Weapons of Math Destruction Quotes

“In many companies, managers’ pay is contingent upon the efficiency of their staff as measured by revenue per employee hour. Scheduling software helps them boost these numbers and their own compensation. Even when executives tell managers to loosen up, they often resist. It goes against everything they’ve been taught. What’s more, at Starbucks, if a manager exceeds his or her “labor budget,” a district manager is alerted, said one employee. And that could lead to a write-up. It’s usually easier just to change someone’s schedule, even if it means violating the corporate pledge to provide one week’s notice.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“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 Josh Bersin of the consulting firm Deloitte.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“The trouble was that the rankings were self-reinforcing. If a college fared badly in U.S. News, its reputation would suffer, and conditions would deteriorate. Top students would avoid it, as would top professors. Alumni would howl and cut back on contributions. The ranking would tumble further. The ranking, in short, was destiny.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“In a targeted world, we no longer pay the average. Instead, we’re saddled with anticipated costs. Instead of smoothing out life’s bumps, insurance companies will demand payment for those bumps in advance.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“But a crucial part of justice is equality. And that means, among many other things, experiencing criminal justice equally. People who favor policies like stop and frisk should experience it themselves. Justice cannot just be something that one part of society inflicts upon the other.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“This establishes a powerful basis for legitimate ad campaigns, but it also fuels their predatory cousins: ads that pinpoint people in great need and sell them false or overpriced promises.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“They draw statistical correlations between a person’s zip code or language patterns and her potential to pay back a loan or handle a job. These correlations are discriminatory, and some of them are illegal.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Employers, for example, are increasingly using credit scores to evaluate potential hires. Those who pay their bills promptly, the thinking goes, are more likely to show up to work on time and follow the rules.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“This was the Big Data economy, and it promised spectacular gains. A computer program could speed through thousands of résumés or loan applications in a second or two and sort them into neat lists, with the most promising candidates on top. This not only saved time but also was marketed as fair and objective. After all, it didn’t involve prejudiced humans digging through reams of paper, just machines processing cold numbers. By 2010 or so, mathematics was asserting itself as never before in human affairs, and the public largely welcomed it.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“This was the Big Data economy, and it promised spectacular gains. A computer program could speed through thousands of résumés or loan applications in a second or two and sort them into neat lists, with the most promising candidates on top. This not only saved time but also was marketed as fair and objective. After all, it didn’t involve prejudiced humans digging through reams of paper, just machines processing cold numbers. By 2010 or so, mathematics was asserting itself as never before in human”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“What’s different here is the focus on the proxy when far more relevant data is available. I cannot imagine a more meaningful piece of data for auto insurers than a drunk driving record. It is evidence of risk in precisely the domain they’re attempting to predict. It’s far better than other proxies they consider, such as a high school student’s grade point average. Yet it can count far less in their formula than a score drawn from financial data thrown together on a credit report (which, as we’ve seen, is sometimes erroneous).”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“There’s a paradox here. If we return one last time to that ’50s-era banker, we see that his mind was occupied with human distortions—desires, prejudice, distrust of outsiders. To carry out the job more fairly and efficiently, he and the rest of his industry handed the work over to an algorithm. Sixty years later, the world is dominated by automatic systems chomping away on our error-ridden dossiers. They urgently require the context, common sense, and fairness that only humans can provide. However, if we leave this issue to the marketplace, which prizes efficiency, growth, and cash flow (while tolerating a certain degree of errors), meddling humans will be instructed to stand clear of the machinery.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“By the end of the meeting, one conscientious human being had cleared up the confusion generated by web-crawling data-gathering programs. The housing authority knew which Catherine Taylor it was dealing with. The question we’re left with is this: How many Wanda Taylors are out there clearing up false identities and other errors in our data? The answer: not nearly enough. Humans in the data economy are outliers and throwbacks.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“The trouble is that profits end up serving as a stand-in, or proxy, for truth.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“In WMDs, many poisonous assumptions are camouflaged by math and go largely untested and unquestioned.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“The privileged, we’ll see time and again, are processed more by people, the masses by machines.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“Some two thousand stone-throwing protesters gathered in the street outside the school. They chanted, "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you don't let us cheat." It sounds like a joke, but they were absolutely serious.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy