Weapons of Math Destruction – Book Club Seminar
Begin reading Weapons of Math Destruction (O’Neil, 2016) and prepare for our book club next week, pondering these questions. (These questions are guides for in-depth thinking.)
1.) How are models used in business and what statistics are used as a model?
2.)Think about college rankings and getting credit: what factors would you include in an algorithm to avoid it being a WMD?
3.) Why does the author state that more data is not always better data or that it does not make the algorithm better?
4.) Chapter 6 introduces the idea of using WMD for good instead of being them to discriminate against certain populations by using them to identify areas of need and offer help to those populations. Think about the various WMDs discussed in the book so far. How would you transform them into an effort for good?
5.) What is Simpson’s Paradox? In what other areas of life might we see Simpson’s Paradox? (Hint: p. 136)
6.) Can mathematical models be objective? How would we know?
