Weapons Of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality And Threatens Democracy Quotes
"As a budding math nerd, I was especially intrigued by the primes."
"Math provided a neat refuge from the messiness of the real world."
"In leaving academia for finance, I carried mathematics from abstract theory into practice."
"Mathematics, once my refuge, was not only deeply entangled in the world’s problems but also fueling many of them."
"Math was able to combine with technology to multiply the chaos and misfortune."
"These mathematical models were opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists."
"Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, were beyond dispute or appeal."
"Models are opinions embedded in mathematics."
"We are judged by what we do, not by who we are."
"A model’s blind spots reflect the judgments and priorities of its creators."
"To create a model, we make choices about what’s important enough to include, simplifying the world into a toy version."
"But modelers run into problems when they focus models as simple as a smoke alarm on their fellow humans."
"Racism operates like many of the WMDs I’ll be describing in this book."
"Statistical systems like the LSI–R are effective in gauging recidivism risk—or at least more accurate than a judge’s random guess."
"We are modeled as shoppers and couch potatoes, as patients and loan applicants, and very little of this do we see."
"Fund-raising is one of the metrics that boosted TCU’s ranking."
"Winning athletic programs turn out to be the most effective promotions for some applicants."
"The more students apply, the more selective the school can be."
"The concept of a safety school is now largely extinct, thanks to the U.S. News ranking."
"Our entire society has embraced the idea that a degree from a highly ranked school can catapult a student into a life of power and privilege."
"The proxies the journalists chose for educational excellence make sense."
"Between 1985 and 2013, the cost of higher education rose by more than 500 percent."
"Each prospective student represents a series of assets and usually a liability or two."
"The greatest shortcoming of the U.S. News college ranking is that it doesn’t count tuition and fees."
"Basketball teams are managing individuals, each one potentially worth millions of dollars. Their analytics engines are crucial to their competitive advantage, and they are hungry for data."
"The majority of job applicants, thankfully, are not blackballed by automatic systems. But they still face the challenge of moving their application to the top of the pile."
"Musicians behind the sheet can actually perform the job they’re applying for. In other professions, employers have to hunt through résumés."
"72 percent of résumés are never seen by human eyes. Computer programs flip through them, pulling out skills and experiences that the employer is looking for."
"The ideal way to circumvent such prejudice is to consider applicants blindly."
"The existence of these e-scores shouldn’t be surprising. We’ve seen models feeding on similar data when targeting us for predatory loans or weighing the odds that we might steal a car."
"Phrenology was a model that relied on pseudoscientific nonsense to make authoritative pronouncements, and for decades it went untested."
"The trouble, from the employees’ perspective, is an oversupply of low-wage labor."
"The unequal treatment at the hands of these gatekeepers extends far beyond résumés."
"The best ideas would tend to spread more widely through the network. If people cut and pasted certain groups of words and shared them, those words were likely ideas."
"Every person gets a different experience, and the models are optimized to draw as much money as they can from the desperate and the ignorant."
"The underlying idea was that drivers should be judged by their records—not by their consumer patterns or those of their friends or neighbors."
"These days, many trucks carry an electronic logging device that registers every turn, every acceleration, every time they touch the brakes."
"Insurance companies now have manifold ways to study drivers’ behavior in exquisite detail."
"In theory, this meets the ideal of the Consumer Reports campaign. The individual driver comes into focus."
"The judgment is still based on the driver’s behavior, not on extraneous details like her credit rating or the driving records of people her age."
"In this way, even the models that track our personal behavior gain many of their insights, and assess risk, by comparing us to others."
"As insurance companies scrutinize the patterns of our lives and our bodies, they will sort us into new types of tribes."
"At the same time, surveillance will change the very nature of insurance."
"Employers, which have long been nickel and diming workers to lower their costs, now have a new tactic to combat these growing costs."
"The idea, as we’ve seen so many times, springs from good intentions."
"Trouble is, the intrusions cannot be ignored or wished away. Nor can the coercion."
"If companies set up free and voluntary wellness programs, few would have reason to object."
"The BMI is a person’s weight in kilograms divided by their height in centimeters. It’s a crude numerical proxy for physical fitness."
"But tying a flawed statistic like BMI to compensation, and compelling workers to mold their bodies to the corporation’s ideal, infringes on freedom."
"The greatest savings from wellness programs come from the penalties assessed on the workers."
"Employers are already overdosing on our data. They’re busy using it, as we’ve seen, to score us as potential employees and as workers."
"In the era of machine intelligence, most of the variables will remain a mystery."
"These automatic programs will increasingly determine how we are treated by the other machines."
"In the world of WMDs, privacy is increasingly a luxury that only the wealthy can afford."
"Blacks fill up 40 percent of America’s prison cells."
"A 2013 study by the New York Civil Liberties Union."