Transparency matters. And yet many companies go out of their way to hide the results of their models or even their existence. One common justification is that the algorithm constitutes a “secret sauce” crucial to their business. It’s intellectual property, and it must be defended, if need be, with legions of lawyers and lobbyists. In the case of web giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, these precisely tailored algorithms alone are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. WMDs are, by design, inscrutable black boxes. That makes it extra hard to definitively answer the second question: Does
...more
