Weapons of Math Destruction

“Like gods, these mathematical models were opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, were beyond dispute or appeal. And they tended to punish the poor and the oppressed in our society, while making the rich richer.”

Weapons of Math Destruction perpetuate inequities by exploiting math under the guise of fairness. They are beyond question because math is considered fact, and their inner logic (or lack thereof) often isn’t accessible to the masses. This is the thinking that O’Neil intends to dismantle.

“[R]acism 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.”

The racial implications of WMDs echo throughout the book and dramatically alter society so that it is skewed in favor of the privileged. While many of these WMDs seem complex in that they are hidden from public view and nefarious, they are quite simple in that they are human stereotyping in machine form.

“It wasn’t found money, like nuggets from a mine or coins from a sunken Spanish galleon. This wealth was coming out of people’s pockets. For hedge funds, the smuggest of the players on Wall Street, this was ‘dumb money.’”

The extreme wealth afforded to the elite few isn’t harmless profit. It is money skimmed from those who need it the most, and the elite maintain their positions by finding ways to further exploit the populations who keep them wealthy.