Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

by Cathy O'Neil

As the rankings grow, so do efforts to game them. In a 2014 U.S. News ranking of global universities, the mathematics department at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz University landed in seventh place, right behind Harvard. The department had been around for only two years but had somehow leapfrogged ahead of several giants of mathematics, including Cambridge and MIT. At first blush, this might look like a positive development. Perhaps MIT and Cambridge were coasting on their fame while a hardworking insurgent powered its way into the elite. With a pure reputational ranking, such a turnaround would take decades. But data can bring surprises to the surface in a hurry. Algorithms, though, can also be gamed. Lior Pachter, a computational biologist at Berkeley, looked into it. He found that the Saudi university had contacted a host of mathematicians whose work was highly cited and had offered them $72,000 to serve as adjunct faculty. The deal, according to a recruiting letter Pachter posted on his blog, stipulated that the mathematicians had to work three weeks a year in Saudi Arabia. The university would fly them there in business class and put them up at a five-star hotel. Conceivably, their work in Saudi Arabia added value locally. But the university also required them to change their affiliation on the Thomson Reuters academic citation website, a key reference for the U.S. News rankings. That meant the Saudi university could claim the publications of their new adjunct faculty ...