By Noah Giansiracusa
Reclaim maths from the powerful
Subject
Themes
Every day begins with numerification. From the moment an alarm sounds, algorithms score, rank, and reduce human experiences to data points. TikTok selects videos through a secret engagement formula. Social media compresses identity into follower counts. Grocery chains like Kroger and Tesco sell petabytes of customer data. Job applicants swim through sponsored search results and face automated tracking systems that reduce them to scores with no feedback. Credit scores, university rankings, standardised tests, and even organ-transplant algorithms assign numbers that shape life outcomes. The proposition at the heart of all this is simple: ordinary people must reclaim the mathematical tools that institutions use against them.
Every day begins with numerification. From the moment an alarm sounds, algorithms score, rank, and reduce human experiences to data points. TikTok selects videos through a secret engagement formula. Social media compresses identity into follower counts. Grocery chains like Kroger and Tesco sell…
Robin Hood Math arrives at a moment when public anxiety about algorithmic power has reached a critical inflection point. The publication of Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction in 2016 inaugurated a wave of popular books warning about the dangers of mathematical models deployed without…
Weighted sums are the single most pervasive mathematical structure in modern life, appearing everywhere from college rankings and credit scores to stock market indices and social media algorithms. The formula is deceptively simple: assign a numerical weight to each factor, multiply each factor's…
The more influential a ranking or scoring system becomes, the greater the incentive to manipulate it. This pattern repeats across every domain where weighted sums and numerical scores determine outcomes, from university rankings and international finance to social media algorithms and credit scores.…
The central argument running through every mathematical tool presented is that personalisation transforms passive consumers of numbers into active participants. Rather than accepting the scores, rankings, and predictions that institutions impose, individuals can build their own versions using the…
Social media platforms have constructed an attention economy in which human engagement is the raw material, weighted sums are the extraction mechanism, and advertising revenue is the end product. Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter all use fundamentally identical formulas to determine what billions of…
Expected value, Bayes's formula, variance, and covariance are not abstract concepts confined to university lecture halls. They form a practical thinking framework that sharpens decision-making in health, finance, careers, and daily life. The power of these tools lies not in producing exact answers…
A piercing alarm at seven in the morning marks the start of a day defined by numerification, the systematic reduction of complex human lives to data points. Before even leaving bed, a person opens TikTok, where a secret mathematical formula determines which of billions of videos appears first. Every…
On 18 September 2023, Brandeis University plummeted sixteen spots in the U.S. News Best Colleges rankings, dropping from forty-four to sixty. The University of Chicago similarly fell from sixth to twelfth. Neither school's raw data had changed significantly; instead, U.S. News had implemented its…
In 1906, Francis Galton collected eight hundred paper tickets from an ox-weight guessing contest at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition in Plymouth. The median guess was 1,207 pounds; the actual weight turned out to be 1,198 pounds, an error of less than 1 per cent. This astonishing…
Sam Bankman-Fried amassed a twenty-billion-dollar fortune by age twenty-nine through his cryptocurrency exchange FTX, only to be convicted at thirty-one on seven criminal charges including fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. A prosecutor called his scheme "one of the biggest financial frauds in…
A 2015 New Yorker article warned of a one-in-ten chance of a devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake striking the Pacific Northwest within fifty years. Questions about COVID vaccine risks and startup investments illustrate that risk permeates everyday decisions, not just the domain of hedge fund…
Liv Boeree spent her youth plagued by anxiety. After reading about alopecia, she spent six months counting hairs in her brush. Later she became convinced she had contracted a brain-eating amoeba while wakeboarding. "The only thing eating my brain was my irrational anxiety," she wrote. Turning to…
In December 2022, a TikTok video of a woman posing with the cryptic text "now replace S with N" went massively viral. Viewers spent hours rewatching and commenting, trying to decode its meaning. The creator eventually told the Daily Dot, "It doesn't mean anything." The video succeeded because it…
Six of the seven largest companies by market capitalisation are technology firms: Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, and Meta. The four richest individuals as of August 2024 are tech moguls. Their dominance is not inherently problematic, but their products have degraded into ad-infested…
By Noah Giansiracusa
Subject
Themes
Every day begins with numerification. From the moment an alarm sounds, algorithms score, rank, and reduce human experiences to data points. TikTok selects videos through a secret engagement formula. Social media compresses identity into follower counts. Grocery chains like Kroger and Tesco sell petabytes of customer data. Job applicants swim through sponsored search results and face automated tracking systems that reduce them to scores with no feedback. Credit scores, university rankings, standardised tests, and even organ-transplant algorithms assign numbers that shape life outcomes. The proposition at the heart of all this is simple: ordinary people must reclaim the mathematical tools that institutions use against them.