Weapons of Math Destruction

Author(s): Cathy O'Neil

Mathematics | Politics & Current Affairs

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives - whether we get a job or a loan, how much we pay for insurance - are being made by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness- everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated. But as Cathy O'Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and incontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination, creating a toxic cocktail for democracy.Tracing the arc of a person's life, Cathy O'Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future as individuals and as a society. These "weapons of math destruction" score teachers and students, sort CVs, grant or deny loans, evaluate workers, target voters and monitor our health. O'Neilcalls on modellers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it's up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives.


Product Information

This is a manual for the 21st-century citizen, and it succeeds where other big data accounts have failed - it is accessible, refreshingly critical and feels relevant and urgent -- Federica Cocco Financial Times Well-written, entertaining and very valuable -- Danny Dorling Times Higher Education O'Neil has become a whistle-blower for the world of Big Data... Her work makes particularly disturbing points about how being on the wrong side of an algorithmic decision can snowball in incredibly destructive ways Time Cathy O'Neil has seen Big Data from the inside, and the picture isn't pretty. Weapons of Math Destruction opens the curtain on algorithms that exploit people and distort the truth while posing as neutral mathematical tools. This book is wise, fierce, and desperately necessary -- Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not To Be Wrong Weapons of Math Destruction is a fantastic, plainspoken call to arms. Cathy O'Neil's book is important precisely because she believes in data science. It's a vital crash course in why we must interrogate the systems around us and demand better -- Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and co-editor of Boing Boing

Cathy O'Neil is a data scientist and author of the blog mathbabe.org. She earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard and taught at Barnard College before moving to the private sector, where she worked for the hedge fund D. E. Shaw. She then worked as a data scientist at various start-ups, building models that predict people's purchases and clicks. O'Neil started the Lede Program in Data Journalism at Columbia and is the author of Doing Data Science. She appears weekly on the Slate Money podcast.

General Fields

  • : 9780141985411
  • : Penguin Books, Limited
  • : Penguin Books, Limited
  • : 0.204
  • : June 2017
  • : 198mm X 129mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : June 2017
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Cathy O'Neil
  • : Paperback
  • : 617
  • : English
  • : 005.7
  • : 272
  • : PDZM