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Often however, the invocation of a model can be seen as a form of mathwashing: a way of lending credibility to an argument or justifying a course of action by appealing to mathematical authority (as if there were only one).
Handwashing and mathwashing | Cambridge Mathematics Lucy Rycroft-Smith 2023
scarequotes commented on the word mathwashing
http://technical.ly/brooklyn/2016/06/08/fred-benenson-mathwashing-facebook-data-worship/
Mathwashing can be thought of using math terms (algorithm, model, etc.) to paper over a more subjective reality. For example, a lot of people believed Facebook was using an unbiased algorithm to determine its trending topics, even if Facebook had previously admitted that humans were involved in the process.
June 8, 2016