Brandon Caples

“To create a model, then, we make choices about what’s important enough to include, simplifying the world into a toy version that can be easily understood and from which we can infer important facts and actions. We expect it to handle only one job and accept that it will occasionally act like a clueless machine, one with enormous blind spots.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“We’ve seen time and again that mathematical models can sift through data to locate people who are likely to face great challenges, whether from crime, poverty, or educations. It’s up to society whether to use that intelligence to reject and punish them—or to reach out to them with the resources they need. We can use the scale and efficiency that make WMDs so pernicious in order to help people. It all depends on the objective we choose.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“The human victims of WMDs, we’ll see time and again, are held to a far higher standard of evidence than the algorithms themselves.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“This is a point I’ll be returning to in future chapters: we’ve seen time and again that mathematical models can sift through data to locate people who are likely to face great challenges, whether from crime, poverty, or education. It’s up to society whether to use that intelligence to reject and punish them—or to reach out to them with the resources they need.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy