I’m moving on to Chapters 2 and 3 of Weapons of Math Destruction .  In this week’s prompt, Bryan asks:

• If creating or running a WMD is so profitable, how can we push back against them?

By making them less profitable.  The only way I see to do this is to require some human intervention in the decision processes these algorithms facilitate.  Making a person responsible for verifying the algorithmic outputs would at least improve accountability.  In the event of egregious harms, the person who signed off on the algorithmic output could be held to account for his or her decision.

• Do you find other university ranking schemes to be preferable to the US News one, either personally or within this book’s argument?

I don’t know enough about them to say.

• At one point the author suggests that gaming the US News ranking might not be bad for a university, as “most of the proxies… reflect a school’s overall quality to some degree” (58).  Do you agree?

This doesn’t matter.  Even if the proxies are good proxies, the fact that it’s a ranking system creates the arms race condition which forces colleges to game the system aggressively by doing things like rejecting qualified applicants who are unlikely to enroll.  O’Neil discusses this decline of the safety school.  The root of the problem is the role of reputation in the whole system.

Not surprisingly the discussion of college rankings in Chapter 3 resonated strongly with me for two reasons:

I applied to colleges just at the end of Ivy League collusion on financial aid offers.  I wonder how much the early effects of the US News rankings might have affected me as an Ivy League applicant.

As the parent of teenagers, I had only a vague sense of how the admissions process has changed since I was a college applicant. I worry for my children.

Note:

“However, when you create a model from proxies, it is far simpler for people to game it.” (55)