Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil

in math from Harvard, was a postdoc at the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College, where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. The video of this presentation can be viewed above-or directly on Vimeo.Ĭathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D.

$Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O$

O’Neil empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change. But in the end, it’s up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. O’Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.” Welcome to the dark side of Big Data. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: if a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.īut as Cathy O’Neil reveals, the opposite is true. O’Neil-a Harvard-trained mathematician and former hedge fund data analyst-discusses how many of the decisions that affect our lives-where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance-are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. On September 16, 2016, Social Science Matrix hosted Cathy O’Neil, author of W eapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil