Weapons of Math Destruction

Clopening is the red-eye shift in a 24-hour business that bridges the traditional closing time with opening time. O’Neil examines how these shifts are detrimental to a worker’s well-being and keep them in cycles of poverty.

A hedge fund is a complex investment firm that juggles many assets and risks to make profit. O’Neil once worked for a hedge fund and found that the company was using Big Data to profit while millions of Americans were struggling in an economic downturn.

A model is a mathematically based equation that makes calculations based on a series of variables. The models in WMDs are themselves not problematic, but the resultant figures from these models are often correlative rather than causative and can cause destructive outcomes.

This term originates from baseball’s use of statistics for game strategizing. O’Neil calls this an ideal model because it’s transparent, meaning everyone has access to the data. It is also flexible and takes changes and variabilities into consideration.

A proxy is a factor, item, or metric that stands in for the actual information. It is not exact but rather an approximate. For example, a proxy for determining responsible drivers would be their credit scores. It’s not an exact measure of how responsible a driver is, but it can show responsibility in other domains, like finances. Proxies, because of their inexactitude and lack of nuance, are sometimes necessary due to a lack of exact correlating information but are an area O’Neil criticizes throughout the book.

Scale demonstrates how many people or what sized population is impacted by a particular force. In the case of this book, O’Neil discusses scale in terms of WMDs’ impact on consumers.