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

by Cathy O'Neil

More likely, they’ll have var...

A serious justice system research program would delve into the effects of each of these elements, how they work together, and whic...

The goal, if data were used constructively, would be to optimize prisons—much the way companies like Amazon optimize websites or supply chains—for the benefit...

But prisons have every incentive to avoid this data...

Privately run prisons, which house only 10 percent of the incarcerated population, are a $5 billion industry.

Like airlines, the private prisons make profits only when running at high capacity.

Too much poking and prodding might threaten tha...

So instead of analyzing prisons and optimizing them, we deal with...

Prisoners go in and disappear fr...

Nastiness no doubt occurs, but behind thick walls. What goes on ...

The current models stubbornly stick to the dubious and unquestioned hypothesis that more prison time for supposedly h...

And if studies appear to upend that logic, they can b...

Stop and frisk may seem intrusive and unfair, but in short time it will also be viewed as primitive.

That’s because police are bringing back tools and techniques from the global campaign against terrorism and focusing them on local crime fighting.

In San Diego, for example, police are not only asking the people they stop for identif...

more empathetic approach could lead to warmer relations between the police and the policed, and fewer of the tragedies we’ve seen in recent years—the police killings of young black men and the riots that follow them.

a mathematical point of view, however, trust is hard to quantify.

That’s a challenge for people bui...

Sadly, it’s far simpler to keep counting arrests, to build models that assume we’re birds of a f...

He decided to look into it and soon learned that the use of personality tests for hiring was indeed widespread among large corporations.

And yet he found very few legal challenges to this practice.

As he explained to me, people who apply for a job and are red-lighted rarely learn that they were rejected...

Even when they do, they’re not likely to co...

Behm went on to send notices to seven companies—Finish Line, Home Depot, Kroger, Lowe’s, PetSmart, Walgreen Co., and Yum Brands—informing them of his intent to file a class-action suit alleging that the use of ...

Arguments are likely to focus on whether the Kronos test can be considered a medical exam, the use of which in hiring is illegal under the A...

If this turns out to be the case, the court will have to determine whether the hiring companies themselves are responsible for runni...

The question for this book is how automatic systems judge us when we seek jobs and wh...

Already, we’ve seen WMDs poisoning the college admissions process, both for the rich ...

Meanwhile, WMDs in criminal justice rope in millions, the great majority of them poor, most of whom never had the...

Members of each of these groups face radically different challenges. But they have something in common, too. ...

Finding work used to be largely a question of...

In fact, Kyle Behm was following the traditional route when he applie...

His friend had alerted him to the opening and put...

For decades, that was how people got a foot in the door, whether at grocers, the do...

Candidates then usually faced an interview, where a manager would try t...

All too often this translated into a single basic judgment: Is this person like me (or...

The result was a lack of opportunity for job seekers without a friend inside, especially if they came from a differen...

Women also found themselves excluded by thi...

The hiring business is automating, and many of the new programs include personality tests like the one Kyle Behm took.

It is now a $500 million annual business and is growing by 10 to 15 percent a year, according to Hogan Assessment Systems Inc., a testing company.

Such tests now are used on 60 to 70 percent of prospective workers in the United States, up from 30 to 40 percent about five years ago, estimates Jos...

Naturally, these hiring programs can’t incorporate information about how the candidate would actu...

That’s in the future, and theref...

So like many other Big Data programs, they set...

And as we’ve seen, proxies are bound to be inexact ...

In fact, the Supreme Court ruled in a 1971 case, Griggs v. Duke Power Company, that intelligence tests for hiring were di...

One would think that case might have triggered som...

But instead the industry simply opted for replacements, including personality tests like one ...

Even putting aside the issues of fairness and legality, research suggests that personality tests are poor...

Frank Schmidt, a business professor at the University of Iowa, analyzed a century of workplace productivity data to measure the predictiv...