[quotes] The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 1986

 

"But there's a literary form I haven't mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an arc of hope: every recorded story implies a future reader."

"I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely."

"Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."

"Even though some of them no more than fourteen - Start them soon is the policy, there's not a moment to be lost - still they'll remember. And the ones after them will, for three or four or five years; but after that they won't. They'll always have been in white, in groups of girls; they'll always have been silent."

"Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another.... It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that."

[quotes] Nudge - Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein 2008

  

"The clear lesson here is that consistent and unwavering people, in the private or public sector, can move groups and practices in their preferred direction."

"Small interventions and even coincidences, at a key stage, can produce large variations in the outcome."

"It turns out that if you ask people, the day before the election, whether they intend to vote, you can increase the probability of their voting by as much as 25 percent!"

"One way to start thinking about incentives is to ask four questions about a particular choice architecture:
Who uses?
Who chooses?
Who pays?
Who profits?"

"One solution to the political problem of getting such bills passed may be to use some mental accounting. For example, the revenues from a carbon tax might be paired with a cut in personal tax rates, the funding for Social Security and Medicare, or the provision of universal health insurance. Similarly, the "rights" to pollute in a cap-and-trade system can be auctioned off, and the revenues used in the same way. This linking of costs and benefits might help the pill go down more easily."

"People who want to signal their green credentials are much happier in a Prius than a hybrid Camry because no one will know that the Camry is a hybrid unless she carefully examines some labeling on the car."

"So put it simply, forcing people to choose is not always wise, and remaining neutral is not always possible."

"It is not possible to avoid choice architecture, and in that sense it is not possible to avoid influencing people."

[quotes] Weapons of Math Destruction - Cathy O'Neil 2016

 

"if the people being evaluated are kept in the dark, the thinking goes, they'll be less likely to attempt to game the system. Instead, they'll simply have to work hard, follow the rules, and pray that the model registers and appreciates their efforts."

"So thanks to a highly questionable model, a poor school lost a good teacher, and a rich school, which didn't fire people on the basis of their students' scores, gained one."

"That's how trustworthy models operate. They maintain a constant back-and-forth with whatever in the world they're trying to understand or predict. Conditions change, and so must the model."

"Our own values and desires influence our choices, from the data we choose to collect to the questions we ask. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics."

"... sentencing models that profile a person by his of her circumstances help to create the environment that justifies their assumptions. This destructive model loop goes round and round, and in the process the model becomes more and more unfair."

"A young suburbanite with every advantage - the prep school education, the exhaustive coaching for college admissions tests, the overseas semester in Paris or Shanghai - still flatters himself that it is his skill, hard work, and prodigious problem-solving abilities that have lifted him into a world of privilege. Money vindicates all doubts."

"The top 20 percent of the population controls 89 percent of the wealth in the country, and the bottom 40 percent controls none of it. Their assets are negative: the average household in this enormous and struggling underclass has a net debt of $14,800."

"So even if our model is color blind, the result is anything but. In our largely segregated cities, geography is a highly effective proxy for race."

"The result is that we criminalize poverty, believing all the while that our tools are not only scientific but fair."

"...we've seen time and again that mathematical models can sift through data to locate people who are likely to face great challenges, whether from crime, poverty, or education. It's up to society whether to use that intelligence to reject and punish them - or to reach out to them with the resources they need. We can use the efficiency that make WMDs so pernicious in order to help people."

"... Simpson's Paradox: when a whole body of data displays one trend, yet when broken into subgroups, the opposite trend comes into view for each of those subgroups."

"While that campaign launched into public view, hundreds of others continue to hover below the surface, addressing individual voters."

"As this happens, it will become harder to access the political message our neighbors are seeing - and as result, to understand why they believe what they do, often passionately."

"As is often the case with WMDs, the very same models that inflict damage could be used to humanity's benefit. Instead of targeting people in order to manipulate them, it could line them up for help."

"Many of these models, like some of the WMDs we've discussed, will arrive with the best intentions. But they must also deliver transparency, disclosing the input data they're using as well as the results of their targeting. And they must be open to audits."