Weapons of Math Destruction Study Guide

Cathy O’Neil was interested in math from a young age. After attending UC Berkley as an undergraduate and earning a PhD in mathematics (with a focus on algebraic number theory) from Harvard University in 1999, she held a postdoc appointment at the MIT math department and a professorship at Barnard College. After leaving Barnard to work as a quant (or quantitative analyst) at D.E. Shaw, a major hedge fund, O’Neil found herself at the center of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. In 2011, O’Neil left Shaw to work as a data scientist at an e-commerce startup, but she found herself increasingly disillusioned by how faulty and dangerous algorithms had become central to almost every sector of the economy. O’Neil joined the Occupy Wall Street movement and started a blog, mathbabe, where she focused on “exploring and venting about quantitative issues.” O’Neil is the author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy and the founder of ORCAA (O’Neil Risk Consulting & Algorithmic Auditing), a consultancy focused on helping companies and organizations responsibly manage and audit algorithms.

Throughout Weapons of Math Destruction, author Cathy O’Neil traces the roots of the modern-day data economy. She describes the beginnings of the insurance industry in the 1600s and the early days of data’s role in the American justice system in the mid-20th century. She even delves into the obscure but meaningful connection between Big Data and the racist and long-debunked study of phrenology (how bumps and ridges on the human skull were believed to dictate certain traits and characteristics) in the 18th-20th centuries. O’Neil also discusses more modern-day socioeconomic and political happenings, such as the 2007-2008 financial crisis which began on Wall Street but had ripple effects throughout the global economy. Even more recently, she examines the 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which bad polling data played a critical role.

Weapons of Math Destruction is one of many books that explore how data and algorithms are increasingly influential in almost every aspect of contemporary life. Michael P. Lynch’s The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data explores how internet algorithms have helped—and hindered—the human learning process. Weapons of Math Destruction also touches on some major social and political milestones of the early 21st century, including the 2007 Wall Street crash and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin examines the financial crash from the inside out, while Hillary Clinton’s What Happened examines how polling data and resulting campaign strategy gaffes derailed her run for the presidency. Weapons of Math Destruction also examines social media platforms’ role in entrenching data and algorithms in every aspect of life. In a similar vein, The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich explores the founding of Facebook, exploring how the company’s roots have shaped its current power in the tech world.