This Mathematician Says Big Data Is Causing a ‘Silent Financial Crisis’

[marle35]

A Harvard trained mathematician, O’Neil spent the last several years teaching at Barnard, working for DE Shaw, one of the world’s leading hedge funds, and launching a technology start up designed to deliver targeted advertising. Her key takeaway from the last two experiences—that Big Data is increasing inequality and threatening democracy—is the subject of her important new book, Weapons of Math Destruction, out on September 6.

... data driven algorithms are all around us. Already, many of our bosses use them to grade our performance. Our children’s teachers are hired and fired by them. They decide who gets access to credit and who pays higher insurance premiums, as well as who will receive online advertising for luxury handbags versus who’ll be targeted by predatory ads for for-profit universities

...

Indeed, O’Neil writes that WMDs punish the poor especially, since “they are engineered to evaluate large numbers of people. They specialize in bulk. They are cheap. That’s part of their appeal.” Whereas the poor engage more with faceless educators and employers, “the wealthy, by contrast, often benefit from personal input. A white-shoe law firm or an exclusive prep school will lean far more on recommendations and face-to-face interviews than a fast-food chain or a cash-strapped urban school district. The privileged… are processed more by people, the masses by machines.”

More:
http://time.com/4471451/cathy-oneil-math-destruction

[MattP]

1. Trumps biggest donor is a analytics Billionaire

[LWolf]

2. Amen.

As a teacher, I can vouch for that. And I can add that, as a person who makes an effort not to allow hate to enter her life, I have come to HATE the very word "data."

[mike_c]

3. the buzz words of academic accreditation and performance review are awful....

If I never hear the words "evidence based" or "outcomes assessment" again I will be perfectly happy. Education is a seed that bears fruit over the long term, measured in lifetimes. "Outcomes assessment" looks for that fruit before the seed has even properly germinated.

[LWolf]

4. YES. nt

[MowCowWhoHow III]

6. As long as a domain can be meaningfully quantified I approve of data driven methods

Of course, some things aren't easy to measure...

[hunter]

7. "meaningfully quantified" is usually what's missing.

The people who think they can make any bullshit sloshing around in their heads "meaningful" with a Powerpoint presentation or an Excel spreadsheet need to have their computers taken away and smashed.

There are many "data-driven" realities that have little relationship to actual reality. Models that are the equivalent of three day weather forecasts are used, uselessly, to "predict" weather months in advance.

[Xolodno]

8. Interesting.

Attended a few "Big Data" conferences and can see where people have higher purchasing power are competed over more fiercely for their expenditures. A customer with higher purchasing power is more likely to walk out of a store with more than one item, thus giving an immediate coupon to their smart phone incentivizes to do that. Customers with less purchasing power and even with a digital coupon, won't buy.

Likewise online, purchasing more items hits a threshold for free shipping. Someone with less purchasing power, won't be able to hit that threshold.

And of course, one has to be careful about correlation, as the old joke goes....there is a direct correlation of more fire fighters around large fires. Therefore to reduce the size of fires, we should reduce the number of fire fighters....