100 words - day 3

I’m currently reading Weapons of Math Destruction (WMD) by Cathy O’Neil and it strikes me that there are similarities in the themes in another book I read a couple of years ago How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier.

Essentially we all like to trust maths, logic and science and when this is presented in the form of a chart, graph or map we tend to trust it. It feels like it has science behind it and it therefore should be trusted to make a decision.

Both these books challenge this notion and dig into the consequences of why this is important and even more so when it can implicate so many lives. Opaque algorithms lie behind much of our world today, they claim to make things fairer with less human bias, but Cathy O’Neil challenges this with countless examples. I’m really enjoying it and still have plenty left to feast upon.