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Cathy O'Neil

“In both cultures, wealth is no longer a means to get by. It becomes directly tied to personal worth. A young suburbanite with every advantage—the prep school education, the exhaustive coaching for college admissions tests, the overseas semester in Paris or Shanghai—still flatters himself that it is his skill, hard work, and prodigious problem-solving abilities that have lifted him into a world of privilege. Money vindicates all doubts. They’re eager to convince us all that Darwinism is at work, when it looks very much to the outside like a combination of gaming a system and dumb luck.
In both of these industries, the real world, with all of its messiness, sits apart. The inclination is to replace people with data trails, turning them into more effective shoppers, voters, or workers to optimize some objective. This is easy to do, and to justify, when success comes back as an anonymous score and when the people affected remain every bit as abstract as the numbers dancing across the screen. More and more, I worried about the separation between technical models and real people, and about the moral repercussions of that separation. In fact, I saw the same pattern emerging that I’d witnessed in finance: a false sense of security was leading to widespread use of imperfect models, self-serving definitions of success, and growing feedback loops. Those who objected were regarded as nostalgic Luddites.”

Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
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Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil
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