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A former Wall Street data scientist sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life - and threaten to rip apart our social fabric.
Cathy O'Neil is the author of the bestselling Weapons of Math Destruction, which won the Euler Book Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She received her PhD in mathematics from Harvard and has worked in finance, tech, and academia. She launched the Lede Program for data journalism at Columbia University and recently founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company. O'Neil is a regular contributor to Bloomberg View.
Fascinating and deeply disturbing
*Guardian Books of the Year*
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
*Financial Times*
Well-written, entertaining and very valuable
*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*
Often we don't even know where to look for those important
algorithms, because by definition the most dangerous ones are also
the most secretive. That's why the catalogue of case studies in
O'Neil's book are so important; she's telling us where to look
*Guardian*
In today's world, if you want to change your fate you've got to
pray at the altar of the algorithm... As math guru Cathy O'Neil
argues in her newest book, these models are just the latest way
America's institutions perpetuate bias and prejudice to reward the
rich and keep the poor, well, poor. It's a nuanced reminder that
big data is only as good as the people wielding it
*Wired*
Not math heavy, but written in an exceedingly accessible, almost
literary style; her fascinating case studies of WMDs fit neatly
into the genre of dystopian literature. There's a little Philip K.
Dick, a little Orwell, a little Kafka in her portrait of powerful
bureaucracies ceding control of the most intimate decisions of our
lives to hyper-empowered computer models riddled with all of our
unresolved, atavistic human biases
*Paris Review*
O'Neil is an ideal person to write this book... She is one of the
strongest voices speaking out for limiting the ways we allow
algorithms to influence our lives and against the notion that an
algorithm, because it is implemented by an unemotional machine,
cannot perpetrate bias or injustice... 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*
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