Cathy O'Neil
Mathematician; author of Weapons of Math Destruction; founder of ORCAA
Cathy O'Neil left finance to write about how opaque scoring models — in hiring, lending, policing and school ratings — scale harm while escaping scrutiny. Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) was a National Book Award longlist title. She now runs ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing firm.
Read them in their own words
Published elsewhere, not by me — so you get real context beyond the name and the title.
Cathy O'Neil on Weapons of Math Destruction
Older, and still the clearest explanation of how hiring and sentencing scores go wrong.
Key arguments & positions
- Argues opaque scoring models scale harm precisely because they are hard to inspect or appeal — her "weapons of math destruction".
- Holds that an algorithm deployed on people needs an audit trail and a route of appeal, the same as any other administrative decision.
- Warns that optimizing a proxy (test scores, arrest counts, clicks) reliably damages the thing the proxy was standing in for.
Accomplishments
- Author of Weapons of Math Destruction (2016), longlisted for the National Book Award.
- Founder of ORCAA, a firm that audits algorithms for bias and legal risk.
- Former Wall Street quant and academic mathematician; longtime blogger as mathbabe.
Papers & key writings
Links
In the library
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