The tech giants are paying millions of dollars to the operators of clickbait pages, bankrolling the deterioration of information ecosystems around th… - Cathy O'Neil

… techno utopia is this idea that the machine-learning tools, the algorithms, the things that help Google, like, have cars that drive themselves, that these tools are somehow making things objective and fair when, in fact, we really have no idea what's happening to most algorithms under the hood.

... Eventually, I became a tenure-track professor at , which had a combined math department with .
And then I made a big change. I quit my job and went to work as a quant for , a leading hedge fund. In leaving academia for finance, I carried mathematics from abstract theory into practice. The operations we performed on numbers translated into trillions of dollars sloshing from one account to another. At first I was excited and amazed by working in this new laboratory, the global economy. But in the autumn of 2008, after I'd been there for a bit more than a year, it came crashing down
The crash made it all too clear that mathematics, once my refuge, was not only deeply entangled in the also fueling many of them. The housing crisis, the collapse of major financial institutions, the rise of unemployment—all had been aided and abetted by mathematicians wielding magic formulas.

For shame machines, there is nothing more profitable than a painful and intractable scourge shrouded in mystery. False promises sell, and since they don’t work, the market stays strong. Failure, in fact, is central to the dieting business model, fueling earnings for giants like and . They profit from a never-ending stream of shame-addled, self-loathing repeat customers. Weight Watchers’ former chief financial officer, Richard Samber, told that 84 percent of the customers failed in their diets and cycled back to the company. “That’s where your business comes from,” he said.