PERILOUS EQUATIONS

1 5 1 R P E R I L O U S E Q U A T I O N S E D I S O N M I Y A W A K I What is the mightiest of the sciences? If judged by the power of its weaponry, math vies for preeminence. Enter Cathy O’Neil, who is a Ph.D. mathematician, once a Barnard academic with a concentration in number theory (the ‘‘queen of mathematics,’’ as the field has been called); then she turned ‘‘quant’’ for a company nicknamed the Harvard of hedge funds; then she left all that in 2009. She has a website called mathbabe.org, where, somewhat at random, I found this rant from 2013: ‘‘It seems pretty clear we can chuck trigonometry out the window, and focus on getting the average high school student up to the point of scientific literacy that she can read a paper in a medical journal and understand what the experiment was and what the results mean. Or at the very least be able to read media reports of the studies and have some sense of statistical significance. That’d be a pretty cool goal, to get people to be able to read the newspaper.’’ Skipping over her employment at start-up internet companies before she returned to W e a p o n s o f M a t h D e s t r u c t i o n : H o w B i g D a t a I n c r e a s e s I n e q u a l i t y a n d T h r e a t e n s D e m o c r a c y , by Cathy O’Neil (Crown, 259 pp., $26) 1 5 2 M I Y A W A K I Y New York’s Morningside Heights and Columbia University, we arrive at the present: her new book, Weapons of Math Destruction, has no equations in it, yet her subject is scientific. To paraphrase from 2013, she teaches us that we can’t yet read the newspaper in our lives – and, be forewarned and forearmed, there’s danger in the news. O’Neil doesn’t think that math itself is a device of some horrific sort – and for the record, she has nothing against trigonometry in particular, although she’s angry when it’s taught poorly in high school. Math isn’t the problem, but O’Neil sees in the news and in light of her private-sector experience that math can be coopted and abused – therein lies one nontrivial danger. But there’s a far bigger threat. A non-quant (meaning: most of us) hears that a quant (also known as a ‘‘data scientist,’’ as O’Neil calls herself these days) has determined that something is true, proven, or compelling . We agree with the scientist, but in the assent we metaphorically explode ourselves to smithereens. Reviews of O’Neil’s crisply written book have not articulated a surprise in it, so let me try. She discusses math as an analytical weapon, but who would anticipate that we turn it upon ourselves? Is it false comfort to argue, as O’Neil does, that there are outside enemies when, in fact, the danger is our own proclivity to analyze? She alleges that ‘‘bigdata ’’ widens the gap between haves and have-nots and even threatens democracy. Big-data is an Orwellian personification, a controlling, nefarious force perhaps. But data – big, small, or indi√erent – are just data; a datum is a datum, nothing more or less. The moment we use data, however, there are consequences of the analysis – sometimes good, very often bad. Maybe we’d prefer to ignore data altogether, but it’s fascinating to consider that we can’t help ourselves. We steal any peek at analysis in the same way that we can’t avoid looking at ourselves in a mirror. In one of her more wilting critiques, a chapter called ‘‘Arms Race: Going to College,’’ O’Neil examines U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of eighteen hundred American colleges...