Month: May 2019

Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction doesn’t break new ground in its discussion of how computer algorithms discriminate against the poor, minorities and women, making them pay more for loans, shutting them out of jobs, and disrupting their work schedules. Just about everything she writes about we’ve seen in the pages of major newspapers and serious magazines.  

But O’Neil puts it all together in language we can understand and with the rigor of a mathematician who has actually delved into the various assumptions and computations hidden within the digital black boxes that companies use to sort resumes, banks use to give loans, employers use to schedule employees and virtually every consumer company uses to target customers with products and services.

O’Neil does not advocate doing away with all the mathematical models that permeate contemporary American society, only those that threaten our social fabric because of hidden prejudices built into the algorithm or those that purposely exploit or deceive people.

Take the development of U.S. News Report’s top college rankings, which over the past thirty years has engendered a “keep up with the Joneses” competition among status seeking parents, while dramatically changing how universities approach their own development and improvement, pandering to the rating instead of the educational mission of the institution. It has also created a new industry of college selection advisors to help rich and middle class parents get their children into the highest-ranking schools. O’Neil reports that the original mathematical model used as its measures of success those variables in which the schools thought to be traditionally the best had excelled, such as contributions by alumni. Their selection of what to measure not only favored Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the other universities already entrenched at the top of the pecking order, it also led to such obvious distortions as small liberal arts colleges for the wealthy achieving a higher rating than state universities with far-ranging research capabilities and an economically diverse student base such as Washington, Texas, Wisconsin, North Carolina and the University of California Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses.

It’s amazing that one misshapen computer model could do so much damage. But O’Neil analyses a number of such monstrosities, such as the biased models by which school districts evaluate teachers, banks decide which financial services to offer and how to price them, employers analyze resumes without looking at them to decide whom to hire and political campaigns select which messages to send to individual voters. O’Neil calls these models “Weapons of Math Destruction,” or WMD, both clever and accurate.

Many of the problems caused by WMD stem from substituting a simple measurement for a complicated situation, for example when teacher evaluation models substitute test scores for in-class performance to measure teachers’ competence or employment models use credit scores to determine a potential employee’s stability. Another major problem is that many of the models have as their sole purpose the maximizing of profit, regardless of what that means to customers or employees, such as job scheduling models that make employees work split shifts, add or cancel their work hours before the shift begins, and prevent their total hours from exceeding the minimums for receiving benefits. The employer makes more money, while financially strapped employees have to deal with juggling childcare, medical appointments and other aspects of daily life. Then there are the models that instantaneously analyze your Internet browsing history as soon as you get on the website of a financial institution, telling the institution whether to offer you a high or low rate on loans and insurance, based on your “risk.” High risk in this case serves as a euphemism for poor and often, minority.

An anecdote O’Neil tells near the end of the book is particularly scary because it reflects the anti-science, anti-fact bias shared by many corporations and politicians. Despite years of work as a successful mathematician in the private sector, in 2013 O’Neil took an unpaid internship in New York City’s Departments of Housing and Human Service. She was interested in building mathematical models that help, not hurt society. The issue was homelessness. Her team looked over masses of data to figure out what factors led people into homeless shelters and what factors led them to leave and stay out for good.  One of her colleagues discovered that one group of homeless families left shelters never to return—those who obtained vouchers for housing under a federal housing program called Section 8.

Ooopsy! As it turns out, then NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the data king who had made billions of dollars supplying the financial industry with information, didn’t like Section 8 vouchers and had instituted a highly publicized new program called Advantage, which limited Section 8 subsidies to three years. As O’Neil writes, “The ideas was that the looming expiration of benefits would push poor people to make more money and pay their own way.” Yeah, right—they’d finally stop working as a fast food cashier and take a job as a Wall Street lawyer! Of course with rents booming in the Big Apple, the opposite was happening: people lost their vouchers after three years and ended up in homeless shelters.

The Bloomberg administration did not welcome the researcher’s finding and evidently ignored it in future planning. What the Bloomberg Administration wanted to believe literally trumped (pun intended!) what the facts were suggesting: that the cure for homelessness was not unfettered capitalism but providing a helping hand. Ignoring what the research proved corrupted Bloomberg’s approach to reducing homelessness as much as the current Trump administration’s approach to the environment, government regulation, taxation and education is corrupted by its failure to follow the facts.  Corruption and manipulation lie at the heart of what caused institutions to create and apply WMDs.

I vividly remember an example of the corruption of ignoring facts I experienced when I worked for a large public relations agency in 1987. I returned from a Conference Board seminar with a study about the way corporations would employ agencies in the 1990s. The new approach to agency use would make it harder for agencies to make money and force them to engage in more competitions with not just other large agencies, but small boutique firms that specialized in one kind of PR. As soon as I completed my presentation to the staff of our office, our general manager got up and said I was wrong and outlined a rosy view based on no research whatsoever. Of course, the predictions presented at the Conference Board seminar turned out to be right on the money.

Thus, while we must beware weapons of math destruction and devise industry standards for both developing mathematical models and regulating their use, the greater problem is the age-old one best expressed in a quote often attributed to Mark Twain that Figures never lie, but liars figure.

Many major media outlets, including USA Today and New York Times have been floating the idea of lowering the voting age to 16.

Bad idea. If anything, we should raise the voting age to 21.

The simple fact of the matter is that the brains of virtually all 16-year-olds are still forming. Their reasoning capacity and their ability to comprehend complex material will keep improving for several years. The brains of many boys continue to develop until well into their twenties.

While there are exceptions, the average 16-year-old is still as much child as adult. A 16-year-old still looks heavily to both parents and peers for approval. Those in the middle and upper classes have not had to work for a living and probably have led sheltered lives. Rich kids and poor kids alike have had a minimum of experience in the real world. Many have irrational crushes on celebrities. Others are in poor control of their emotions. We can’t expect a 16-year-old to make an informed decision about issues or candidates.

The one advantage of giving 16-year-olds the right to vote is that we could register kids in high schools, which would hopefully lead to an increase in the percentage of Americans who vote. But we could also use a mass outreach approach to register young voters at other life stations—as part of registration for college or vocational training. Or better yet, we could extend selective service registration to women (and non-binaries!) and make voter registration part of the process.

I believe that a majority of my dear readers will agree with me that 16 is too young to vote. But my second assertion—that we should raise the voting age to 21—will likely meet with two thumbs down from most. If, however, you put credence in medical science, you should see little difference between voting at 16 and 18. The human mind is still developing at age 18. Although 18 year olds are for the most part much more mature than 16 year olds, they don’t have their acts together as much as they will at age 21. Far from it. Every parent will readily be able to cite examples.

The reason that we allow people to vote at 18 is business. The business of war, which since World War II may be the biggest and most important business that Americans pursue. After all, we have been at constant warfare somewhere around the globe almost continually over the past 70 years. Our annual military budget is about equal to that of all the other countries on Earth combined. We are the primary arms merchant throughout the world; our bombs and guns participate in virtually all of the almost 40 current armed conflicts worldwide.

We gave the vote to 18-year-olds in 1971 in the middle of the Viet Nam War after many Americans—young and old— rightfully pointed out that anyone old enough to die for his or her country should be old enough to vote. At the time I was overjoyed, because I had turned 18 about three months before the 1968 election and was frustrated that I did not have a chance to write in for Eugene McCarthy.

It was about the time that I realized that my hypothetical vote in 1968 should have gone to Hubert Humphrey that I also figured out that in bringing fairness to army enrollments, the United States should have moved the age of combat up and not the voting age down.

The cynical would argue that many young people need the discipline and structure that life in the armed forces provides. Especially for those who go don’t go to college and for the poor, rather than be set adrift in an uncaring economy, 18- and 19-year-olds can “grow up” in the army. This argument supposes that crime and social unrest would increase if we didn’t let young adults, and especially young men with proclivities towards violence, join the army. Once you establish the indispensable social and socialization role of the army for 18-21-year-olds, you have to allow 18-year-olds to vote. Once again, if they’re putting their lives on the line, you have to let them have a say.

But then there’s the ultra-cynical view, the one to which I subscribe. Without the pool of 18-21-year-olds, the armed forces could not fill its ranks. The army grabs kids at the very age when most are still adrift, still sorting out their path in life. They don’t own houses yet, haven’t started families, haven’t had their first full-time job. They have the fewest community ties and the least to lose by serving for a few years in the armed forces. Our armed forces recruitment centers grab them when they are most vulnerable to nonsense about pride and belonging. Primed for the plucking. Just enroll ‘em, train ‘em and send ‘em to a war zone.

Like every military since the rise of organized armies millennia ago, the Armed Forces of the United States of America depends on the 18-21 age group to provide cannon fodder for our military death machine. If raising the voting age to 21 makes us raise the minimum age to join the armed forces to 21, it might cripple out ability to wage wars.

And that would be a very good thing.

The current wave of anti-choice legislation passed in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio and elsewhere fills me with a deep sadness for the many victims whom these benighted laws will create. Women who will die or be severely injured in back alley abortions. Men and women whose lives will be made infinitely more difficult or unhappy because they have to raise children they don’t want, can’t afford or are unprepared for. Most of all, my heart breaks for the children of unwanted pregnancies, often born in poverty or with disabilities or raised by parents who didn’t really want them.

The unholy irony of these new laws is that they are passed by elected officials who typically also campaign for cutting food stamps, aid to education, health care for the poor and other programs that help children once they are born.

Like many conservative positions, the extreme anti-choice line is faith based. But there’s a big difference between the rightwing view on abortion and its position on other issues such as immigration and government regulation: we can explode the myths that underlie most of contemporary conservatism with facts, but pro-choicers base their position as much on faith as anti-choicers do.

Facts and analysis disprove virtually all of the rightwing’s assertions. Experts—by which I mean scientists, engineers, economists, sociologists and other researchers not paid by industry—have demonstrated that virtually all the premises supporting the GOP platform run counter to reality.

Some examples: Global warming is occurring and much of it is manmade; its effects will do more harm than good.

Lowering taxes on the wealthy does not create jobs, whereas raising them usually does.

Immigrants lower the unemployment rate and raise the salaries of native-born Americans. Crime rates are lower among immigrants—legal or undocumented—than among native born Americans.

Universal medical insurance would lower the overall cost that Americans pay for healthcare.

Increased government regulations do not decrease jobs or economic activity in the overall economy.

Public schools do a better job of educating students than either private schools or privatized charter schools.

Raising the minimum wage has a meager if any impact on employment rates and tends to lead to higher wages up the employment ladder.

The more guns there are in any society, the more gun deaths and injuries occur.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the point, dear readers.  Research exists that in short order destroys virtually all of 21st century conservatism.

The exception is abortion, for one simple reason: No one really knows when life begins. All we can determine is the point in fetal development when life is viable—able to sustain itself outside the womb. Even that premise is open to some question, as an infant can’t live without the help of adults to feed, shelter and protect it. Common sense would conclude that a newborn is not truly viable. In the 18th and 19th centuries, infanticide was a primary means of birth control in many cultures, including our own.  

I personally believe that a woman should control her own body and therefore should have the right to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy. But I am also painfully aware that this argument doesn’t really hold muster under close scrutiny. Society often interferes with an individual’s control of its own body. We consider people who mutilate themselves to be emotionally unstable and in need of psychological treatment (unless society approves the mutilation, as with tattoos and or non-corrective cosmetic surgery). We have laws against assisted suicide. Drug laws interfere with the right of women and men to control their own body. We force children to attend school until a certain age. We throw in jail people who sell their bodies or use them as lethal weapons. Society therefore often constrains the bodies of people and could theoretically prevent women from having abortions.

The problem is that no one can say for certain when life begins. At conception?  At a mother’s recognition of the pregnancy? At heartbeat? At viability? No one really knows. Of course, we as a society could agree to a definition of the beginning of life, or, to put it in the center of the controversy, the point at which the rights of the fetus are as strong as or stronger than the rights of the mother.

But wherever we set the beginning of life is completely arbitrary—a first premise, an axiom in mathematics, a principle from which you argue from and never to.

In other words, a matter of faith.

Setting the point after which an abortion should not be performed for any reason is always a matter of faith, belonging to the realm of religion and not science.

Which is the very reason why American governments on all levels must as a matter of constitutional law allow abortions in virtually all cases. The United States has an absolute separation of state and religion. The titleless aristocracy that founded the country adamantly opposed having a state religion or letting the state interfere with the private practice of religion. The judiciary has reconfirmed the principle of the separation of church and state innumerable times.

Those who oppose all abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, practice one faith. Those who want to abort all fetuses that will develop Down’s syndrome or other terrible ailments practice another faith. I’ll leave it to each reader to decide whose religion is more humane, more caring, and more attuned to the needs of society.

But all must agree that it is never the function of government to get involved in ontological disputes between different faiths. Constitutionally, the government cannot and should not have any position on abortion.

That leaves opponents of a woman’s right to control her own body with the traditional options that religions have in the United States. Advertise and proselytize. Convince pregnant women not to have abortions. Go ahead and tell them that all pregnancies are a blessing, even if the baby is never going to be close to normal. (Just don’t do it with lies such as the false myth that women who have abortions are more likely to get cancer.)

The marketplace of ideas is the proper place to discuss abortion, not the legislative halls or the bureaucracies of the administrative branch of government. Whether these new anti-abortion laws are moral depends on one’s religion, but there can be no disputing that they go against the principles upon which we have built our country.