons of Math Destruction' on 'LibraryThing'

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So often when someone starts a Twitter message with the label “Must read” I get defensive. You’re not my teacher. I’m a grown up. I get to decide what I’m going to read, thank you very much. But I’m really tempted to start this post with “Must read” because Cathy O’Neil’s book, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy is important and covers issues everyone should care about. Bonus points: it’s accessible, compelling, and – something I wasn’t expecting – really fun to read.returnreturnO’Neil is a data scientist who taught at Barnard before being seduced by the excitement of applying mathematics to finance, working for a Wall Street hedge fund before the crash of 2008. One of the things she quickly learned was different from academic mathematics was that employees were treated like members of an Al Qaida cell: the amount of information they could …

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