According to CNN Money, Math is Racist.
Wait? Math? The hyper-logical subject that we all agree (excepting philosophers) is not subjective is capable of having a racial prejudice? Sounds like a load of crap! That’s the bait. And it’s worked. By which I mean it seems to be completely ineffective.
The article itself is a review of a book by Cathy O’Neil. And frankly, it looks pretty interesting. I mean, half this blog is me complaining about poor data analysis, which sounds like what she does in this book. Here’s her giving a talk.
The article has nothing to do with arguing that math itself is racist. I’ve seen it shared several times, but not once have I seen any comment on the book it reviewed. Which strongly suggests that the people sharing the article aren’t reading past the headline–which is pretty par for the course on the internet.
There are two likely scenarios here: either CNN intentionally wrote a clickbait headline to get clicks to the page without regard for honestly conveying the information in the article, or they unintentionally wrote a clickbait headline. I’ll let you decide which one it was, so long as you’re all familiar with the heuristic of Hanlon’s razor.
In journalism especially, headlines are often written by separate headline writers. There’s an art to writing headlines: they needs to be super-condensed but also explain what’s in the tin. I would suspect this is the case here.
Regardless, the headline was bullshit clickbait.The internet basically saw this as a variation on Poe’s law, an observation that on the internet, it is often difficult to discern genuine commentary by people holding extreme positions and satire, parody, etc.
Conscientiously or not, CNN shot their own credibility for making it that way. It fanned the flames of the culture war being waged between the “social justice warriors” and their opposition (and bystanders). The idea that math is somehow racist is prima facie absurd, but a completely plausible thing to hear given the climate of social justice commentary. CNN is making itself appear to be on the absurd side for the sake of getting attention. Like the proverbial kid acting up in a classroom, negative attention is still attention.
In the short term, they’ll see a lot of shares. “Wow!” The suits will exclaim, “look at how many people are visiting our site. More articles like these!” And so more clickbait gets made. Natural selection. Except it’s a myopic look at the data. People are sharing the link, but not reading the articles. In theory, the push back should be provided by the advertisers, who notice that the actual open screen time on the page is basically nothing. If people aren’t staying on the site once they open it, they aren’t going to stick around to look at more ads. Of course, it’s possible that the advertisers are also incompetent. “Wow!” The suits will exclaim, “look at how many people are viewing that site! Let’s spend money on them!”
Someone could probably write a book about how bad data analytics is damaging society….