O’Neil’s book offers a wide-ranging and alarming critique of Big Data technology, profit- and efficiency-driven algorithms. The title and the central concept in the book, Weapons of Math Destruction (WMDs), refers to prediction models that inform decisions at large scale and damage the well-being of many people subjected to them. They include models that categorize,…
Author: Davood Gozli
Thoughts on ‘Naked Statistics’ (by Charles Wheelan)
Let’s begin this post with a comment by Chris Schuck on my recent video about The Data Detective by Tim Harford. Chris wrote: Some of the books in this genre look really great, but I was also thinking about how these statistical/quant critical thinking analyses are often at their most effective when placed in the…
Thoughts on ‘Data Detective’ (by Tim Harford)
Tim Harford’s (2021) book, Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics, isn’t really about statistical methods. It has a much broader scope, and it is less technical than book on methods. It deals with knowledge in general, our relationship with knowledge, and the factors that determine that relationship for individuals and collectives….
Reading Together Umberto Eco’s _Inventing the Enemy & Other Occasional Writings_
Over a period of five months, we read this collection of “occasional writings” by Umberto Eco (translated to English by Richard Dixon). Today was the final session, where we discussed Eco’s short essay on Wikileaks. Discussing this collection together with our small group has been the longest and best-sustained group project, thus far, associated with…
Reflections on ‘Saint Francis of Assisi’ by G. K. Chesterton
… it is utterly useless to study a great thing like the Franciscan movement while remaining in the modern mood that murmurs against gloomy asceticism. The whole point about St. Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he certainly was not gloomy. Chesterton’s book Saint Francis of Assisi was published in 1923,…