A review by laraph
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil

5.0

Excellent coverage of a selection of algorithms that codify racism and discrimination against the poor and mentally ill, obscure accountability, and endanger democracy. She insists on an ethical exclusion of all proxies for race, poverty, health etc in model building and training. I'd push further for mandatory testing of all results for correlations with discriminatory markers and, should they exist, models would have to retrain while enforcing that such correlations _vanish_. Yes, this reduces "accuracy" but if we are to dismantle our reality of discrimination, we must lose that bit of "accuracy" that encodes all too real discrimination.

Only complaint: the book was too short!