The most important goal I had in mind was to convince people to stop blindly trusting algorithms and assuming that they are inherently fair and objective.
Cathy O'NeilThe disconnect I was experiencing was that people hated Wall Street, but they loved tech.
Cathy O'NeilThe NSA buys data from private companies, so the private companies are the source of all this stuff.
Cathy O'NeilBy 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'NeilI think big data companies only like good news. So I think they're just hoping that they don't get sued, essentially.
Cathy O'NeilI 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