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

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

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.

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

It's a standard thing you hear from startup people - that their product is somehow improving the world. And if you follow the reasoning, you will get somewhere, and I'll tell you where you get: You'll get to the description of what happens to the winners under the system that they're building.

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.

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