Cathy O'Neil Quotes

#1. Some two thousand stone-throwing protesters gathered in the street outside the school. They chanted, "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you don't let us cheat." It sounds like a joke, but they were absolutely serious.

Cathy O'Neil

#2. I was forced to confront the ugly truth: people had deliberately wielded formulas to impress rather than clarify.

Cathy O'Neil

#3. My love for math eventually became a passion. I 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

Cathy O'Neil

#4. In WMDs, many poisonous assumptions are camouflaged by math and go largely untested and unquestioned.

Cathy O'Neil

#5. The human victims of WMDs, we'll see time and again, are held to a far higher standard of evidence than the algorithms themselves.

Cathy O'Neil

#6. However, when you create a model from proxies, it is far simpler for people to game it. This is because proxies are easier to manipulate than the complicated reality they represent.

Cathy O'Neil

#7. The result is that we criminalize poverty, believing all the while that our tools are not only scientific but fair.

Cathy O'Neil

#8. The privileged, we'll see time and again, are processed more by people, the masses by machines.

Cathy O'Neil

#9. Someone who takes the trouble to see her file at one of the many brokerages, for example, might see the home mortgage, a Verizon bill, and a $ 459 repair on the garage door. But she won't see that she's in a bucket of people designated as "Rural and Barely Making It,"or perhaps "Retiring on Empty.

Cathy O'Neil

#10. The trouble is that profits end up serving as a stand-in, or proxy, for truth.

Cathy O'Neil

#11. In a system in which cheating is the norm, following the rules amounts to a handicap.

Cathy O'Neil

#12. Simpson's Paradox: when a whole body of data displays one trend, yet when broken into subgroups, the opposite trend comes into view for each of those subgroups.

Cathy O'Neil