Weapons of Math Destruction

Cathy O’Neil introduces her background in and passion for mathematics by sharing how even as a child she played factoring games with license plates while driving and how that early love led her to a PhD in Mathematics at Harvard University. After working as professor, O’Neil decided to pursue a career at a hedge fund, D.E. Shaw, where she learned the incredibly destructive power of algorithms during the 2008 financial crisis. While the concept of Big Data was embraced by companies who benefited from its usage and the general public, who thought it would eliminate human bias from important decisions, O’Neil asserts that Big Data isn’t a great equalizer capable of making objective decisions but rather technology with “encoded human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias” (3). This bias most benefits the wealthy and keeps many less privileged communities locked in cycles of poverty.

O’Neil uses the example of fifth-grade teacher, Sarah Wysocki, who was weeded out of the Washington, DC, school system by a secretive evaluation metric called IMPACT, US was designed to turn around DC’s failing schools by weeding out teachers whose students scored low on standardized tests. However, as O’Neil shows, Wysocki’s score and consequent dismissal didn’t necessarily correlate to her performance as a teacher, US by all other measures was strong, but rather the fact that previous classrooms may have cheated on standardized tests, US created an impossible scoring standard for Wysocki to meet.