Latest Cathy O'Neil Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• We can't just throw something out there and assume it works just because it has math in it.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Math, Assuming

  Source: www.salon.com

• You'll never be able to really measure anything, right? Including teachers.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Teacher, Able, Including

  Source: www.salon.com

• I think there's inherently an issue that models will literally never be able to handle, which is that when somebody comes along with a new way of doing something that's really excellent, the models will not recognize it. They only know how to recognize excellence when they can measure it somehow.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Thinking, Issues, Excellence

  Source: www.salon.com

• Google is so big you have no idea what a given person does.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Ideas, Google, Doe

  Source: www.salon.com

• I think big data companies only like good news. So I think they're just hoping that they don't get sued, essentially.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Thinking, Data, News

  Source: www.salon.com

• Micro-targeting is the ability for a campaign to profile you, to know much more about you than you know about it, and then to choose exactly what to show you.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Campaigns, Profile, Ability

  Source: www.salon.com

• My fantasy is that there is a new regulatory body that is in charge of algorithmic auditing.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Body, Fantasy

  Source: www.salon.com

• The Facebook algorithm designers chose to let us see what our friends are talking about. They chose to show us, in some sense, more of the same. And that is the design decision that they could have decided differently. They could have said, "We're going to show you stuff that you've probably never seen before." I think they probably optimized their algorithm to make the most amount of money, and that probably meant showing people stuff that they already sort of agreed with, or were more likely to agree with.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Thinking, Talking, People

  Source: www.salon.com

• I set up a company, an algorithmic auditing company myself. I have no clients.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Clients, Company

  Source: www.salon.com

• We don't let a car company just throw out a car and start driving it around without checking that the wheels are fastened on. We know that would result in death; but for some reason we have no hesitation at throwing out some algorithms untested and unmonitored even when they're making very important life-and-death decisions.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Car, Life And Death, Decision

  Source: www.salon.com

• With recidivism algorithms, for example, I worry about racist outcomes. With personality tests [for hiring], I worry about filtering out people with mental health problems from jobs. And with a teacher value-added model algorithm [used in New York City to score teachers], I worry literally that it's not meaningful. That it's almost a random number generator.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Meaningful, Teacher, New York

  Source: www.salon.com

• There are lots of different ways that algorithms can go wrong, and what we have now is a system in which we assume because it's shiny new technology with a mathematical aura that it's perfect and it doesn't require further vetting. Of course, we never have that assumption with other kinds of technology.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Technology, Perfect, Auras

  Source: www.salon.com

• Obviously the more transparency we have as auditors, the more we can get, but the main goal is to understand important characteristics about a black box algorithm without necessarily having to understand every single granular detail of the algorithm.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Goal, Black, Important

  Source: www.salon.com

• The national conversation around white entitlement, around institutionalized racism, the Black Lives Matter movement, I think, came about in large part because of the widening and broadening of our understanding of inequality. That conversation was begun by Occupy.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Thinking, White, Racism

  Source: www.salon.com

• Because of my experience in Occupy, instead of asking the question, "Who will benefit from this system I'm implementing with the data?" I started to ask the question, "What will happen to the most vulnerable?" Or "Who is going to lose under this system? How will this affect the worst-off person?" Which is a very different question from "How does this improve certain people's lives?"

  Cathy O'Neil

  Data, People, Doe

  Source: www.salon.com

• Occupy provided me a lens through which to see systemic discrimination.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Lenses, Discrimination

  Source: www.salon.com

• Evidence of harm is hard to come by.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Harm, Evidence, Hard

  Source: www.salon.com

• I don't think anybody's ever notified that they were sentenced to an extra two years because their recidivism score had been high, or notified that this beat cop happened to be in their neighborhood checking people's pockets for pot because of a predictive policing algorithm. That's just not how it works.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Thinking, Years, Two

  Source: www.salon.com

• When people are not given an option by some secret scoring system, it's very hard to complain, so they often don't even know that they've been victimized.

  Cathy O'Neil

  People, Secret, Complaining

  Source: www.salon.com

• By construction, the world of big data is siloed and segmented and segregated so that successful people, like myself - technologists, well-educated white people, for the most part - benefit from big data, and it's the people on the other side of the economic spectrum, especially people of color, who suffer from it. They suffer from it individually, at different times, at different moments. They never get a clear explanation of what actually happened to them because all these scores are secret and sometimes they don't even know they're being scored.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Successful, Data, White

  Source: www.salon.com

• We've learned our lesson with finance because they made a huge goddamn explosion that almost shut down the world. But the thing I realized is that there might never be an explosion on the scale of the financial crisis happening with big data.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Data, Might, World

  Source: www.salon.com

• There might never be that moment when everyone says, "Oh my God, big data is awful."

  Cathy O'Neil

  Data, Might, Awful

  Source: www.salon.com

• The public trusts big data way too much.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Data, Too Much, Way

  Source: www.salon.com

• People felt like they were friends with Google, and they believed in the "Do No Evil" thing that Google said. They trusted Google more than they trusted the government, and I never understood that.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Government, People, Evil

  Source: www.salon.com

• The NSA buys data from private companies, so the private companies are the source of all this stuff.

  Cathy O'Neil

  Nsa, Data, Stuff

  Source: www.salon.com