SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard about a story that appeared on CNN on September 9, 2016.
From targeted advertising and insurance to education and policing, Cathy O'Neil's new book 'Weapons of Math Destruction' [WMD] looks at how algorithms and big data are targeting the poor, reinforcing racism and amplifying inequality.
[...] In a vacuum, these models are bad enough, but O'Neil emphasizes, "they're feeding on each other." Education, job prospects, debt and incarceration are all connected, and the way big data is used makes them more inclined to stay that way.
"Poor people are more likely to have bad credit and live in high-crime neighborhoods, surrounded by other poor people," she writes. "Once ... WMDs digest that data, it showers them with subprime loans or for-profit schools. It sends more police to arrest them and when they're convicted it sentences them to longer terms."
In turn, a new set of WMDs uses this data to charge higher rates for mortgages, loans and insurance.
[...] "Big Data processes codify the past," O'Neil writes. "They do not invent the future. Doing that requires moral imagination, and that's something only humans can provide."
I'm not interested in the story. I'm interested in what it says about once proud CNN's current quality of journalism. Fox News: Left Division?
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-destruction/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Monday October 03 2016, @08:53AM
Nice idea. Too bad it is illegal. Ever heard of "Disparate Impact" as a legal concept? It says that if you are handing out licenses to practice medicine and your process doesn't have the same percentage of any 'Protected Minority" (and the list grows, MENA in currently being split from White for the next Census and will certainly get included in all of the quotas) on the output (licenses) as input (applications) that any judge or Diversity Czar at the DOJ, EEOC, HHS, etc., can declare "Disparate Impact" and order you to change your discriminatory process. Knowing this, you ensure you award licenses in carefully measured and documented quotas.
[lots more blathering deleted]
Two questions for you, jmorris:
1. Have you ever heard of Medical Board Exams [wikipedia.org]?
2. Where did you get your law degree?
I'll have to make sure never to employ an attorney who attended that school. What's that? No law degree? No wonder it smells so bad here -- because you're talking out of your ass, as usual.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr