Weapons of Math Destruction Quotes

“The national drugstore chain CVS announced in 2013 that it would require employees to report their levels of body fat, blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol—or pay $600 a year.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“According to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, nearly half of America’s employers screen potential hires by looking at their credit reports. Some of them check the credit status of current employees as well, especially when they’re up for a promotion.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“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.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Ill-conceived mathematical models now micromanage the economy, from advertising to prisons.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Dios los cría y, estadísticamente hablando, ellos efectivamente se juntan.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Armas de destrucción matemática: Cómo el Big Data aumenta la desigualdad y amenaza la democracia

“No obstante, el modelo seguiría cometiendo errores, ya que todo modelo es, por su propia naturaleza, una simplificación. Ningún modelo puede incluir toda la complejidad del mundo ni los matices de la comunicación humana. Es inevitable que parte de la información importante se quede fuera.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Armas de destrucción matemática: Cómo el Big Data aumenta la desigualdad y amenaza la democracia

“Los puntos ciegos de un modelo reflejan las opiniones y prioridades de sus creadores.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Armas de destrucción matemática: Cómo el Big Data aumenta la desigualdad y amenaza la democracia

“Anywhere you find the combination of great need and ignorance, you’ll likely see predatory ads. Why, specifically, were they targeting these folks? Vulnerability is worth gold. The customers’ ignorance, of course, is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Once the ignorance is established, the key for the recruiter, just as for the snake-oil merchant, is to locate the most vulnerable people and then use their private information against them. This involves finding where they suffer the most, which is known as the “pain point.” It might be low self-esteem, the stress of raising kids in a neighborhood of warring gangs, or perhaps a drug addiction. Many people unwittingly disclose their pain points when they look for answers on Google or, later, when they fill out college questionnaires.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“A model’s blind spots reflect the judgments and priorities of its creators. After all, a key component of every model, whether formal or informal, is its definition of success. This is an important point that we’ll return to as we explore the dark world of WMDs. In each case, we must ask not only who designed the model but also what that person or company is trying to accomplish.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“In statistics, this phenomenon is known as Simpson’s Paradox: when a whole body of data displays one trend, yet when broken into subgroups, the opposite trend comes into view for each of those subgroups.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Compared to the human brain, machine learning isn’t especially efficient. A child places her finger on the stove, feels pain, and masters for the rest of her life the correlation between the hot metal and her throbbing hand. And she also picks up the word for it: burn. A machine learning program, by contrast, will often require millions or billions of data points to create its statistical models of cause and effect. But for the first time in history, those petabytes of data are now readily available, along with powerful computers to process them. And for many jobs, machine learning proves to be more flexible and nuanced than the traditional programs governed by rules.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“This part of the analysis, like any collection of human opinion, was sure to include old-fashioned prejudice and ignorance. It tended to protect the famous schools at the top of the list, because they were the ones people knew about. And it made it harder for up-and-comers.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“A model’s blind spots reflect the judgments and priorities of its creators.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“WMDs, by contrast, tend to favor efficiency. By their very nature, they feed on data that can be measured and counted. But fairness is squishy and hard to quantify. It is a concept. And computers, for all of their advances in language and logic, still struggle mightily with concepts.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“The question, however, is whether we've eliminated human bias or simply camouflaged it with technology.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“In each case, we must ask not only who designed the model but also what they person or company is trying to accomplish.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Nevertheless, many of these models encoded human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into the software systems that increasingly managed our lives.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Predictive models are, increasingly, the tools we will be relying on to run our institutions, deploy our resources, and manage our lives. But as I’ve tried to show throughout this book, these models are constructed not just from data but from the choices we make about which data to pay attention to—and which to leave out. Those choices are not just about logistics, profits, and efficiency. They are fundamentally moral.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Nevertheless, many of these models encoded human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into the software systems that increasingly managed our lives. Like gods, these mathematical models were opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, were beyond dispute or appeal. And they tended to punish the poor and the oppressed in our society, while making the rich richer.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“We have to learn to interrogate our data collection process, not just our algorithms.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“With political messaging, as with most WMDs [Weapons for Math Destruction], the heart of the problem is almost always the objective. Change that objective from leeching off people to helping them, and a WMD is disarmed -- and can even become a force for good.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Consequently, racism is the most slovenly of predictive models. It is powered by haphazard data gathering and spurious correlations, reinforced by institutional inequities, and polluted by confirmation bias”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“A few years ago, MIT researchers analyzed the behavior of call center employees for Bank of America to find out why some teams were more productive than others. They hung a so-called sociometric badge around each employee’s neck. The electronics in these badges tracked the employees’ location and also measured, every sixteen milliseconds, their tone of voice and gestures. It recorded when people were looking at each other and how much each person talked, listened, and interrupted. Four teams of call center employees—eighty people in total—wore these badges for six weeks. These employees’ jobs were highly regimented. Talking was discouraged because workers were supposed to spend as many of their minutes as possible on the phone, solving customers’ problems. Coffee breaks were scheduled one by one. The researchers found, to their surprise, that the fastest and most efficient call”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“The input to my internal cooking model is the information I have about my family, the ingredients I have on hand or I know are available, and my own energy, time, and ambition. The output is how and what I decide to cook. I evaluate the success of a meal by how satisfied my family seems at the end of it, how much they’ve eaten, and how healthy the food was. Seeing how well it is received and how much of it is enjoyed allows me to update my model for the next time I cook. The updates and adjustments make it what statisticians call a “dynamic model.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“A model, after all, is nothing more than an abstract representation of some process, be it a baseball game, an oil company’s supply chain, a foreign government’s actions, or a movie theater’s attendance. Whether it’s running in a computer program or in our head, the model takes what we know and uses it to predict responses in various situations. All of us carry thousands of models in our heads. They tell us what to expect, and they guide our decisions.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Big Data processes codify the past. They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that’s something only humans can provide. We have to explicitly embed better values into our algorithms, creating Big Data models that follow our ethical lead. Sometimes that will mean putting fairness ahead of profit. In a sense, our society is struggling with a new industrial revolution. And we can draw some lessons from the last one. The turn of the twentieth century was a time of great progress. People could light their houses with electricity and heat them with coal. Modern railroads brought in meat, vegetables, and canned goods from a continent away. For many, the good life was getting better.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“The victims, of course, feel differently. But the greatest number of them—the hourly workers and unemployed, the people dragging low credit scores through life—are poor. Prisoners are powerless. And in our society, where money buys influence, these WMD victims are nearly voiceless. Most are disenfranchised politically. Indeed, all too often the poor are blamed for their poverty, their bad schools, and the crime that afflicts their neighborhoods. That’s why few politicians even bother with antipoverty strategies. In the common view, the ills of poverty are more like a disease, and the effort—or at least the rhetoric—is to quarantine it and keep it from spreading to the middle class. We need to think about how we assign blame in modern life and how models exacerbate this cycle. But the poor are hardly the only victims of WMDs. Far from it. We’ve already seen how malevolent models can blacklist qualified job applicants and dock the pay of workers who don’t fit a corporation’s picture of ideal health. These WMDs hit the middle class as hard as anyone. Even the rich find themselves microtargeted by political models. And they scurry about as frantically as the rest of us to satisfy the remorseless WMD that rules college admissions and pollutes”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“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 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

“Seven years after A Nation at Risk was published with such fanfare, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories took a second look at the data gathered for the report. These people were no amateurs when it came to statistics—they build and maintain nuclear weapons—and they quickly found the error. Yes, it was true that SAT scores had gone down on average. However, the number of students taking the test had ballooned over the course of those seventeen years. Universities were opening their doors to more poor students and minorities. Opportunities were expanding. This signaled social success. But naturally, this influx of newcomers dragged down the average scores. However, when statisticians broke down the population into income groups, scores for every single group were rising, from the poor to the rich.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Scheduling software can be seen as an extension of the just-in-time economy. But instead of lawn mower blades or cell phone screens showing up right on cue, it’s people, usually people who badly need money. And because they need money so desperately, the companies can bend their lives to the dictates of a mathematical model.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy