Course Details

Concerns about the misuse of mathematics have grown along with 21st century technology. Cathy O’Neil’s book “Weapons of Math Destruction” (note the pun) has the subtitle “How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.” In debates about political and social issues, statistics and equations are often used to buttress arguments that would seem much less convincing if stated in plain English.

When encountering arguments using numbers and equations, even well-educated people are paralyzed — like deer in the headlights — and lose their capacity for critical thinking. Students generally do not learn how to question and criticize quantitative claims. The purpose of this seminar is to develop your capacity not only to analyze mathematical arguments, but also to write clearly and persuasively about the flaws you discover in them. The main work of the course (aside from a few reading assignments) will be to write, discuss in class, correct, and improve one essay per week in which you explain the flaws, omissions, and deceptions in a quantitative argument that appeared in a published or online article or opinion piece.

There is no math prerequisite, but students should be willing to think critically about statistical fallacies (such as poor sample selection and stats that don’t really support the conclusion that they’re used to support), misuse of probabilities (such as wrongly assuming that two occurrences are independent of one another) and logical gaps (such as unstated implicit assumptions that don’t hold).