Beschrijving
Titel: Weapons of Math Destruction Auteur: Cathy O'Neil ISBN: 9780451497338 Conditie: AsNew A FORMER WALL STREET OUANT SOUNDS AN ALARM ON THE MATHEMATICAL MODELS THAT PERVADE MODERN LIFE AND THREATEN TO RIP APART OUR SOCIAL FABRIC We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, 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. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated. But as Cathy O’Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opagque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they're wrong. 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. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.” Welcome to the dark side of Big Data. Tracing the arc of a person’s life, O’ Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. These “weapons of math destruction” score teachers and students, sort résumés, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health. O’Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it's up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change. When [ was a little girl, Ì used to gaze at the traffic out the car window and study the numbers on license plates. [ would reduce each one to its basic elements—the prime numbers that made it up. 45 = 3 X 3 Xx 5. That's called factoring, and it was my favorite investigative pastime. As a budding math nerd, [ was especially intrigued by the primes. My love for math eventually became a passion. [ went to math camp when I was fourteen and came home clutching a Rubik's Cube to my chest. Math provided a neat refuge from the messiness of the real world. It marched forward, its field of knowledge expanding relentlessly, proof by proof. And Í could add to it, Ì majored in math in college and went on to get my PhD. My the sis was on algebraic number theory, a field with roots in all that factoring I did as a child. Eventually, 1 becarne a tenure-track pro. fessor at Barnard, which had a combined math department with Columbia University. And then I made a big change. I quit my job and went to work as a quant for D. E. Shaw, a leading hedge fund. In leaving academia for finance, I carried mathematics from abstract theory into practice. ‘The operations we performed on numbers translated into trillions of dollars sloshing from one account to another. At first I was excited and amazed by working in this new laboratory, the global econorny. But in the autumn of 2008, after I' d been there for a bit more than a year, it came crashing down. The crash made it all too clear that mathematics, once my refuge, was not only deeply entangled in the world's problems but also fueling many of them. ‘The housing crisis, the collapse of major financial institutions, the rise of unemployment—all had been aided and abetted by mathematicians wielding magic formulas. What’s more,
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