Review: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

We've all seen the Big Data books: the future is now! A/B testing forever! AlphaGo crushed it! OkCupid says you shouldn't have a shirtless fish pic, you adorably dull redneck!

But Big Data has a darkside, and O'Neil goes through each segment of our life to show how these "models" can be used against us, to extract goods from us, and to keep us poor. Unfortunately, she also loses her argumentative power that could come with nuance, and she has to disregard nuance in order to make it understandable to the layperson (in other words, I don't think she's very charitable to the layperson).

The first big issue she brings up and has lots of evidence for is: Transparency. Lots of Big Data models that we use (and are fed into) on a daily basis, are not transparent. They're opaque equations sitting on a server farm. A teacher being graded on a value added model doesn't know where their score is coming from. A potential hire doesn't know why he failed his psyche evaluation. A criminal standing before judge doesn't know why the score said he'd be more like to return to jail.

This is honestly one of my biggest takeaways, and it hits close to home. When you apply for a credit card, they tell you why you failed to get one. You can access your "data point" and know why you have the FICO score you do. Google and Facebook tell you the metrics they use to serve you ads in their settings. I know that Amazon is trying to get me to buy another wallet even though I just bought a wallet because they showed me five hundred ads for another wallet. But what about those ads that Forbes tries to serve me? The cookies sitting on my computer watching me? I have no ideas what they're doing and not readily known way to find out. What about non-regulated credit systems that exist out there in Web 2.0 land? Bank of America controls for race and tries to stop redlining when they make a new policy, but will Peter Thiel try to do that when he invests in E-Corp? Probably not.

The second big problem with some Big Data systems is that they create feedback loops that increase inequality. Here, O'Neil is super weak except when she brings up the criminal justice example- we could be using big data to help keep people out of prison and make programs that lower recidivism, but instead we're using it as a way to keep white people out of prison.... but am I really supposed to believe that ads help make poor people poorer? She brings up for-profit schools using targeted ads to lure immigrants and poor people into massive student debt to make a profit, and, while I admit that's super shady, it's not the targeted ads' fault, is it?

The third problem with these "Weapons of Math destruction" is that they often have skewed data. This is the old line "garbage in, garbage out" except now it's "racist/sexist garbage in, racist/sexist garbage out." For example, if you make a employment system that filters out resumes, than teach it on a bunch of older resumes, you're inputting the bias of those older resumes. So if the guy that was reading those resumes was racist, you might be teaching a racist model.

Technically O'Neil has two other "bad points" about "WMDs" but they're just about scale.

Now, there are a lot of problems in this book and O'Neil kind of goes on tangents. For one thing, the WMDs she brings up are less "weapons" than they are symptoms of a bigger societal problem. Take "democracy": our current political system allows a few people- those that live in Orlando, Florida and Pennsylvania, basically- to chose who will be the President. This is messed up, but it means that the Democratic Party could build a powerful machine learning system that most efficiently spent money in locations to help change hearts and minds and win. She really dislikes this Big Data system, and says it's a threat to democracy...

... but the electoral system itself is giant problem and threat to democracy (see: election of 2000)! Big Data has nothing to do with it!

The book ought to have been longer, and it ought to have included more counterexamples of positive data models (I can recall only two, FICO and some housing model). I think that she should've, if not had hand written equations or step-by-step instructions, at least given some background on actual data science. The way it is written makes it seem like she's a magician-mathematician that wandered down from the Ivory tower and realized that bankers were using magic for evil and now she wants to raise hell.

But I guess if I wanted authors to stop writing popular non-fiction books that they A/B tested on their blogs and turned into TED talks, I should stop reading popular non-fiction.

Review: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

Estimates of the number of tons of carbon that we can safely burn before we have to stop range from 250 gigtons of Carbon to 500 gigatons of carbon (the conservative answer that Klein quotes). The number of gigatons that we know about. The number of gigatons that we as a civilization have the power to burn in our lifetime? 2,000 gigatons.

Those are the kind of numbers that Klein brings up in the first half of This Changes Everything. These are terrifying numbers. They are inexorable numbers. We all know that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth many times over... but we don't use nukes. We have enough carbon to destroy a hundred thousand ecosystems many (4-8) times overs.... and we're using them. We're increasing our use of them.

Klein points out that there is a time window- approximately ten years from 2017- that we have to dramatically curb our carbon pollution. To do this would require putting wind and solar up en masse and shutting down fossil fuel systems at the same time. She rightly points out that there is no "magic" technology. The nuclear systems that I love as much as the next engineer, simply can't be made as quickly and safely as we'll need them. She estimates that in the West we'd have to cut back our "consumption" to the same levels as in the 70s.

lol.

Another big takeaway: our carbon footprint in America and Europe cannot be counted by looking at just the carbon spewed out to power our air conditioners or released from our cars. It includes the Chinese soot that is used to make our goods, but ends up killing the elderly or young. That carbon energy is ultimately used to make Walmart competitive.

How are we to face this tidal wave of carbon and heat? Not geoengineering. If we realize too late that the islands are sinking and that the crops are on fire and the poor are dying of thirst, then we can't "geoengineer" because the results of that will be people dying of hunger! Not cap and trade or market systems- the European system doesn't work! Not carbon sequestration- it's literally impossible and anybody that thinks it would scale is an idiot.

No. How are we to face this tidal wave of carbon and heat? Cowboys and Indians... oh, and Hippies. That's Klein's answer to the climate crisis. The cowboys and Indians will unite the rural lands where pipes carry poison and the ground is broken, and they'll repel the capitalist scum while city-hippies will make urban-farms and begin shopping local. Oh, and divestment caused the gas bust.

If I sound a little irreverent it is because it is patently absurd. She herself has given us the task: reduce potential missions by 400%. If you think that bottom-up populism is going do that... well, maybe you've been hanging around too many tar sands. You need massive carbon taxes, massive subsidizes for fuels. You need the kind of direction and purpose that historically only a Democratic President and Congress have ever delivered for the American people.

And that's not happening. That's really the kicker. Klein, being Canadian (and worst, a Western Canadian) couldn't have predicted the rise of populist racism in the United States and Europe. She's too far removed from it. But here we are, on the edge of 2017, when "the Energy Agency (IEA) warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy will “lock-in” extremely dangerous warming" and the primary issue of the day is the fact that America is split between the racists and the not-racists. Oh, and "the youth aren't excited" about the not-racist candidate.

Despite what the reviews in the New York Times will tell you, this is not an optimistic book, and you shouldn't be optimistic.