I think people have this hang-up from school that maths is this dusty old textbook that was finished hundreds of years ago, and all the answers are in the back. Whereas in my job I struggle to find anything that maths can’t offer an interesting perspective on. Hannah Fry Read Quote
When designing algorithms as a business owner, your incentive is your profit, something for your business, it’s not an incentive to maximise something for the individual. Hannah Fry Read Quote
And anytime a programmer makes a decision about how to deal with data, how to average it or clean it, you’re imparting more of your own bias on it. Hannah Fry Read Quote
Imagine life without any algorithms at all, you wouldn’t be able to do anything. This is already completely encompassing. We have a habit of over-trusting what mathematics or computer scientists tell us to do, without questioning it, too much faith in the magical power of analysis. Hannah Fry Read Quote
People are often quite lazy. We like taking the easy way out – we like handing over responsibility, we like being offered shortcuts that mean we don’t have to think. Hannah Fry Read Quote
We have this imbalance where the people who are making algorithms aren’t talking to the people who are using them. And the people who are using them aren’t talking to the people who are having decisions made about their lives by them. Hannah Fry Read Quote
But as soon as Facebook decided that they wanted to become purveyors of news, suddenly you have these highly personalized newsfeeds where everything is based on what your friends like, what you like, things that you’ve read in the past. Hannah Fry Read Quote
So my favorite online dating website is OkCupid, not least because it was started by a group of mathematicians. Hannah Fry Read Quote
Curating our data is valuable. Like 23andMe – while selling us the chance to know whether we’re Vikings or whatever, they’re amassing these huge DNA databases that are unimaginably valuable. Get people to pay you to add their DNA to this database. Genius! Hannah Fry Read Quote
