This book is an extended essay where the author is trying to make a point about how algorithms can be damaging to our communities.
Unfortunately the logic in the book is a dumpster fire. I was astonished given that the author holds a PhD in mathematics... a very logical discipline.
The main thesis of the book is that there are certain conditions for an algorithm in which it can become a 'weapon of math destruction', and tries to show examples of these cases. O'Neil is decidedly anti-big data and anti-modeling in this book.
Here are my main complaints:
1. Her treatment of all of the examples is offensive to the experts who actually do social science in those fields. She clearly has only a surface knowledge of these issues, makes many factual errors, and does not actually know what current social scientists are working on. For example, in the section about policing, O'Neil says that if the Chicago Police Department hired her as their data scientist (!) she could make these biases and issues with the models go away, all while completely oblivious to what current economists, sociologists, and other experts are working on.
2. The claims made by O'Neil in this book are all testable hypotheses, however she makes NO effort to use data to make her argument, and instead relies on scant anecdotes and sweeping generalizations.
3. O'Neil was contradictory as to whether people are the problem or algorithms are the problem. For example, in the section about Starbucks and employee scheduling software she slammed the managers who took control over the algorithm, but then later explained that we don't have enough people actually being involved who adjust the algorithms as necessary... So which is it?
4. She misses the nuance between 'good' and 'bad' aspects of models. For example, when discussing the US News rating system for colleges, she argues that it isn't appropriate to rank schools. Then she goes on to attack for-profit colleges, while failing to acknowledge that the US News rating system can help guide someone who is underprivileged and doesn't have college counselors to tell them that the for-profit colleges are terribly terribly ranked.
5. She needs to look up the word 'arbitrary' in the dictionary. I'll quote the definition here: "based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system". Many times throughout the book she describes the choices of models in her examples as 'arbitrary'. A model is the exact OPPOSITE of arbitrary. It makes choices based on the defined rules of the program...
6. There is no original content or analysis in this book, beyond her coining of the phrase of 'weapons of math destruction'.
7. I'm confused why people say the book is well written. It isn't. It rambles and often strays away from the thesis.
In short, she does a disservice to the nuance involved with data and algorithms. She identifies some of the important issues near the beginning (e.g. sample size, out-of-sample conclusions, poor objective functions), however, her poor understanding of her examples, and hack-job of an argument is unfortunate and ultimately damning.
Add to book club
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club?
Learn more
Join or create book clubs
Choose books together
Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20210609014924im_/https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/514043DnLLL._SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_ML2_.jpg)
Flip to back
Flip to front
Follow the Author
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
OK
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy Paperback – September 5, 2017
by
Cathy O'Neil
(Author)
Cathy O'Neil
(Author)
Find all the books, read about the author, and more.
See search results for this author
Are you an author?
Learn about Author Central
|
-
Print length288 pages
-
LanguageEnglish
-
PublisherCrown
-
Publication dateSeptember 5, 2017
-
Dimensions5.14 x 0.6 x 7.89 inches
-
ISBN-100553418831
-
ISBN-13978-0553418835
Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Download to your computer
|
Kindle Cloud Reader
|
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
- Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce RacismPaperback
- Automating InequalityEubanksPaperback
- Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (The MIT Press)Paperback
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of PowerPaperback
- The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp HumanityPaperback
- Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked ProtestPaperback
More items to explore
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
- Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim CodePaperback
- Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce RacismPaperback
- Automating InequalityEubanksPaperback
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of PowerPaperback
- Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (The MIT Press)Paperback
- The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp HumanityPaperback
Customers who bought this item also bought
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
Editorial Reviews
Review
“O’Neil’s book offers a frightening look at how algorithms are increasingly regulating people. . . . Her knowledge of the power and risks of mathematical models, coupled with a gift for analogy, makes her one of the most valuable observers of the continuing weaponization of big data. . . . [She] does a masterly job explaining the pervasiveness and risks of the algorithms that regulate our lives.”—The New York Times Book Review
"Weapons of Math Destruction is the Big Data story Silicon Valley proponents won't tell. . . . [It] pithily exposes flaws in how information is used to assess everything from creditworthiness to policing tactics . . . a thought-provoking read for anyone inclined to believe that data doesn't lie.”—Reuters
“This is a manual for the twenty-first century citizen, and it succeeds where other big data accounts have failed—it is accessible, refreshingly critical and feels relevant and urgent.”—Financial Times
"Insightful and disturbing."—New York Review of Books
“Weapons of Math Destruction is an urgent critique of . . . the rampant misuse of math in nearly every aspect of our lives.”—Boston Globe
“A fascinating and deeply disturbing book.”—Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens
“Illuminating . . . [O’Neil] makes a convincing case that this reliance on algorithms has gone too far.”—The Atlantic
“A nuanced reminder that big data is only as good as the people wielding it.”—Wired
“If you’ve ever suspected there was something baleful about our deep trust in data, but lacked the mathematical skills to figure out exactly what it was, this is the book for you.”—Salon
“O’Neil is an ideal person to write this book. She is an academic mathematician turned Wall Street quant turned data scientist who has been involved in Occupy Wall Street and recently started an algorithmic auditing company. She is one of the strongest voices speaking out for limiting the ways we allow algorithms to influence our lives. . . . While Weapons of Math Destruction is full of hard truths and grim statistics, it is also accessible and even entertaining. O’Neil’s writing is direct and easy to read—I devoured it in an afternoon.”—Scientific American
“Indispensable . . . Despite the technical complexity of its subject, Weapons of Math Destruction lucidly guides readers through these complex modeling systems. . . . O’Neil’s book is an excellent primer on the ethical and moral risks of Big Data and an algorithmically dependent world. . . . For those curious about how Big Data can help them and their businesses, or how it has been reshaping the world around them, Weapons of Math Destruction is an essential starting place.”—National Post
“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, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of How Not To Be Wrong
“O’Neil has become [a whistle-blower] for the world of Big Data . . . [in] her important new book. . . . Her work makes particularly disturbing points about how being on the wrong side of an algorithmic decision can snowball in incredibly destructive ways.”—Time
"Weapons of Math Destruction is the Big Data story Silicon Valley proponents won't tell. . . . [It] pithily exposes flaws in how information is used to assess everything from creditworthiness to policing tactics . . . a thought-provoking read for anyone inclined to believe that data doesn't lie.”—Reuters
“This is a manual for the twenty-first century citizen, and it succeeds where other big data accounts have failed—it is accessible, refreshingly critical and feels relevant and urgent.”—Financial Times
"Insightful and disturbing."—New York Review of Books
“Weapons of Math Destruction is an urgent critique of . . . the rampant misuse of math in nearly every aspect of our lives.”—Boston Globe
“A fascinating and deeply disturbing book.”—Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens
“Illuminating . . . [O’Neil] makes a convincing case that this reliance on algorithms has gone too far.”—The Atlantic
“A nuanced reminder that big data is only as good as the people wielding it.”—Wired
“If you’ve ever suspected there was something baleful about our deep trust in data, but lacked the mathematical skills to figure out exactly what it was, this is the book for you.”—Salon
“O’Neil is an ideal person to write this book. She is an academic mathematician turned Wall Street quant turned data scientist who has been involved in Occupy Wall Street and recently started an algorithmic auditing company. She is one of the strongest voices speaking out for limiting the ways we allow algorithms to influence our lives. . . . While Weapons of Math Destruction is full of hard truths and grim statistics, it is also accessible and even entertaining. O’Neil’s writing is direct and easy to read—I devoured it in an afternoon.”—Scientific American
“Indispensable . . . Despite the technical complexity of its subject, Weapons of Math Destruction lucidly guides readers through these complex modeling systems. . . . O’Neil’s book is an excellent primer on the ethical and moral risks of Big Data and an algorithmically dependent world. . . . For those curious about how Big Data can help them and their businesses, or how it has been reshaping the world around them, Weapons of Math Destruction is an essential starting place.”—National Post
“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, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of How Not To Be Wrong
“O’Neil has become [a whistle-blower] for the world of Big Data . . . [in] her important new book. . . . Her work makes particularly disturbing points about how being on the wrong side of an algorithmic decision can snowball in incredibly destructive ways.”—Time
About the Author
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 is currently a columnist for Bloomberg View.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
BOMB PARTS
What Is a Model?
It was a hot August afternoon in 1946. Lou Boudreau, the player-manager of the Cleveland Indians, was having a miserable day. In the first game of a doubleheader, Ted Williams had almost single-handedly annihilated his team. Williams, perhaps the game’s greatest hitter at the time, had smashed three home runs and driven home eight. The Indians ended up losing 11 to 10.
Boudreau had to take action. So when Williams came up for the first time in the second game, players on the Indians’ side started moving around. Boudreau, the shortstop, jogged over to where the second baseman would usually stand, and the second baseman backed into short right field. The third baseman moved to his left, into the shortstop’s hole. It was clear that Boudreau, perhaps out of desperation, was shifting the entire orientation of his defense in an attempt to turn Ted Williams’s hits into outs.
In other words, he was thinking like a data scientist. He had analyzed crude data, most of it observational: Ted Williams usually hit the ball to right field. Then he adjusted. And it worked. Fielders caught more of Williams’s blistering line drives than before (though they could do nothing about the home runs sailing over their heads).
If you go to a major league baseball game today, you’ll see that defenses now treat nearly every player like Ted Williams. While Boudreau merely observed where Williams usually hit the ball, managers now know precisely where every player has hit every ball over the last week, over the last month, throughout his career, against left-handers, when he has two strikes, and so on. Using this historical data, they analyze their current situation and calculate the positioning that is associated with the highest probability of success. And that sometimes involves moving players far across the field.
Shifting defenses is only one piece of a much larger question: What steps can baseball teams take to maximize the probability that they’ll win? In their hunt for answers, baseball statisticians have scrutinized every variable they can quantify and attached it to a value. How much more is a double worth than a single? When, if ever, is it worth it to bunt a runner from first to second base?
The answers to all of these questions are blended and combined into mathematical models of their sport. These are parallel universes of the baseball world, each a complex tapestry of probabilities. They include every measurable relationship among every one of the sport’s components, from walks to home runs to the players themselves. The purpose of the model is to run different scenarios at every juncture, looking for the optimal combinations. If the Yankees bring in a right-handed pitcher to face Angels slugger Mike Trout, as compared to leaving in the current pitcher, how much more likely are they to get him out? And how will that affect their overall odds of winning?
Baseball is an ideal home for predictive mathematical modeling. As Michael Lewis wrote in his 2003 bestseller, Moneyball, the sport has attracted data nerds throughout its history. In decades past, fans would pore over the stats on the back of baseball cards, analyzing Carl Yastrzemski’s home run patterns or comparing Roger Clemens’s and Dwight Gooden’s strikeout totals. But starting in the 1980s, serious statisticians started to investigate what these figures, along with an avalanche of new ones, really meant: how they translated into wins, and how executives could maximize success with a minimum of dollars.
“Moneyball” is now shorthand for any statistical approach in domains long ruled by the gut. But baseball represents a healthy case study—and it serves as a useful contrast to the toxic models, or WMDs, that are popping up in so many areas of our lives. Baseball models are fair, in part, because they’re transparent. Everyone has access to the stats and can understand more or less how they’re interpreted. Yes, one team’s model might give more value to home run hitters, while another might discount them a bit, because sluggers tend to strike out a lot. But in either case, the numbers of home runs and strikeouts are there for everyone to see.
Baseball also has statistical rigor. Its gurus have an immense data set at hand, almost all of it directly related to the performance of players in the game. Moreover, their data is highly relevant to the outcomes they are trying to predict. This may sound obvious, but as we’ll see throughout this book, the folks building WMDs routinely lack data for the behaviors they’re most interested in. So they substitute stand-in data, or proxies. 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. Baseball models, for the most part, don’t use proxies because they use pertinent inputs like balls, strikes, and hits.
Most crucially, that data is constantly pouring in, with new statistics from an average of twelve or thirteen games arriving daily from April to October. Statisticians can compare the results of these games to the predictions of their models, and they can see where they were wrong. Maybe they predicted that a left-handed reliever would give up lots of hits to right-handed batters—and yet he mowed them down. If so, the stats team has to tweak their model and also carry out research on why they got it wrong. Did the pitcher’s new screwball affect his statistics? Does he pitch better at night? Whatever they learn, they can feed back into the model, refining it. That’s how trustworthy models operate. They maintain a constant back-and-forth with whatever in the world they’re trying to understand or predict. Conditions change, and so must the model.
Now, you may look at the baseball model, with its thousands of changing variables, and wonder how we could even be comparing it to the model used to evaluate teachers in Washington, D.C., schools. In one of them, an entire sport is modeled in fastidious detail and updated continuously. The other, while cloaked in mystery, appears to lean heavily on a handful of test results from one year to the next. Is that really a model?
The answer is yes. 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.
Here’s an informal model I use every day. As a mother of three, I cook the meals at home—my husband, bless his heart, cannot remember to put salt in pasta water. Each night when I begin to cook a family meal, I internally and intuitively model everyone’s appetite. I know that one of my sons loves chicken (but hates hamburgers), while another will eat only the pasta (with extra grated parmesan cheese). But I also have to take into account that people’s appetites vary from day to day, so a change can catch my model by surprise. There’s some unavoidable uncertainty involved.
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.”
Over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at making meals for my family, I’m proud to say. But what if my husband and I go away for a week, and I want to explain my system to my mom so she can fill in for me? Or what if my friend who has kids wants to know my methods? That’s when I’d start to formalize my model, making it much more systematic and, in some sense, mathematical. And if I were feeling ambitious, I might put it into a computer program.
Ideally, the program would include all of the available food options, their nutritional value and cost, and a complete database of my family’s tastes: each individual’s preferences and aversions. It would be hard, though, to sit down and summon all that informationoff the top of my head. I’ve got loads of memories of people grabbing seconds of asparagus or avoiding the string beans. But they’re all mixed up and hard to formalize in a comprehensive list.
The better solution would be to train the model over time, entering data every day on what I’d bought and cooked and noting the responses of each family member. I would also include parameters, or constraints. I might limit the fruits and vegetables to what’s in season and dole out a certain amount of Pop-Tarts, but only enough to forestall an open rebellion. I also would add a number of rules. This one likes meat, this one likes bread and pasta, this one drinks lots of milk and insists on spreading Nutella on everything in sight.
If I made this work a major priority, over many months I might come up with a very good model. I would have turned the food management I keep in my head, my informal internal model, into a formal external one. In creating my model, I’d be extending my power and influence in the world. I’d be building an automated me that others can implement, even when I’m not around.
There would always be mistakes, however, because models are, by their very nature, simplifications. No model can include all of the real world’s complexity or the nuance of human communication. Inevitably, some important information gets left out. I might have neglected to inform my model that junk-food rules are relaxed on birthdays, or that raw carrots are more popular than the cooked variety.
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 and 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.
Sometimes these blind spots don’t matter. When we ask Google Maps for directions, it models the world as a series of roads, tunnels, and bridges. It ignores the buildings, because they aren’t relevant to the task. When avionics software guides an airplane, it models the wind, the speed of the plane, and the landing strip below, but not the streets, tunnels, buildings, and people.
A model’s blind spots reflect the judgments and priorities of its creators. While the choices in Google Maps and avionics software appear cut and dried, others are far more problematic. The value-added model in Washington, D.C., schools, to return to that example, evaluates teachers largely on the basis of students’ test scores, while ignoring how much the teachers engage the students, work on specific skills, deal with classroom management, or help students with personal and family problems. It’s overly simple, sacrificing accuracy and insight for efficiency. Yet from the administrators’ perspective it provides an effective tool to ferret out hundreds of apparently underperforming teachers, even at the risk of misreading some of them.
Here we see that models, despite their reputation for impartiality, reflect goals and ideology. When I removed the possibility of eating Pop-Tarts at every meal, I was imposing my ideology on the meals model. It’s something we do without a second thought. Our own values and desires influence our choices, from the data we choose to collect to the questions we ask. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.
Whether or not a model works is also a matter of opinion. 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. If the North Korean government built a model for my family’s meals, for example, it might be optimized to keep us above the threshold of starvation at the lowest cost, based on the food stock available. Preferences would count for little or nothing. By contrast, if my kids were creating the model, success might feature ice cream at every meal. My own model attempts to blend a bit of the North Koreans’ resource management with the happiness of my kids, along with my own priorities of health, convenience, diversity of experience, and sustainability. As a result, it’s much more complex. But it still reflects my own personal reality. And a model built for today will work a bit worse tomorrow. It will grow stale if it’s not constantly updated. Prices change, as do people’s preferences. A model built for a six-year-old won’t work for a teenager.
This is true of internal models as well. You can often see troubles when grandparents visit a grandchild they haven’t seen for a while. On their previous visit, they gathered data on what the child knows, what makes her laugh, and what TV show she likes and (unconsciously) created a model for relating to this particular four-year-old. Upon meeting her a year later, they can suffer a few awkward hours because their models are out of date. Thomas the Tank Engine, it turns out, is no longer cool. It takes some time to gather new data about the child and adjust their models.
This is not to say that good models cannot be primitive. Some very effective ones hinge on a single variable. The most common model for detecting fires in a home or office weighs only one strongly correlated variable, the presence of smoke. That’s usually enough. But modelers run into problems—or subject us to problems—when they focus models as simple as a smoke alarm on their fellow humans.
Racism, at the individual level, can be seen as a predictive model whirring away in billions of human minds around the world. It is built from faulty, incomplete, or generalized data. Whether it comes from experience or hearsay, the data indicates that certain types of people have behaved badly. That generates a binary prediction that all people of that race will behave that same way.
Needless to say, racists don’t spend a lot of time hunting down reliable data to train their twisted models. And once their model morphs into a belief, it becomes hardwired. It generates poisonous assumptions, yet rarely tests them, settling instead for data that seems to confirm and fortify them. 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. In this way, oddly enough, racism operates like many of the WMDs I’ll be describing in this book.
BOMB PARTS
What Is a Model?
It was a hot August afternoon in 1946. Lou Boudreau, the player-manager of the Cleveland Indians, was having a miserable day. In the first game of a doubleheader, Ted Williams had almost single-handedly annihilated his team. Williams, perhaps the game’s greatest hitter at the time, had smashed three home runs and driven home eight. The Indians ended up losing 11 to 10.
Boudreau had to take action. So when Williams came up for the first time in the second game, players on the Indians’ side started moving around. Boudreau, the shortstop, jogged over to where the second baseman would usually stand, and the second baseman backed into short right field. The third baseman moved to his left, into the shortstop’s hole. It was clear that Boudreau, perhaps out of desperation, was shifting the entire orientation of his defense in an attempt to turn Ted Williams’s hits into outs.
In other words, he was thinking like a data scientist. He had analyzed crude data, most of it observational: Ted Williams usually hit the ball to right field. Then he adjusted. And it worked. Fielders caught more of Williams’s blistering line drives than before (though they could do nothing about the home runs sailing over their heads).
If you go to a major league baseball game today, you’ll see that defenses now treat nearly every player like Ted Williams. While Boudreau merely observed where Williams usually hit the ball, managers now know precisely where every player has hit every ball over the last week, over the last month, throughout his career, against left-handers, when he has two strikes, and so on. Using this historical data, they analyze their current situation and calculate the positioning that is associated with the highest probability of success. And that sometimes involves moving players far across the field.
Shifting defenses is only one piece of a much larger question: What steps can baseball teams take to maximize the probability that they’ll win? In their hunt for answers, baseball statisticians have scrutinized every variable they can quantify and attached it to a value. How much more is a double worth than a single? When, if ever, is it worth it to bunt a runner from first to second base?
The answers to all of these questions are blended and combined into mathematical models of their sport. These are parallel universes of the baseball world, each a complex tapestry of probabilities. They include every measurable relationship among every one of the sport’s components, from walks to home runs to the players themselves. The purpose of the model is to run different scenarios at every juncture, looking for the optimal combinations. If the Yankees bring in a right-handed pitcher to face Angels slugger Mike Trout, as compared to leaving in the current pitcher, how much more likely are they to get him out? And how will that affect their overall odds of winning?
Baseball is an ideal home for predictive mathematical modeling. As Michael Lewis wrote in his 2003 bestseller, Moneyball, the sport has attracted data nerds throughout its history. In decades past, fans would pore over the stats on the back of baseball cards, analyzing Carl Yastrzemski’s home run patterns or comparing Roger Clemens’s and Dwight Gooden’s strikeout totals. But starting in the 1980s, serious statisticians started to investigate what these figures, along with an avalanche of new ones, really meant: how they translated into wins, and how executives could maximize success with a minimum of dollars.
“Moneyball” is now shorthand for any statistical approach in domains long ruled by the gut. But baseball represents a healthy case study—and it serves as a useful contrast to the toxic models, or WMDs, that are popping up in so many areas of our lives. Baseball models are fair, in part, because they’re transparent. Everyone has access to the stats and can understand more or less how they’re interpreted. Yes, one team’s model might give more value to home run hitters, while another might discount them a bit, because sluggers tend to strike out a lot. But in either case, the numbers of home runs and strikeouts are there for everyone to see.
Baseball also has statistical rigor. Its gurus have an immense data set at hand, almost all of it directly related to the performance of players in the game. Moreover, their data is highly relevant to the outcomes they are trying to predict. This may sound obvious, but as we’ll see throughout this book, the folks building WMDs routinely lack data for the behaviors they’re most interested in. So they substitute stand-in data, or proxies. 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. Baseball models, for the most part, don’t use proxies because they use pertinent inputs like balls, strikes, and hits.
Most crucially, that data is constantly pouring in, with new statistics from an average of twelve or thirteen games arriving daily from April to October. Statisticians can compare the results of these games to the predictions of their models, and they can see where they were wrong. Maybe they predicted that a left-handed reliever would give up lots of hits to right-handed batters—and yet he mowed them down. If so, the stats team has to tweak their model and also carry out research on why they got it wrong. Did the pitcher’s new screwball affect his statistics? Does he pitch better at night? Whatever they learn, they can feed back into the model, refining it. That’s how trustworthy models operate. They maintain a constant back-and-forth with whatever in the world they’re trying to understand or predict. Conditions change, and so must the model.
Now, you may look at the baseball model, with its thousands of changing variables, and wonder how we could even be comparing it to the model used to evaluate teachers in Washington, D.C., schools. In one of them, an entire sport is modeled in fastidious detail and updated continuously. The other, while cloaked in mystery, appears to lean heavily on a handful of test results from one year to the next. Is that really a model?
The answer is yes. 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.
Here’s an informal model I use every day. As a mother of three, I cook the meals at home—my husband, bless his heart, cannot remember to put salt in pasta water. Each night when I begin to cook a family meal, I internally and intuitively model everyone’s appetite. I know that one of my sons loves chicken (but hates hamburgers), while another will eat only the pasta (with extra grated parmesan cheese). But I also have to take into account that people’s appetites vary from day to day, so a change can catch my model by surprise. There’s some unavoidable uncertainty involved.
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.”
Over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at making meals for my family, I’m proud to say. But what if my husband and I go away for a week, and I want to explain my system to my mom so she can fill in for me? Or what if my friend who has kids wants to know my methods? That’s when I’d start to formalize my model, making it much more systematic and, in some sense, mathematical. And if I were feeling ambitious, I might put it into a computer program.
Ideally, the program would include all of the available food options, their nutritional value and cost, and a complete database of my family’s tastes: each individual’s preferences and aversions. It would be hard, though, to sit down and summon all that informationoff the top of my head. I’ve got loads of memories of people grabbing seconds of asparagus or avoiding the string beans. But they’re all mixed up and hard to formalize in a comprehensive list.
The better solution would be to train the model over time, entering data every day on what I’d bought and cooked and noting the responses of each family member. I would also include parameters, or constraints. I might limit the fruits and vegetables to what’s in season and dole out a certain amount of Pop-Tarts, but only enough to forestall an open rebellion. I also would add a number of rules. This one likes meat, this one likes bread and pasta, this one drinks lots of milk and insists on spreading Nutella on everything in sight.
If I made this work a major priority, over many months I might come up with a very good model. I would have turned the food management I keep in my head, my informal internal model, into a formal external one. In creating my model, I’d be extending my power and influence in the world. I’d be building an automated me that others can implement, even when I’m not around.
There would always be mistakes, however, because models are, by their very nature, simplifications. No model can include all of the real world’s complexity or the nuance of human communication. Inevitably, some important information gets left out. I might have neglected to inform my model that junk-food rules are relaxed on birthdays, or that raw carrots are more popular than the cooked variety.
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 and 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.
Sometimes these blind spots don’t matter. When we ask Google Maps for directions, it models the world as a series of roads, tunnels, and bridges. It ignores the buildings, because they aren’t relevant to the task. When avionics software guides an airplane, it models the wind, the speed of the plane, and the landing strip below, but not the streets, tunnels, buildings, and people.
A model’s blind spots reflect the judgments and priorities of its creators. While the choices in Google Maps and avionics software appear cut and dried, others are far more problematic. The value-added model in Washington, D.C., schools, to return to that example, evaluates teachers largely on the basis of students’ test scores, while ignoring how much the teachers engage the students, work on specific skills, deal with classroom management, or help students with personal and family problems. It’s overly simple, sacrificing accuracy and insight for efficiency. Yet from the administrators’ perspective it provides an effective tool to ferret out hundreds of apparently underperforming teachers, even at the risk of misreading some of them.
Here we see that models, despite their reputation for impartiality, reflect goals and ideology. When I removed the possibility of eating Pop-Tarts at every meal, I was imposing my ideology on the meals model. It’s something we do without a second thought. Our own values and desires influence our choices, from the data we choose to collect to the questions we ask. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.
Whether or not a model works is also a matter of opinion. 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. If the North Korean government built a model for my family’s meals, for example, it might be optimized to keep us above the threshold of starvation at the lowest cost, based on the food stock available. Preferences would count for little or nothing. By contrast, if my kids were creating the model, success might feature ice cream at every meal. My own model attempts to blend a bit of the North Koreans’ resource management with the happiness of my kids, along with my own priorities of health, convenience, diversity of experience, and sustainability. As a result, it’s much more complex. But it still reflects my own personal reality. And a model built for today will work a bit worse tomorrow. It will grow stale if it’s not constantly updated. Prices change, as do people’s preferences. A model built for a six-year-old won’t work for a teenager.
This is true of internal models as well. You can often see troubles when grandparents visit a grandchild they haven’t seen for a while. On their previous visit, they gathered data on what the child knows, what makes her laugh, and what TV show she likes and (unconsciously) created a model for relating to this particular four-year-old. Upon meeting her a year later, they can suffer a few awkward hours because their models are out of date. Thomas the Tank Engine, it turns out, is no longer cool. It takes some time to gather new data about the child and adjust their models.
This is not to say that good models cannot be primitive. Some very effective ones hinge on a single variable. The most common model for detecting fires in a home or office weighs only one strongly correlated variable, the presence of smoke. That’s usually enough. But modelers run into problems—or subject us to problems—when they focus models as simple as a smoke alarm on their fellow humans.
Racism, at the individual level, can be seen as a predictive model whirring away in billions of human minds around the world. It is built from faulty, incomplete, or generalized data. Whether it comes from experience or hearsay, the data indicates that certain types of people have behaved badly. That generates a binary prediction that all people of that race will behave that same way.
Needless to say, racists don’t spend a lot of time hunting down reliable data to train their twisted models. And once their model morphs into a belief, it becomes hardwired. It generates poisonous assumptions, yet rarely tests them, settling instead for data that seems to confirm and fortify them. 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. In this way, oddly enough, racism operates like many of the WMDs I’ll be describing in this book.
Product details
- Publisher : Crown; Reprint edition (September 5, 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0553418831
- ISBN-13 : 978-0553418835
- Item Weight : 7.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.14 x 0.6 x 7.89 inches
-
Best Sellers Rank:
#5,198 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Data Processing
- #2 in Privacy & Surveillance in Society
- #3 in Business Statistics
- Customer Reviews:
Customer reviews
4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
2,071 global ratings
How are ratings calculated?
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2018
272 people found this helpful
Report abuse
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2018
Verified Purchase
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Niel is an interesting and accessible read that provides some valuable insight into the world of big data, predictive analytics, and artificial intelligence. She identifies some very real technical and underlying scientific issues as the world races to advance these technologies. She persuasively points out that computer models can encode human bias into tools and that sometimes exacerbates these biases. Many of her examples are quite rich and compelling. Unfortunately, her desire to reinforce her own social beliefs infuse the same kinds of bias into her analysis that she asserts exist in current WMD’s, just in the opposite direction. One example is her discussion of Kronos’ psychological testing. While it is true that the model prevents some mentally ill applicants from gaining jobs that may be able to do, it also assists an honest company from avoiding a provably higher risk of costly employee issues, some of which could threaten the future viability of the company. This possible outcome should be acknowledged in a well crafted analysis.
As a research scientist in the field of analytics I support most all her research recommendations. The technology implementing analytic models (e.g. predictive analytics and AI) is often leaving the supporting science behind. Mastering the science behind, rather than just advancing, these analytic technologies is as important as it is currently unpopular for research investment. But, if these inquiries into “WMD” are to be defensible research with persuasive results they cannot be colored by social and logical biases like Ms. O’Neil’s personal definition of morality or what a utopian society would look like.
As a research scientist in the field of analytics I support most all her research recommendations. The technology implementing analytic models (e.g. predictive analytics and AI) is often leaving the supporting science behind. Mastering the science behind, rather than just advancing, these analytic technologies is as important as it is currently unpopular for research investment. But, if these inquiries into “WMD” are to be defensible research with persuasive results they cannot be colored by social and logical biases like Ms. O’Neil’s personal definition of morality or what a utopian society would look like.
112 people found this helpful
Report abuse
Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2016
So here you are on Amazon's web page, reading about Cathy O'Neil's new book, Weapons of Math Destruction. Amazon hopes you buy the book (and so do I, it's great!). But Amazon also hopes it can sell you some other books while you're here. That's why, in a prominent place on the page, you see a section entitled:
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
This section is Amazon's way of using what it knows -- which book you're looking at, and sales data collected across all its customers -- to recommend other books that you might be interested in. It's a very simple, and successful, example of a predictive model: data goes in, some computation happens, a prediction comes out. What makes this a good model? Here are a few things:
1. It uses relevant input data.The goal is to get people to buy books, and the input to the model is what books people buy. You can't expect to get much more relevant than that.
2. It's transparent. You know exactly why the site is showing you these particular books, and if the system recommends a book you didn't expect, you have a pretty good idea why. That means you can make an informed decision about whether or not to trust the recommendation.
3. There's a clear measure of success and an embedded feedback mechanism. Amazon wants to sell books. The model succeeds if people click on the books they're shown, and, ultimately, if they buy more books, both of which are easy to measure. If clicks on or sales of related items go down, Amazon will know, and can investigate and adjust the model accordingly.
Weapons of Math Destruction reviews, in an accessible, non-technical way, what makes models effective -- or not. The emphasis, as you might guess from the title, is on models with problems. The book highlights many important ideas; here are just a few:
1. Models are more than just math. Take a look at Amazon's model above: while there are calculations (simple ones) embedded, it's people who decide what data to use, how to use it, and how to measure success. Math is not a final arbiter, but a tool to express, in a scalable (i.e., computable) way, the values that people explicitly decide to emphasize. Cathy says that "models are opinions expressed in mathematics" (or computer code). She highlights that when we evaluate teachers based on students' test scores, or assess someone's insurability as a driver based on their credit record, we are expressing opinions: that a successful teacher should boost test scores, or that responsible bill-payers are more likely to be responsible drivers.
2. Replacing what you really care about with what you can easily get your hands on can get you in trouble. In Amazon's recommendation model, we want to predict book sales, and we can use book sales as inputs; that's a good thing. But what if you can't directly measure what you're interested in? In the early 1980's, the magazine US News wanted to report on college quality. Unable to measure quality directly, the magazine built a model based on proxies, primarily outward markers of success, like selectivity and alumni giving. Predictably, college administrators, eager to boost their ratings, focused on these markers rather than on education quality itself. For example, to boost selectivity, they encouraged more students, even unqualified ones, to apply. This is an example of gaming the model.
3. Historical data is stuck in the past. Typically, predictive models use past history to predict future behavior. This can be problematic when part of the intention of the model is to break with the past. To take a very simple example, imagine that Cathy is about to publish a sequel to Weapons of Math Destruction. If Amazon uses only purchase data, the Customers Who Bought This Also Bought list would completely miss the connection between the original and the sequel. This means that if we don't want the future to look just like the past, our models need to use more than just history as inputs. A chapter about predictive models in hiring is largely devoted to this idea. A company may think that its past, subjective hiring system overlooks qualified candidates, but if it replaces the HR department with a model that sifts through resumes based only on the records of past hires, it may just be codifying (pun intended) past practice. A related idea is that, in this case, rather than adding objectivity, the model becomes a shield that hides discrimination. This takes us back to Models are more than just math and also leads to the next point:
4. Transparency matters! If a book you didn't expect shows up on The Customers Who Bought This Also Bought list, it's pretty easy for Amazon to check if it really belongs there. The model is pretty easy to understand and audit, which builds confidence and also decreases the likelihood that it gets used to obfuscate. An example of a very different story is the value added model for teachers, which evaluates teachers through their students' standardized test scores. Among its other drawbacks, this model is especially opaque in practice, both because of its complexity and because many implementations are built by outsiders. Models need to be openly assessed for effectiveness, and when teachers receive bad scores without knowing why, or when a single teacher's score fluctuates dramatically from year to year without explanation, it's hard to have any faith in the process.
5. Models don't just measure reality, but sometimes amplify it, or create their own. Put another way, models of human behavior create feedback loops, often becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. There are many examples of this in the book, especially focusing on how models can amplify economic inequality. To take one example, a company in the center of town might notice that workers with longer commutes tend to turn over more frequently, and adjust its hiring model to focus on job candidates who can afford to live in town. This makes it easier for wealthier candidates to find jobs than poorer ones, and perpetuates a cycle of inequality. There are many other examples: predictive policing, prison sentences based on recidivism, e-scores for credit. Cathy talks about a trade-off between efficiency and fairness, and, as you can again guess from the title, argues for fairness as an explicit value in modeling.
Weapons of Math Destruction is not a math book, and it is not investigative journalism. It is short -- you can read it in an afternoon -- and it doesn't have time or space for either detailed data analysis (there are no formulas or graphs) or complete histories of the models she considers. Instead, Cathy sketches out the models quickly, perhaps with an individual anecdote or two thrown in, so she can get to the main point -- getting people, especially non-technical people, used to questioning models. As more and more aspects of our lives fall under the purview of automated data analysis, that's a hugely important undertaking.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
This section is Amazon's way of using what it knows -- which book you're looking at, and sales data collected across all its customers -- to recommend other books that you might be interested in. It's a very simple, and successful, example of a predictive model: data goes in, some computation happens, a prediction comes out. What makes this a good model? Here are a few things:
1. It uses relevant input data.The goal is to get people to buy books, and the input to the model is what books people buy. You can't expect to get much more relevant than that.
2. It's transparent. You know exactly why the site is showing you these particular books, and if the system recommends a book you didn't expect, you have a pretty good idea why. That means you can make an informed decision about whether or not to trust the recommendation.
3. There's a clear measure of success and an embedded feedback mechanism. Amazon wants to sell books. The model succeeds if people click on the books they're shown, and, ultimately, if they buy more books, both of which are easy to measure. If clicks on or sales of related items go down, Amazon will know, and can investigate and adjust the model accordingly.
Weapons of Math Destruction reviews, in an accessible, non-technical way, what makes models effective -- or not. The emphasis, as you might guess from the title, is on models with problems. The book highlights many important ideas; here are just a few:
1. Models are more than just math. Take a look at Amazon's model above: while there are calculations (simple ones) embedded, it's people who decide what data to use, how to use it, and how to measure success. Math is not a final arbiter, but a tool to express, in a scalable (i.e., computable) way, the values that people explicitly decide to emphasize. Cathy says that "models are opinions expressed in mathematics" (or computer code). She highlights that when we evaluate teachers based on students' test scores, or assess someone's insurability as a driver based on their credit record, we are expressing opinions: that a successful teacher should boost test scores, or that responsible bill-payers are more likely to be responsible drivers.
2. Replacing what you really care about with what you can easily get your hands on can get you in trouble. In Amazon's recommendation model, we want to predict book sales, and we can use book sales as inputs; that's a good thing. But what if you can't directly measure what you're interested in? In the early 1980's, the magazine US News wanted to report on college quality. Unable to measure quality directly, the magazine built a model based on proxies, primarily outward markers of success, like selectivity and alumni giving. Predictably, college administrators, eager to boost their ratings, focused on these markers rather than on education quality itself. For example, to boost selectivity, they encouraged more students, even unqualified ones, to apply. This is an example of gaming the model.
3. Historical data is stuck in the past. Typically, predictive models use past history to predict future behavior. This can be problematic when part of the intention of the model is to break with the past. To take a very simple example, imagine that Cathy is about to publish a sequel to Weapons of Math Destruction. If Amazon uses only purchase data, the Customers Who Bought This Also Bought list would completely miss the connection between the original and the sequel. This means that if we don't want the future to look just like the past, our models need to use more than just history as inputs. A chapter about predictive models in hiring is largely devoted to this idea. A company may think that its past, subjective hiring system overlooks qualified candidates, but if it replaces the HR department with a model that sifts through resumes based only on the records of past hires, it may just be codifying (pun intended) past practice. A related idea is that, in this case, rather than adding objectivity, the model becomes a shield that hides discrimination. This takes us back to Models are more than just math and also leads to the next point:
4. Transparency matters! If a book you didn't expect shows up on The Customers Who Bought This Also Bought list, it's pretty easy for Amazon to check if it really belongs there. The model is pretty easy to understand and audit, which builds confidence and also decreases the likelihood that it gets used to obfuscate. An example of a very different story is the value added model for teachers, which evaluates teachers through their students' standardized test scores. Among its other drawbacks, this model is especially opaque in practice, both because of its complexity and because many implementations are built by outsiders. Models need to be openly assessed for effectiveness, and when teachers receive bad scores without knowing why, or when a single teacher's score fluctuates dramatically from year to year without explanation, it's hard to have any faith in the process.
5. Models don't just measure reality, but sometimes amplify it, or create their own. Put another way, models of human behavior create feedback loops, often becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. There are many examples of this in the book, especially focusing on how models can amplify economic inequality. To take one example, a company in the center of town might notice that workers with longer commutes tend to turn over more frequently, and adjust its hiring model to focus on job candidates who can afford to live in town. This makes it easier for wealthier candidates to find jobs than poorer ones, and perpetuates a cycle of inequality. There are many other examples: predictive policing, prison sentences based on recidivism, e-scores for credit. Cathy talks about a trade-off between efficiency and fairness, and, as you can again guess from the title, argues for fairness as an explicit value in modeling.
Weapons of Math Destruction is not a math book, and it is not investigative journalism. It is short -- you can read it in an afternoon -- and it doesn't have time or space for either detailed data analysis (there are no formulas or graphs) or complete histories of the models she considers. Instead, Cathy sketches out the models quickly, perhaps with an individual anecdote or two thrown in, so she can get to the main point -- getting people, especially non-technical people, used to questioning models. As more and more aspects of our lives fall under the purview of automated data analysis, that's a hugely important undertaking.
512 people found this helpful
Report abuse
Top reviews from other countries
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20210609014924/https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
PhilipM
3.0 out of 5 stars
American - not for Europeans
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 5, 2017Verified Purchase
Interesting but very American based and many examples were meaningless to me in Britain.
40 people found this helpful
Report abuse
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20210609014924/https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
Richard2047
3.0 out of 5 stars
Rather superficial view of how algorithms affect us
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 12, 2021Verified Purchase
A pop science book about algorithms. US bias in the language distracts from the message - apart from 'math' instead of 'maths' for 'mathematics', words like 'maven', 'honor roll' and 'Super PACS' (which should be 'PACs') have little relevance outside the US. Some basic errors in research, too, such as reference to "a quality computer, like the IBM Selectric" (page 115) and the reference to "the British city of Kent" (page 89) suggest a lack of deep knowledge of the subject, and the description of machine learning (pages 75-77) is superficial, failing to explain the distinction between data mining, machine learning and artifical intelligence in general. Plenty of anecdotes but not much science, some of it wrong. I was surprised to read "BMI is a person's weight in kilograms divided by their height in centimetres" (page 176). By that measure, a 6'6" man (200 cm) could weight 5 tons (5000 kg) and be 'normal' with a BMI of 25. No wonder so many people are overweight if that's the American way. Of course, BMI is actually weight (in kg) divided by the square of height (in metres). Curiously, until the NIH redefined U.S. BMI cut-offs in 1998, LeBron James (I had to look him up) with a BMI of 26.6 would be 'normal'. Errors like that cast doubt on the rest of the book, and I wonder what else I missed.
6 people found this helpful
Report abuse
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20210609014924/https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
n1msr
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting message - the future is here
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 30, 2019Verified Purchase
WMD is a well-known book by now, and I have been meanin to read it for some time. It is short and easy to read. Plenty of examples from different industries, starting with finance. Cathy's experience in this and other Big Data and Data Scientist roles helps to give her message credance. She explains the examples well.
If you are looking for a really in depth text, this is not it. This is meant for everyone and in that respect it is a good book. When I started reading it I thought perhaps it could do with the Michael Lewis touch (Flashboys, Moneyball etc) but when I finished I thought not. It looks like this is the way the future looks, and it is not pretty the way it is right now. Let's hope that the technology and scale leads to greater beneifts to all, and not mass categorisation with a dumb central machine.
If you are looking for a really in depth text, this is not it. This is meant for everyone and in that respect it is a good book. When I started reading it I thought perhaps it could do with the Michael Lewis touch (Flashboys, Moneyball etc) but when I finished I thought not. It looks like this is the way the future looks, and it is not pretty the way it is right now. Let's hope that the technology and scale leads to greater beneifts to all, and not mass categorisation with a dumb central machine.
4 people found this helpful
Report abuse
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20210609014924/https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/7fe9ffad-8a18-420e-87f1-fc3d78934828._CR0,0,416,416_SX48_.jpg)
Ace
4.0 out of 5 stars
A important warning on the dark side of data. Join the data movement and use it as a force for good
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 7, 2018Verified Purchase
This is an easy to read book with a raft of real world examples across a range of industries from education, finance to ecommerse on where data has been mis-used and negatively impacted customers and employees. It’s an important perspective on how data can be misused and offers ideas on how we need to adapt our control & culture in an increasing data driven world.
The author passion for the subject can be felt through the book and although enjoyed it did leave me feeling a little saddened to see so many examples of poorly implemented analytics.
The book would have benefitted from a broader perspective and also included success stories to show how data can also be a force for good to simplify and improve our lives. At the end of the day these are tools and it’s how people use them that can produce these WMD’s.
Also reminds us of the need to educate the wider community on how data is used and that data asset needs to benefit everyone.
The author passion for the subject can be felt through the book and although enjoyed it did leave me feeling a little saddened to see so many examples of poorly implemented analytics.
The book would have benefitted from a broader perspective and also included success stories to show how data can also be a force for good to simplify and improve our lives. At the end of the day these are tools and it’s how people use them that can produce these WMD’s.
Also reminds us of the need to educate the wider community on how data is used and that data asset needs to benefit everyone.
10 people found this helpful
Report abuse
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20210609014924/https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
DanBy
3.0 out of 5 stars
It reads somewhat like an extended NYT think piece
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2017Verified Purchase
This books makes an important argument about the lack of regulatory oversight as ever more sections of our lives come to be analysed and decided via computational means. Certainly this is an area of public policy that needs marked urgent attention. While I somewhat agree with O'Neil's point of view the level detail and the depth to which her arguments are developed seemed somewhat cursory. We're often left having to rely on the author's say-so as the evidence for the conclusions is seldom fully developed. It reads somewhat like an extended NYT think piece, which is a fine style for a Sunday newspaper article but I expected quite a bit more detail in a long form work.
14 people found this helpful
Report abuse
Pages with related products.
See and discover other items: facebook 2017, economic policy books, applied mathematics books, mathematical statistics books, Explore create engines for cars