What is a model?
- “A model, after all, is nothing more than an abstract representation of some process, be it a baseball game, an oil company’s supply chain, a foreign government’s actions, or a movie theater’s attendance” (O’neil, 2016, p. 18).
- “No model can include all of the real world’s complexity or the nuance of human communication” (O’neil, 2016, p. 20).
- “Models are opinions embedded in mathematics” (O’neil, 2016, p. 21)
From the quotes from Weapons of Math destructions above, a model seems to be defined as a simplified flaw of actions or phenomenon, which involves incomplete and subjective variables.
What are Weapons of Math Destructions?
- “I came up with a name for these harmful kinds of models: Weapons of Math Destruction, or WMDs for short” (O’neil, 2016, p. 3).
- “So to sum up, these are the three elements of a WMD: Opacity, Scale, and Damage” (O’neil, 2016, p. 31).
Interpreting the quotes above and taking several portions from the book into consideration, WMDs seem like models that meet the qualifications as follows:
- the model is opaque
- the model is unfair and harmful to someone
- the model is scalable to a bigger population
Criteria for liberal arts college rankings
- Number of students who’ve got Phd after graduation
- Career support & alumni’s careers
- Financial aids
- Quality of professors
- Satisfaction rates of students
- Number and quality of researches and publications
- Faculty resources
References
ONeil, C. (2017). Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Great Britain: Penguin Books.
Chris's Blog for LC 
You did a really great job, Chris! Your blog is clearly organized, and I can see that you have completely understood what the author wanted to tell us in Chapter 1. Also, it is helpful to attach several quotes to understand how the author feels. To deepen our understanding more, I have a question. What is a good model? How does a model separate a good model or a WMD? As for the factors of college ranking, I agree with these criteria because those characteristics are what college applicants also eager to know. I’m also curious about the way to measure the quality of the professors. It has the possibility to be a WMD. I enjoyed reading your blog.
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You did a good job of concisely explaining the major concepts that are mentioned in the book. Putting excerpts from the book reinforces your own explanation for some terms. I’d like to know what examples of a model and a WMD would be. It’d be good for readers if you offer some real-life examples of a good model and a WMD. Also, as for your criteria of liberal arts college ranking, I wonder why you specifically consider the acquisition of a Ph.D. a criterion for the ranking even though you could take the rate of employment and students proceeding to grad school into consideration. Moreover, how are your criteria different from the criteria for universities ranking in general?
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Your blog was well organized and very clear. When you explained definitions of models and WMD, you introduced several quotes with page number. I think that this way of writing was very good because readers can understand your thinking process easily from these information. Also about factors of ranking of liberal arts college, I did not came up the idea, “Number and quality of researches and publications”. This was a good criteria. By analyzing publications from a school, we can estimate the quality of students and professors. However, there is a criteria I am not sure. That is “faculty resources”. Is this criteria for measuring the quality of faculty? If so, this criteria is similar to another criteria, “quality of professors”.
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