[HN Gopher] Facial recognition can predict person's political or...
___________________________________________________________________
Facial recognition can predict person's political orientation with
72% accuracy
Author : andreykocevski
Score : 272 points
Date : 2021-03-05 15:48 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| ebegnwgnen wrote:
| "The dating website sample was provided by a popular dating
| website in 2017. It contains profile images uploaded by 977,777
| users; their location (country); and self-reported political
| orientation, gender, and age."
|
| It doesn't sound like people were consenting/aware that they'll
| endup on a facial recognition study.
|
| But I'm not even surprised dating website would sell their such
| data
| htkyoholk wrote:
| Did it control for sun exposure? Working outside in the sun
| versus working inside in city buildings.
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| It's likely that users did consent when they checked the "I've
| read the terms and conditions" checkbox when signing up.
| jklein11 wrote:
| It's possible that the dating website got 1 million users and
| couldn't find product market fit. They then pivoted to selling
| their users data.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| There are plenty of scraped dating website datasets lying
| around.
| ebegnwgnen wrote:
| Yes, but I suppose you can't use them in a publication on
| Nature if they are scrapped illegally.
|
| This dataset directly from the dating website
| freebreakfast wrote:
| What does "scrapped illegally" mean?
|
| I've never encountered this term. I can see how scrapping
| might be a violation of some websites terms of use, but
| I've never seen "scrapped illegally" used. Do you have any
| examples?
| emteycz wrote:
| Well, pictures of faces could be considered personal data
| per GDPR. Scraping that data without each person's
| approval could be illegal regardless of any terms of use.
| astura wrote:
| 1) Web scraping is not "illegal"
|
| 2) I haven't the slightest clue why you think scraped data
| can't be used in a publication - some results from first
| page of Google Scholar:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S18780296
| 1...
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00420980209181
| 9...
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Ha. Hahaha. I wish. I'm sorry to laugh, but a ton of ML
| papers are based on illegally-scraped datasets of one form
| or another, _unless_ they use strictly blessed datasets
| (Imagenet2012 being the gold standard mostly-useless-in-
| the-real-world dataset).
|
| OpenAI's Jukebox is based on illegal large-scale gathering
| of copyrighted material, for example.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I wonder how much data about a person can you squeeze out of a
| high-definition video, analyzing not only face, but grimaces,
| tone of voice, rhythm of speech etc.
|
| That should give you a lot more hints than a still image.
|
| The worst possible uses: filtering out _undesirable_ people
| applying for jobs or for college, firing people who are suspect
| of belonging to a different political tribe.
| human wrote:
| My political orientiations have changed a few times over the last
| 10 years but my face hasn't. This can't actually work...
| _cs2017_ wrote:
| First, your face has changed over the past 10 years because of
| the aging, the way you take care of your face, your health,
| your mental and emotional state, your sleep, your nutrition,
| and many other factors.
|
| Second, the model in the paper did not only look at the face,
| but at the entire photograph. How you choose to present
| yourself on a dating site has also changed over the 10 years:
| the quality of the photo, what haircut you choose, how closely
| you shave, whether you're tanned, your facial expression,
| whether you wear glasses, what objects, landscapes, and colors
| can be seen in the background, etc.
|
| Finally, and most importantly: Even if your dating site profile
| picture hasn't changed in lockstep with your political
| leanings, that's fine -- they can make some errors and still
| get the 72% accuracy they report.
| relaxing wrote:
| _72% of the time, it works every time..._
| Kranar wrote:
| You think your face hasn't changed over the last 10 years?
|
| You think there isn't a relationship between age and politics?
| human wrote:
| You're right that I've gained a few pounds and look older.
| Obviously I was exagerating to make a point. But I guess it's
| all about the 72% which means it far from perfect, but still
| better than a coin toss.
| system16 wrote:
| > The highest predictive power was afforded by head orientation
| (58%), followed by emotional expression (57%). Liberals tended to
| face the camera more directly, were more likely to express
| surprise, and less likely to express disgust. Facial hair and
| eyewear predicted political orientation with minimal accuracy
| (51-52%).
|
| This is really interesting. I never considered head orientation
| or expression to be a factor. Then again, it sorta makes sense.
| Speaking very generally, liberal leaning people on social media
| probably tend to be more likely to post pictures of themselves in
| a humorous or "soy face" expression, and conservative-leaning
| types may try to look strong or aggressive.
|
| Also, I automatically assumed features like "handlebar moustache"
| would mean more likely to be conservative, but it sounds like
| facial hair wasn't as big a factor.
| karpierz wrote:
| This isn't a study that shows that people's faces indicate their
| political leanings.
|
| It's a study which shows that pictures that people select to
| represent themselves publicly have features that indicate
| political leaning.
| jbob2000 wrote:
| Profile photo with a person wearing a baseball cap and Oakleys?
| Yup, that's a republican.
| hntrader wrote:
| If it's that easy then why was human guessing only 55 percent
| accurate?
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| Worth noting the human guessing was not on the same data
| set, but I believe the machines are going to beat us at
| this in general.
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| At least partly due to lack of feedback on accuracy. I
| don't know about you but I don't necessarily ask everyone I
| meet their political leanings, so it's hard to train
| yourself other than through stereotype.
| kicat wrote:
| Agree. Even the few pixels bordering the face in the sample
| image can show she's outside. She chose a smiling picture,
| she's wearing makeup, etc...
| jonbronson wrote:
| That's a really good observation to note. The prior embedded in
| their image data is their own bias of what is a "good"
| representation of themselves.
| derekam wrote:
| Exactly. There was some fuss a while back about a similar
| classifier for sexuality. It turned out to be guessing mostly
| based on head tilt, personal hygiene and whether the person was
| wearing glasses. The physiognomy component was ~nonexistent
| even though it was publicized as though it weren't. People
| intentionally if at times subconsciously present themselves in
| a way that signals information to kindred spirits. You'd need
| to bring in hundreds of people, wash them and basically take
| mugshots to control for that.
| jfengel wrote:
| I think that conclusion is at least as interesting as
| physiognomy. It's remarkable that a computer could be more
| sensitive to it than people.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| People don't get confirmation of those details normally
| unlike the ML algorithm. Of course we don't lock people in
| boxes with a stack of training set photos for a period of
| time equivalent to ML training.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Yep, I'd look very closely for training data bias.
| fc373745 wrote:
| >images were tightly cropped around the face and resized to 224
| x 224 pixels
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| One can only wonder what the result would be by using the
| equivalent of government ID photos (neutral expression, no
| smile or make-up, solid backgrounds).
| williesleg wrote:
| That's so ageist, racist, sexist, etc. so offensive there
| nature.com
| nathias wrote:
| The problem wit this is bad interpretation, people look at it and
| think oh this means political orientation is somehow inherent to
| biology or some such nonsense. Any data that can make predictions
| is just a sign that in this data there are some patterns, but
| there is never a straightforward interpretation for it.
|
| Also, whoever makes the first app for this will go viral 100%.
| spamizbad wrote:
| If you can guesstimate someones age bracket, gender, and whether
| or not they're white you can also probably hit a similar
| accuracy.
| TheButlerian wrote:
| Not that hard actually. Chads - conservative, soyboys - liberal.
| bsaul wrote:
| Has there been any attempt to do the same kind of work for IQ
| prediction ?
| umvi wrote:
| Surprising, yet not surprising. As the article mentions:
|
| > Both in real life and in our sample, the classification of
| political orientation is to some extent enabled by demographic
| traits clearly displayed on participants' faces. For example, as
| evidenced in literature and Table 1, in the U.S., white people,
| older people, and males are more likely to be conservatives.
|
| Most people can predict a person's political orientation of their
| own country with >50% accuracy as well just by looking at a face.
| Black or latino? _probably liberal_. Old white person? _probably
| conservative_. If you can see more than just their face it 's
| even easier (wearing religious paraphernalia? LGBT paraphernalia?
| etc?)
|
| What I thought was interesting was:
|
| > The algorithm could successfully predict political orientation
| across countries
|
| I was under the impression that "liberal" and "conservative" had
| different meanings in UK vs. USA so how could it do this?
| rsynnott wrote:
| > I was under the impression that "liberal" and "conservative"
| had different meanings in UK vs. USA so how could it do this?
|
| I assume they're using the US definition (meaning "left wing"
| and "right wing", more or less).
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| I just wish people called it 'correlates' instead of prediction
| since ML algo's often fall in the correlation category, not the
| predicting one.
| yikesshescute wrote:
| Is there some technical definition of "predict" that you are
| assuming?
| adolph wrote:
| Agreed. Without the addition of causal inference this is
| phrenology in ML drag. To their credit the authors say "Here,
| we explore correlations between political orientation and a
| range of interpretable facial features. . ."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36204378-the-book-of-why
| greeneggs wrote:
| I am curious how much additional information, if any, is learned
| from a person's face. From a full-body photo, with the face
| blacked out, what can be learned?
| IndySun wrote:
| The predicted 'answer' for the vast majority of people is going
| to be, basically, left or right (politically speaking), for maybe
| 80 or even 90% and more people, a 50/50 choice. How far does the
| 72% drop for correctly predicting the smaller political factions,
| I wonder?
| btbuildem wrote:
| They claim facial morphology was one of the predictors. Pretty
| wild if true, but how does genetics / heredity play into
| political leanings?
| Agingcoder wrote:
| I haven't read the paper yet, but it's not that surprising. I
| think it's about sociology more than biology.
|
| In the US, African Americans vote overwhelmingly for democrats
| for example. Skin color therefore becomes a very good predictor
| of political orientation. You can probably extend this to states
| being populated from various migration waves, say 'people who
| look like Danes vote for republicans because state X was
| populated by Danes and votes Republican' . Carry this across
| generations/education, and you may have an explanation.
| asah wrote:
| "only"
| ebegnwgnen wrote:
| It reminds me that Israeli company (Faception) which claim to
| identify from your face if you are a terrorist.
|
| It was shown that it was bullshit and that they basically built a
| smile detector (because ofc, in training set, photos of criminal
| in prison weren't really happy to be in prison)
|
| (also, how ironic for an Israeli company build such tools, they
| are literally building the equivalent of the Nazi's nose
| measurement)
| ebegnwgnen wrote:
| wow, I didn't said "bouhou Google are such Nazi omg". I'm
| taking about a very serious issue of a company practicing
| Scientific Racism on people.
|
| All I'm saying is :
|
| - Faception is accusing people of terrorism from analysing the
| shape of their face.
|
| - Faception is pretenting some people have "higher IQ" (== is a
| naturaly superior race) based on the shape of their face
|
| I'm not making this up, just check their website :
|
| --> https://www.faception.com/
|
| Pretending that some race are naturally dangerous criminal
| while other race is "higher IQ" is straight Scientific Racism.
|
| One of the main example of scientific racism on Wikipedia is
| WWII : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
|
| If you prefer another example of Scientific Racism such as
| Colons measuring African's skull to justify the Caucasian
| superiority (on the same wiki page) then be my guest.
|
| In any case I really in courage you to check the picture with
| "High IQ" and "Terrorist" on https://www.faception.com/ . Maybe
| you'll better understand crazy those people are and how
| dangerous it can be for society
| dang wrote:
| That flamebait at the end led predictably to a flamewar. Please
| do not post like that again.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| >they are literally building the equivalent of the Nazi's nose
| measurement
|
| I got downvoted for saying this before. Downvote me again if
| you want. [Edit: read what i have to say first this isn't a
| game]
|
| Nazis and Hitler should be off limits. Period. You wouldn't
| dare accuse people of colour of imitating slave traders, yet
| you think it's acceptable to do that to Jewish people. The
| evils Hitler inflicted has no parallel. To compare any aspect
| of Nazi ideology to something else trivialises their memory.
| You demonstrate that you have no sympathy for their victims.
| You don't really care or understand what Hitler and the Germans
| did. Casual comparisons like yours means that the lessons
| learnt from the holocaust will lose their power and ultimately
| be forgotten. I believe this to be far worse then merely
| perpetuating anti semitic tropes. You would never do one, so
| why the other?
| alacombe wrote:
| > You wouldn't dare accuse people of colour of imitating
| slave traders
|
| Not just imitating, but _being_ slave traders too, either in
| the past or even today. Plenty of tribes in Africa sold other
| Africans to Europeans, and slavery is still very much a thing
| in Africa today.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa
|
| https://qz.com/africa/1333946/global-slavery-index-africa-
| ha...
| dang wrote:
| The GP shouldn't have included that flamebait, but please
| don't respond to flamebait by bursting entirely into flames.
| That's going the wrong way down a one-way street, since we're
| trying for exactly the opposite here.
|
| Of course it's a highly emotional topic and justly so, but
| one of our intentions here is that we all work on self-
| regulation around this kind of thing (e.g. processing strong
| reactions internally before rushing to comments) - not really
| for ethical reasons, but just because it's the only way to
| avoid the failure-mode end states of internet forums.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| If there is a reason to draw a parallel, then why not? Well
| maybe in America but the rest of the world is not taking part
| of these oppression Olympics.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Daho0n wrote:
| If coloured people begang doing things that very much looked
| like what others have suffered through as slaves they would
| most definitely be called out. Israel is not like the Nazis
| but they are one of the closest things we have seen since and
| not just a single fluke but again and again.
| alacombe wrote:
| > If coloured people begang doing things that very much
| looked like what others have suffered through as slaves
| they would most definitely be called out.
|
| They do, and they aren't.
| Daho0n wrote:
| What are who doing and not being called out for?
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > Casual comparisons like yours means that the lessons learnt
| from the holocaust will lose their power and ultimately be
| forgotten.
|
| While I agree with the message of your comment (i.e. the
| critique of everybody using the word Nazi for everything they
| don't like), I feel you make another mistake here by -
| probably unconsciously - reducing Hitler's misdeed to the
| Holocaust. This is very upsetting to huge populations of non-
| Jewish people who lost many members of their families during
| WW2. Especially to Russians - they lost 27M as opposed to 6M
| Jews. I don't want to compare the horror of both numbers in
| any way, just want to mention this because I notice more and
| more many people seem to reduce the evil of WW2 to the
| Holocaust.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| i took pains specifically not to do that. Nowhere in my
| comment did i limit Hitlers impact to Jews alone. You
| failed to read my comment properly. Any reference to the
| Jewish holocaust was in the context of the parent comment.
| Please read my comment again and don't shoehorn your
| preconceived notions into what i said. i was very conscious
| in my wording. One thing i took for granted was that the
| parent and his family were not victimised by the germans
| like other minorities. Or if he did, he doesn't care so
| much
| anoonmoose wrote:
| >Downvote me again if you want
|
| no problem, any time
|
| HN guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on
| comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring
| reading."
|
| I agree, and I vote accordingly.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| you think its a joke?
| anoonmoose wrote:
| nope
| salawat wrote:
| What on earth makes you think calling anyone anything is
| off limits?
|
| I'll call a spade, a spade. Any day of the week, week of
| the month, or month of the year. Not being willing to do
| so is a disservice to everyone around you, and even to
| the person in question, who may be caught in the
| Nietzchean transformation into the very monster they
| putatively fight; something even the people of Israel may
| be served well to remember. It's one thing to be besieged
| on all sides, it's another to ante up atrocity on top of
| atrocity.
|
| You don't get to claim you aren't the monster when you're
| doing the Same. Bloody. Things. It isn't different this
| time. You aren't justified doing it, and we've all seen
| where this movie goes before, your attempts to control
| the narrative aside.
|
| An African American executive espousing abusive workplace
| policies targeting a disadvantaged or otherwise unable to
| realistically defend themselves group of workers is a
| fair game target for being called out as a slave driver
| or plantation owner. A people espousing the employment of
| phrenological methods for the purposes of undesirable
| population control are a dead on ringer for the Nazi
| political regime circa 1940. No it doesn't dilute the
| message. It reinforces that evil is often seductive and
| insidious in it's tendency to convince even good people
| that they are doing the right thing when by all objective
| definitions they most certainly are not.
|
| _You, sir_ , would be well advised to think through the
| consequences of your pleading. To minimize the usability
| of highly disambiguously responded to subject matter is
| to unfasten society's overall moral compass by atrophying
| the ability to sense the fundamental ways in which the
| evil that drove that atrocity was itself a composite of
| goods to the people doing it.
|
| I hear you, and I in no way do not feel sympathy for the
| victims of those atrocities. Quite the opposite. I have a
| near all-encompasding moral mandate to ensure that the
| confluence of circumstances, and lack of accountability
| holding, or voices of reason that led to such vile
| rhetoric taking root _never_ happens again. I will call
| out BLM for their civilly destructive tendencies, and
| lack of restraint of those that step out of line at their
| protests; I will call out the woke movement for doing the
| same thing _you_ espouse, thus ensuring a fields of
| ignorance and uncommemorated infamies evils for
| previously experienced to grow and burst forth out of.
|
| If people weren't so prone to doing evil things thinking
| they were doing the right thing, nobody would have to
| call them out.
|
| Evil, just as hope, springs eternal. It is our duty as
| the gardeners of our species collective morals to be on
| top of it. That does _not happen by locking the ugly away
| in a box or by ignoring it. What you ignore has just as
| much of a positive consequence as what you willfully do.
| The act of willful ignorance is the one great
| unforgivable intellectual sin._
| sunopener wrote:
| I call a spade, Love. Everything arises out of Love, even
| your so-called "evil". Love is the first movement. You
| could unfasten societies overall moral compass and you're
| not going to do diddly-sqat to the Unconditional Love
| that permeates all that is. But don't believe me, I'm
| just a Dark Wizard with nothing to lose, I have embraced
| the Heart of Darkness only to find the Light, I know-see
| everything as Love, transcending time and matter and mind
| itself, the subjects we speak of are absolutely
| arbitrarily absurd, as is Love itself--have you ever
| impregnated yourself and burst forth like a sea-monkey
| giving birth? Remember Love.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| > The evils Hitler inflicted has no parallel.
|
| The evils Hitler inflicted has plenty of parallels. It
| doesn't diminish how bad it was to acknowledge that there
| have been plenty of horrible people throughout history. Post
| WWII PR efforts made Hitler a cultural icon of evil. Let's
| not mince words. He was maximally evil by any relevant
| framework. But putting him on a different plane of moral
| existence is a disservice to those suffering from the evil of
| other, non-hitler, evil people.
| sunopener wrote:
| On six tabs of acid, the mention of Nazi's and whatnot became
| a "cringe" ghost-like voice "Remember Us... Don't forget
| about us...", as if to speak of the obsession the living have
| over the dead, or is it the other way around?
|
| Either way, there was a sort of existential sadness in the
| realization that try as anyone might, one will never do
| anything so great/horrible to be remembered forever, even
| Not-See's and H-Riddler will pass away eventually just as
| easily as that Dude that wrote himself completely out of
| Plato's Cave and didn't stop until he wrote the lethal text
| that upon Plato's reading, wrote himself completely out of
| Plato's mind.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Unfortunately the evils perpetrated by Hitler have many
| parallels. The human race has committed many acts of evil and
| extermination often along genetic lines. We owe the few
| victims who are still alive almost 80 years later our
| sympathy and our commitment to prevent future evil but we do
| not owe them our silence. These events are like it or not
| part of our common historical context.
|
| I absolutely would accuse someone of color of imitating a
| slave,r if the shoe fits wear it. I have never been afraid to
| step on toes and I don't think society should fear to give
| offense if it gets in the way of honest discussion. Contrary
| to your assertion I think discussion keeps the events of the
| holocaust top of mind and relevant. Too many already deny it
| even happened.
|
| Also complaints about getting downvoted attract downvotes.
|
| On the primary topic of discussion do be aware that a Israeli
| terrorist detector might misidentify both Jewish people and
| Palestinians but who do you think would be subject to
| additional scrutiny or mistreatment? Such tools run the risk
| of attaching seemingly scientific justifications to our pre
| existing prejudices.
| Bakary wrote:
| The lessons will lose their potency not because of
| comparisons like these but because most people don't
| particularly care about history and don't want to expend the
| effort of knowing history as opposed to other things they
| could be doing.
|
| Usually, mentioning Nazism doesn't work well due to the way
| it invites flame-wars, to the point where Godwin's Law is
| well known. However, the specific irony they mentioned is in
| fact a valid observation: pseudoscience used by the state
| with grave consequences. I am saying this even though I
| myself have a strong pro-Israel bias.
|
| Asimov mentioned this idea in a discussion with Elie Wiesel
| with reference to the treatment of the Edomites as described
| in scripture. It's an argument that has more to do with
| exploring the nature of political power itself than to
| demonize a specific group. It just so happens that in this
| case we have a group that has experienced one of the most
| poignant extremes of this phenomenon, hence why it comes up
| often.
|
| Is the spotlight often placed repeatedly and with unfair
| frequency on Israel? I personally think it is. But that
| doesn't close off the topic on its own.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Declaring a group or philosophy "off limits," and to say it
| "has no parallel," seems certain to eventually invite just
| such a parallel. Hitler didn't wake up one day, speak an
| incantation that resulted in possession by an eldritch
| creature of unimaginable evil, and then carry out plans for
| dehumanizing world domination. Dehumanizing the other,
| authoritarian fascism, and expansive conquest are common
| themes in human history, and what sets that era and group
| apart is more the confluence of all of those things with the
| time that technology made more horrific things possible than
| previous such events, and more easily documented than
| previous such events. Even in that era, Hitler wasn't alone
| among the Axis power to engage in barbaric atrocities, which
| only focusing on Japanese prison camps in mainland China
| makes clear.
|
| So no, absolutely not, those subject should never be off-
| limits. Already your desire to mythologize the holocaust may
| have caused you to overlook what was happening halfway around
| the globe. Certainly treating the holocaust as a special case
| that could never be repeated seems guaranteed to cause people
| to miss warning signs as those same principles rise in
| popularity again, as history shows they have and do and will.
| NyxWulf wrote:
| I agree that Hitler was evil on a scale unlike any other. I
| also think comparisons should be carefully thought out and
| not tossed out carelessly. I do disagree with the notion that
| we should never compare to Hitler and the Nazis. To
| completely refrain makes them a one off, and treats them as
| if that could never happen again. I think the tools available
| to dictators today make the rise of someone or something like
| that more likely. So I think it is very important that we
| guard against that, and look carefully at the lessons of
| history. Again emphasizing we should be careful and not make
| comparisons callously.
| alacombe wrote:
| Hitler is a Saint compared to Stalin and Mao, maybe even
| the Kims in NK.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > I agree that Hitler was evil on a scale unlike any other.
|
| I feel it is a great danger to think in this way. If you
| disregard the others[0], you may overlook certain important
| aspects of these evil people - especially the factors that
| allowed them to gain popularity, to rise to power, and to
| actually execute their cruel plans. Focusing just on Hitler
| is myopic.
|
| https://fee.org/articles/who-was-the-biggest-mass-
| murderer-i...
| [deleted]
| hughes wrote:
| > Their facial images were obtained from their profiles on
| Facebook or a popular dating website
|
| So, this seems to be doing _profile picture_ recognition, not
| _facial_ recognition. It 's not like they're saying there are
| physical features in your face that give away your political
| affiliation - that is to say, putting two people's bodies under
| the same photographic conditions would probably not create this
| kind of signal.
|
| What this is probably training on is the cues for cultural values
| that we self-select in our most deliberately promoted images of
| ourselves. If you have a carefully-chosen profile picture, it
| probably includes signals of what's important to you,
| _especially_ if you 're using it to attract people with similar
| values.
| function_seven wrote:
| This meme[0] comes to mind. Is this AI picking up on the same
| types of cues represented below?
|
| [0] https://imgur.com/FK0RzKM
| weberer wrote:
| The paper says predicting based on sunglasses use is only 52%
| accurate, so probably not.
| bluecatswim wrote:
| Or this.
|
| https://i.kym-
| cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/330/806/8fc...
| function_seven wrote:
| Thank you. That's a perfect "opposite" collage
| fc373745 wrote:
| > images were tightly cropped around the face and resized to
| 224 x 224 pixels
| marstall wrote:
| still leaves the micro- and macro-expressions, small grooming
| cues (makeup, no makeup, eyebrows trimmed or not), hairline,
| head angle vs. camera, lighting etc. These are all things
| that humans very specifically deploy to define themselves and
| their grouping, and communicate with others. So I am guessing
| a whole universe of personal yes-no qualities, political and
| otherwise, are encoded there, quite intentionally.
| [deleted]
| patwolf wrote:
| At some point in grade school I was home sick for a few days and
| ended up watching C-SPAN for several hours on end. I don't recall
| exactly what was going on politically during that time, but many
| congresspersons were standing up and giving speeches for a few
| minutes at a time.
|
| I eventually started a game in my mind where I'd try to guess
| their political affiliation before the chyron appeared. I'm
| pretty sure by the end I was getting it correct more than 50% of
| the time. Everyone was dressed similarly, but I remember looking
| closely at their tie patterns and hair cuts as clues.
| joncp wrote:
| Upvoted for your use of chyron
| aboringusername wrote:
| I assume there's no way to _actually_ verify how someone may
| choose to vote, assuming there 's no record of that?
|
| I think there's huge value now that everything is being sent into
| a "machine" or "the algorithm" in fucking with it.
|
| Order sex toys from Amazon, show them you're into outrageous
| books and fool them into creating a fake profile of "you", based
| on your spending, browsing and other data you generate.
|
| I'd love to ask a machine what it knows about me, how accurate it
| is, and then switch it all up. I'm too old to vote now (and will
| probably be dead soon) but I'd love to pick a position completely
| unexpected just to throw it off.
|
| Poison the well
| jfk13 wrote:
| > I'm too old to vote now
|
| There are places with a maximum voting age?
| rsynnott wrote:
| Presumably they're a cardinal. Cardinals aged over 80 aren't
| allowed vote for pope.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| This is the only reasonable explanation.
| larkost wrote:
| From Amazon's perspective you have not poisoned the well... you
| are someone who is likely to buy those things. Amazon does not
| care if you really like or even use them, it only cares if you
| buy them.
| yikesshescute wrote:
| The machine will know which sort of person tries to fool it in
| the way that you are trying to fool it.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| This is a fascinating result. On the other hand it is also
| telling .. and maybe dangerous? If we can predict political
| orientation, can we predict if someone is gay? If he is jewish?
| What comes next?
|
| Would't this legitimate all these voices who ever said I can tell
| you by just looking?
| NoOneNew wrote:
| Oh cool, are we going to bring back phrenology as long as its an
| AI powered black box. Sounds wonderful. It's going to be
| impossible for any of this to be abused. I say we should give AI
| power to a select few people who can make sweeping decisions in
| everyone's life. Oo Oo can we bring back eugenics too? What's
| wrong with an AI powered method of selecting the best genes to
| continue the human race. Then we can sterilize the degenerates
| the almighty algorithm picks out.
|
| I swear to fuck. All this praise to repeat the sins of the 20th
| century all over again? But oh no, it's okay because it's done by
| "software engineers".
|
| That and you "atheists techies" are just as fanatically religious
| as jihadists. Instead of a deity, you worship silicon valley and
| algorithms.
|
| Of course tech companies can be trusted with our data.
|
| Theres nothing to fear from putting your life on social media if
| you have nothing to hide.
|
| A select few should have absolute say on what we are allowed to
| even consider "free speech".
|
| Tech companies aren't in it for profit, they're in it to save the
| world because they're the "educated elite".
|
| Just... why is this not being shot down? Are you that blind to
| where it's going to lead? Its literally the same steps every
| other totialirian psychopath took. Mass identification on
| bullshit pseudoscience. Then comes the extermination.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Evil plan: release this model as an app, heavily branded to skew
| usage towards my political enemies, and suggest it to be used to
| find "<opposite side> infiltrators in your midst".
|
| Accuracy issues are a feature not a bug! Now you've sown a bunch
| of discontent and suspicion within their communities.
| cirenehc wrote:
| > "Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age,
| gender, and ethnicity."
|
| So if I just assign the majority label to all of the population
| of a given demographics group, I would get the same result right?
| i.e., predicting "left" for all minorities under 30. You would
| also get ~70% accuracy.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| What do you think 'controlling for age [,etc]' means?
| Applejinx wrote:
| As someone who's studied facial expression in cartooning and
| tried to track down how that's done through face muscles, this
| tracks.
|
| Not only that, it is hackable, and somewhat mutable... and I
| think that can reflect back into one's general attitude on life.
| I'm going to share some personal notes on my own face hacking
| done to serve my purposes as a youtuber and open source coder...
|
| The key phrase here is, "The highest predictive power was
| afforded by head orientation (58%), followed by emotional
| expression (57%). Liberals tended to face the camera more
| directly, were more likely to express surprise, and less likely
| to express disgust." People will respond to you based on what
| your face is doing, and be more or less favorably disposed to you
| if you 'match' where they're at.
|
| Guy Kawasaki's on record as trying to maximize his ability to
| Duchenne smile (crinkle the outside edges of the eyes as your
| cheeks go up) in order to better influence others. You can make
| special efforts to dry your skin there, the better to form heavy
| wrinkles that can come into play, signalling affability and well-
| disposedness as a proper Duchenne smile would do.
|
| But there's another area. If you fret a lot, or glower, your brow
| comes down and wrinkles form where your brow meets your nose.
| This signals suspicion, disgust, hostility. My face-hacking
| involves putting Nivea cream there and on my forehead, keeping
| that skin more flexible and mobile, for a more open affable look.
| But if you're targeting a conservative audience you can do the
| opposite: look at Tucker Carlson sometime. You can cultivate a
| world-weary scowl and it will increase your trust with people
| sharing a similar facial expression, and tend to concentrate your
| viewer's expressions into ones similar to your own (while you
| tell them scowl-worthy things), so long as you have their basic
| trust to start with.
|
| This is all very malleable. Very hackable. You can do it on
| purpose. I don't know if Tucker Carlson does scowl exercises, but
| I know if he botoxed his brow scrunch, he would be less effective
| as a political commentator, because he would be telegraphing the
| intended reaction to his information more weakly.
|
| We're looking at a general connection between human resting
| facial expression, and human overall outlook on life. I didn't
| expect to run across this study but I find it absolutely
| plausible. Almost axiomatic. You can even frame it in ways that
| appear to favor one political side or the other, but the
| underlying principle tells us a lot about how political
| orientations arise.
| lucas_membrane wrote:
| That headline is a bit misleading. The facial recognition has to
| see two faces known to have different political orientations in
| order to deduce which face is which. The 72% classification
| correctness is about what one would expect if only 25% of persons
| had visible features that identified their political orientation
| and the other 75% were completely inscrutable.
| the_arun wrote:
| It is like saying - My intuition usually works great. 78% of the
| times I have been successful with my assumptions/speculations.
| randcraw wrote:
| Assuming this analysis has no problems with method, it's likely
| that the separation of any two groups on a continuous spectrum
| cannot ever reach 100% accuracy. In fact for such multivariate
| groupings as opposing political persuasion, 72% may in fact be as
| good a score as is possible.
|
| Representing the conservative and liberal groups as gaussian
| mixes of multiple atributes, I would expect those two peaks to
| overlap. Perhaps the real surprise is that they overlap no more
| than 28%.
| touringmachine wrote:
| could we please not
| throwitaway1235 wrote:
| This study proves that the liberal surprise face meme is real.
| xnx wrote:
| Isn't it possible in many ML models to then synthesize of the
| images of the features that most strongly predict the
| orientation? Like an archetypical "conservative" or "liberal".
| Could this help identify if the model is picking up on something
| like facial expression, or facial hair?
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| Who wants to take bets on how long before the paper gets
| cancelled and forced retraction?
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I find this fascinating, with no intention to start a political
| battle, how might somebody's biology influence their political
| leanings?
| tryonenow wrote:
| I'd posit that it's some combination of genetic controls on
| things like openness, conscientiousness, threat processing, and
| the fact that people have children who look like them and on
| average live in groups who look somewhat similar.
| jpxw wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orient...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-genes-of-left...
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462...
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12230
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Thank you!
| zapdrive wrote:
| Skin color. Features resulting from inbreeding. Features due to
| your gender. Features resulting from gender change.
| [deleted]
| dogsgobork wrote:
| Inbreeding?
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Yeah, it's not a whole sentence so I'm having difficulty
| grasping the meaning.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I'm not sure where GP is going with this, but for example
| the Habsburger lower lip [1] is a easily identifiable
| feature from inbreeding in Western European nobles. If you
| can identify it it gives you a good clue about the
| socioeconomic class of the person, which gives you a good
| clue about their political orientation.
|
| I'm sure many more subtle examples also exist.
|
| 1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habsburger_Unterlippe
| corpMaverick wrote:
| Is it common to find regular people with this feature in
| normal life? Other than nobles.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean here, can you elaborate?
| minitoar wrote:
| It's pretty well established that age, gender, and skin color
| are correlated with one's voting habits. Here are some stats:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-20...
| rory wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age,
| gender, and ethnicity.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Given the US 2-party system wouldn't accuracy be 50% if you
| just labelled everyone "Democrat". 69% doesn't sound "high"
| in that context.
| gwenzek wrote:
| I'm not sure this is enough. If you classify all old white
| men as Republican you can have 69% accuracy. I'd even argue
| the more such factors you control the less it means
| something.
| nkurz wrote:
| I think you misunderstand what "controlled for" means in
| this case. The way the controlled version of the test
| works is that two pictures are presented at the same
| time. Both subjects will be of the same gender, the same
| ethnicity, and (approximately) the same age. The goal of
| the test is to choose which of the subjects pictured is
| conservative, and which is not. There is no way to obtain
| greater than 50% accuracy by choosing "old white men",
| because both pictures will be of "old white men" (or
| "young black women", or whatever). Something else in the
| photo is being used to obtain the boost in accuracy:
| perhaps facial hair, perhaps obesity, perhaps apparent
| youthfulness, perhaps a guess at sub-ethnicity, perhaps
| pose---but it has to be something other than "old white
| man".
| alcover wrote:
| How would we collectively react if ML proves accurate in
| classifying anti-social traits or worse ? Mythomania, narcissic
| perversion, pedofilia, etc ?
|
| Employers, condos, schools, many communities will want to ML-
| screen candidates, be it officially or not..
| laurent92 wrote:
| We already do it, at least subconsciously. We've also developed
| a side of society who actively tries to counter it, by actively
| seeking out-of-the-normative profiles: The skater look in
| companies is now a thing that helps you get sympathy, being
| female opens up sone avenues, Atlassian's CEO wearing a mohawk
| or Jack Dorsey's looks are all symbols of a society which
| started searching for non-normative people.
|
| Perhaps we'll require AI to do the same. Otherwise AI will be
| an excuse to be racist, saying "It's the stats!".
| alcover wrote:
| OK but attributes like the mohawk are 'playful' in this
| setting. It distinguishes its bearer by making him _look_
| aggressive while still being a good, collaborative member.
|
| On the opposite, ML could indicate that in spite of one's
| hippy looks he really is a potential ruthless monster.
| adolph wrote:
| Ethical AI seems to be a work in progress.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/19/tech/google-ai-ethics-
| investi...
| EricE wrote:
| Sigh - modern day phrenology, but wrapped in AI. Just what we
| need :p
| mc32 wrote:
| I can see making inferences from dress, makeup, style, etc. But,
| this is surprising; "facial morphology"
|
| This skims somewhat close to people who tried to infer
| criminality from facial and cranial characteristics... a century
| ago
| ip26 wrote:
| I don't think it's crazy, what if rural areas (which lean
| conservative) have biased ethnicity? For example, if the Irish,
| Italians & Asians mostly immigrated to urban areas while
| Germans and French mostly immigrated to rural areas, then if
| you can guess the ethnicity from facial structure you can make
| a guess on political leanings.
| souprock wrote:
| A century ago, phrenology failed.
|
| Would it fail if you added a modern AI? How about if you had an
| MRI that provided more-direct information for the AI model?
| Feeding actual brain structure data into an AI is far more
| sophisticated than measuring heads and feeling for lumps.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _But, this is surprising; "facial morphology"_
|
| You could probably get this from how fat their face was, or how
| unhealthy their complexion, e.g.
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5e3z7/gym-bros-more-likely-...
| ml_hardware wrote:
| Haven't seen this mentioned yet, but ResNet-50 is an old model. I
| would probably expect multiple-percentage-point gains from using
| a better (or honestly just larger) architecture and better
| training methodology.
|
| Throw an ML engineer at this task and you could probably do * way
| * better than 72%.
| astrea wrote:
| I question the dataset used for this and the basis. They used
| "self-reported political orientation, age, and gender" and
| "facial images (one per person) were obtained from their profiles
| on Facebook or a popular dating website". I first question the
| ethics of what sounds like a Facebook scrape. Second, I wonder
| how well they normalized across the terrible filters and frames
| and variations in pose. Finally, I question the basis in regards
| to the ability to gauge one's "openness to experience" let alone,
| say, "opinion on immigration policy" from micro-expressions in
| the face (or at least those which could be interpreted by a VGG
| based facial recognition algorithm).
|
| Edit: One last rant about this palm-reading-esque pseudoscience:
| I hate that this was put out in the universe, and thus
| potentially giving the wrong person ideas.
| endisneigh wrote:
| What's a useful application of this, other than more advertising?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Dating app that constrains to like minded potential partners,
| instead of relying on political signaling in profiles.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| More echo chamber...
| PeterisP wrote:
| Well, it's an app for dating, not an app for finding
| "change my mind" political debate; so being an "echo
| chamber" is kind of what's desirable for that app.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Can you explain to me how that's a bad thing? Differences
| among people do not make them more United and their bonds
| stronger. Literally the opposite is true.
| sakopov wrote:
| It's a terrible thing that politics influence this at
| all. A few months ago I was discussing this with my SO
| and we came to the conclusion that ~5 years ago neither
| of us would care about each other's political stances.
| Today, politics have infiltrated literally every single
| facet of life and became a mania of sorts for many even
| non-political types. Ignoring it is difficult to say the
| least. With that said, political differences, in my
| humble opinion, is a great thing as long as they're not
| radical and within normal realms. But, in a polarized
| climate we live in now radical political views are all
| the rage and it'd be very hard to dismiss in a
| relationship.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Differences among people do not make them more United
| and their bonds stronger. Literally the opposite is true
|
| I tend to agree. It's why I find all of the recent
| "Diversity is our strength" stuff so puzzling.
|
| I'm not against diversity, I just recognize that it
| generally results in at least some interpersonal
| challenges to overcome, not necessarily unity.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Sic transit "E pluribus unum"?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pluribus_unum
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_pot
| imwillofficial wrote:
| And as America becomes more different from one person to
| the next, how is that whole "melting pot" idea working?
|
| Multiculturalism is dead.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Former Kaiser of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph, had a
| personal motto of "Viribus Unitis". That means "With
| United Forces". It was also used by A-H military.
|
| In practice, the multicultural empire was greatly
| weakened by incessant nationalist bickering.
|
| Once you have to declare that X is your strength or
| something similar, it most likely isn't.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Good counter-example.
|
| I would argue that Diversity is necessary, but not
| sufficient.
|
| ("E pluribus unum" is -of course- the motto of the United
| States of America. Not the least of nations!)
|
| _" If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable,
| and there's always more than one way to view a situation.
| What's true for the group is also true for the
| individual. It's simple: Overspecialize, and you breed in
| weakness. It's slow death. "_
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| You have been found to have committed wrongthink by an
| automated bot. Please prepare for unpersoning. Have a
| nice day.
| idrios wrote:
| Because the commonalities that exist between people help
| them overcome their differences, understand each other
| better and reflect on themselves.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I'm positing that more differences = weaker relationship.
| Are we agreeing?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| That depends a bit. Differences can complement each
| other.
|
| Some people might be better at some things, while others
| are better at other things. (thus combining strengths)
|
| Some people might actually be really bad at some other
| things yet again, while others could happen to be very
| good at them (thus covering each others weaknesses)
|
| When you have people with different backgrounds and
| training all working together you can do things together
| that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do separately.
| idrios wrote:
| For sure. I was just stating why echo chambers are bad.
| In the context of a dating app, I think dating right now
| suffers from a totally diffent and unrelated effect where
| the pool of potential partners has become so big that
| people have unrealistic expectations in what they want in
| a partner. So in that context I actually think anything
| that narrows the list of potential partners is a good
| thing.
|
| But still, it's yet another facet of our lives where we
| deal with disagreements by putting them out of sight
| rather than communicating and understanding.
| cwkoss wrote:
| We know incest increases the likelihood of genetic disease. I
| wonder if a dating app could make a "faces too similar"
| filter to reduce chances of genetic disease in offspring
| based on just faces.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Having kids with a cousin is about the same genetic risk as
| a woman over 35 having a child.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Finding potential dissidents?
| goatinaboat wrote:
| Like https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/technology/alibaba-
| china-...
| [deleted]
| mmaunder wrote:
| Understanding why it is predictable and using that to either
| exclude ossified groups from targeted campaigns to save
| resources or focusing on them more tightly if they're swing.
| [deleted]
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| I am curious about something: is there a possibility that this is
| due to technical aspects of the images?
|
| For instance:
|
| The type of camera used will vary in ways correlated with the
| person's lifestyle. Richer people will be more likely to use a
| recent flagship, for instance. Various brands have different
| popularity with different groups. Perhaps the algorithm is
| picking up on the different models of camera?
|
| The pictures are drawn from various different websites. Perhaps
| these websites use different software or different settings to
| compress images and the algorithm can pick up on that.
|
| Perhaps old photos are compressed with different settings than
| new ones, or may have been re-encoded multiple times.
|
| A more tech-savvy user is more likely to encode their pictures
| properly, while a user who is less knowledgeable might upload an
| image that has artifacts. Similarly, some users will upload
| images that are out of focus or poorly-lit.
| danaliv wrote:
| There's an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't
| bother to check the article before raising their methodological
| objections, so let's get these out of the way here.
|
| - Yes, they controlled for objects appearing in the pictures that
| might indicate political affiliation. The images are tightly
| cropped around the face. See Methods.
|
| - Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a
| human classifier. They gave the same test to humans, who did much
| worse than the model. See Abstract, Introduction, and Results.
|
| - Yes, this is doing more than just detecting a person's race,
| age, and/or gender. The classifier is still accurate when they
| compare people with the same race, age, and gender. See Results.
|
| If you want to discuss _actual_ limitations in the study, here
| are some the author points out:
|
| - "A more detailed picture could be obtained by exploring the
| links between political orientation and facial features extracted
| from images taken in a standardized setting while controlling for
| facial hair, grooming, facial expression, and head orientation."
|
| - "Another factor affecting classification accuracy is the
| quality of the political orientation estimates. While the
| dichotomous representation used here (i.e., conservative vs.
| liberal) is widely used in the literature, it offers only a crude
| estimate of the complex interpersonal differences in ideology.
| Moreover, self-reported political labels suffer from the
| reference group effect: respondents' tendency to assess their
| traits in the context of the salient comparison group."
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _avalanche of people commenting on this who didn 't bother to
| check the article before raising their methodological
| objections_
|
| This is a norm nowadays, and a bad one. In some cases it's
| carelessness or laziness (why go to the effort of reading the
| article when posting an uninformed contradiction will provide
| free explanations), in others trolling or deliberate
| propagation of misinformation.
| [deleted]
| retrac wrote:
| I suspect we're going to see the same thing we saw in the model
| that can detect sexual orientation with much better than chance
| odds. It was, apparently, detecting that gay men tend to take
| or select images of themselves for a dating profile using a
| different angle, better lighting, and possibly differences in
| things like hairstyle and beards.
|
| Very anecdotally, I've noticed a possible weak correlation
| between certain kinds of beard styles and political leanings in
| men.
| thechao wrote:
| This is all discussed in the paper. The answer is that
| liberals are more likely to show surprise, less likely to
| show disgust and faced the camera directly. Much less
| suggestive was the wearing of beards and glasses where were
| very nearly in the noise.
| lwansbrough wrote:
| Perhaps it's checking if the person took a selfie in a car
| with sunglasses on.
| SamBam wrote:
| Obviously it's looking at _something_. I feel like everyone
| is jumping to assuming the authors are implying it 's somehow
| in the person's facial structure, but it doesn't say that.
|
| If it's looking at the quality of the photo, or the trim of
| the beard, that's still interesting. Among other things, it
| means that you know analyses like this might start cropping
| up everywhere you submit your photo (job application cover
| letter?), and also that humans might be doing this innately
| with photos and not even realizing it.
| sslayer wrote:
| This must be how god feels.
| hntrader wrote:
| Humans might try, but the same study says they're not good
| at it with only 55 percent accuracy.
| Tarsul wrote:
| question would be if a trained human is better than a
| machine. AlphaGo was deemed stronger than humans only
| once it beat the best Go player.
| gus_massa wrote:
| The 55% accuracy is a from a cite about a different study
| with a different set of photos and a different question.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232255935_Accura
| cy_...
| dmurray wrote:
| Oh, that's really important. It's the only important
| comparison - I don't believe 72% means anything on its
| own. The study either needs to try the exact same
| methodology on humans, or to find a metastudy that
| consistently shows humans perform well below that on
| these tests.
|
| To be fair to the authors, the information isn't hidden.
| It's prominent in the introduction, just not in the
| abstract.
| SamBam wrote:
| Why does this need to be better than humans to be
| interesting?
|
| It's still extremely interesting to me that a program can
| determine with over 70% accuracy a person's political
| orientation from a cropped photo, without taking age sex
| or race into consideration.
|
| Among other things, it means it can do that to 10 million
| photos, which you'd have to pay a lot of humans to do if
| you wanted it done otherwise.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Unfortunately people dont have to be good at something to
| advocate it or force it on others. Just look at all the
| 'detoxes, random diets, cultural remedies like trying to
| cure plague with wisky, bloodletting etc.
|
| Our deductive powers havent improved much, they just
| moved to areas of our lives that are more nebulous.
| Fundamentally bloodletting and 'looks like a hippie, and
| hippies shouldn't work for a bank" are about on the same
| footing
| [deleted]
| TomSwirly wrote:
| Please consider that "conservatism" in 2021 isn't just a
| political leaning - it requires one to believe a very great
| number of hateful beliefs that are provably false, and
| therefore to be constantly disgusted and angry.
|
| Is it so unreasonable that these feelings of disgust and
| anger are simply readable by machines on people's faces?
| nullserver wrote:
| Got into Art a few years ago. Took classes and everything.
|
| People like when I take photos now because my come out
| better. I simply got a lot better at understanding lighting
| and angles.
| rednerrus wrote:
| People are desperately trying to tell you who they are with
| everything that they do.
| [deleted]
| bhk wrote:
| The 72% number is the result when _not_ controlling for
| demographics. When controlling for demographics, the results
| ranged from 65% to 71% accuracy.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1/figures/2
|
| It makes we wonder what the accuracy would be if they
| controlled for demographics at a smaller granularity, like sub-
| ethnicities.
|
| Furthermore, it appears that the Canadian dating site data set
| was 54% conservative, so an algorithm that always guessed
| conservative would be correct 54% of the time. From the article
| I can't tell what the balance was for the other data sets.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| "The accuracy is expressed as AUC, or a fraction of correct
| guesses when distinguishing between all possible pairs of
| faces--one conservative and one liberal." - so no way to
| guess better than 50%.
| bhk wrote:
| Ah, yes. I missed that.
| bhk wrote:
| Also: "Overall, the average out-of-sample accuracy was
| 68%..." (again, this does not control for demographics).
|
| I would not call it "prediction" when the "predictor" was
| trained on the data set you're testing it against. The out-
| of-sample number would be more fairly called prediction. It's
| unclear what the number would be for out-of-sample accuracy
| _corrected for demographics_ , but we could extrapolate a
| guess of 64%.
| vipa123 wrote:
| You sir/madame, are a saint!
| gzer0 wrote:
| Good points and summary. Adding on to that, the following was
| from the abstract about 2 sentences in. Seems like some users
| do enjoy jumping straight to the comments!
|
| * Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of
| liberal-conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance
| (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item
| personality questionnaire (66%).
|
| * Accuracy was similar across countries (the U.S., Canada, and
| the UK), environments (Facebook and dating websites), and when
| comparing faces across samples.
|
| * Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age,
| gender, and ethnicity.
| hntrader wrote:
| "controlling for ... ethnicity"
|
| There's significant signal buried in here that is likely not
| controlled for, depending on how granular their controls are.
|
| White-German and White-Italian are much more (10-13 percent)
| likely to be conservative leaning than White-Irish or White-
| British.
|
| Hispanic-Cuban are more likely to be conservative leaning
| than Hispanic-Mexican.
| timkam wrote:
| Now, what would be interesting is to build a model that
| accounts for this "knowledge" and see if it can beat the
| out-of-the-box classifier :-) I'd assume it can, and the
| question is: how far can a bit of manual modeling bring us?
| xxpor wrote:
| In the US or generally?
| hntrader wrote:
| In the US
| cies wrote:
| The words conservative and liberal have wildly other
| meanings outside of the US. Even in the US they are not
| well agreed upon (especially the definitions, people seem
| to know which one to pick though when they have to).
| nullserver wrote:
| Some dumbed down US conservative principles. A
| conservative may only care about some of these.
|
| Financial: balanced budget types.
|
| Government: Common defense, otherwise minimal.
|
| Responsibility: Your job to feed and cloth yourself.
|
| Morals: don't kill babies.
|
| Religious: Act like God watches you and you will be
| judged.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Their section about demographics controls in the paper was
| really unclear (kinda surprised you can get this published
| being so vague).
|
| What does a final number with the controls active even
| mean? I doubt accuracy was identical within each grouping
| they used. Even the groupings are really unclear in the
| paper (at most 4 ethnic groups,no idea how they did age,
| etc.)
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _- Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip
| and a human classifier. They gave the same test to humans, who
| did much worse than the model. See Abstract, Introduction, and
| Results._
|
| Where do they say that they gave the same test for to humans?
| All I find is the reference [15] that points to
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232255935_Accuracy_...
| that cite a previous article about a _different_ set of photos
| and a _different_ question.
| robocat wrote:
| And _some_ humans may be very good classifiers, or would be
| if trained.
| dmurray wrote:
| They very much didn't. Downvoted the GP for taking the snarky
| tone about "an avalanche of people commenting on this who
| didn't bother to check the article before raising their
| methodological objections", but then mis-characterizing the
| methodology himself.
| fcantournet wrote:
| So even filtering for the extremely limited number of things
| that you allow us to find problematic, by their own admission :
| - they know that it's actually probably "working" (lol 72%)
| because of other biases they didn't take into account -
| Ultimately it puts people into 2 bins which are both huge and
| disparate and reduce complexe multi-dimensional elements to a
| meaningless binary.
|
| cool cool cool.
| SamBam wrote:
| I don't really understand this comment. You don't think it's
| surprising or interesting that it could predict with 70%
| accuracy the political orientation of two different older
| white males? Or two younger non-white females?
|
| I found this to be a surprising result.
|
| What the mechanism? Is it the haircut? The facial expression?
| The quality of the photo? Maybe. Do those count as "biases
| that they don't take into account?" Could be. Would it be
| interesting to learn what those "biases" are? Yes!
| gzer0 wrote:
| This is statistically significant. The implications are
| massive. The authors are signalling it _might_ be worthwhile
| to take a look at the exponential growth of these
| technologies.
|
| 72% is much better than:
|
| * random chance (50%)
|
| * human accuracy (55%)
|
| * 100-item personality questionnaire (66%)
| andybak wrote:
| Surely the ability to sort people into meaningless bins on
| facial features alone is worthy of note?
|
| Let's say you created an arbitrary classification ("number of
| letters in street address" or "cosine of age in minutes") and
| an alorithm could predict that based on a photo alone. That
| would surely indicate that the classification wasn't
| arbitrary and there was something more interesting happening?
|
| At the very least you'd want to dig deeper.
| abecedarius wrote:
| > lol 72%
|
| It takes 33 bits to single out a human. 72% means a
| substantial fraction of a bit -- it's not much, but combine
| it with a few dozen other clues of similar magnitude and
| you're really getting somewhere.
| pretendscholar wrote:
| Scoffing at 22% over random? Lets play poker some time.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| >Ultimately it puts people into 2 bins which are both huge
| and disparate and reduce complexe multi-dimensional elements
| to a meaningless binary
|
| Binary, yes. Meaningless, no. Having multi-dimensional
| information is better than binary information, but having
| binary information is better than no information (or
| guessing). Telling me the temperature, humidity, wind, cloud
| cover, and precipitation outside gives me more information
| than just telling me it is hot or cold outside. But knowing
| if it is hot or cold outside is still far better than not
| knowing anything. You can still make decisions and take
| actions based on limited information, which you could not do
| with no information.
| gvd wrote:
| IS it a meat head / not meat head detector?
| mywittyname wrote:
| There's evidence of inheritability of political orientation,
| since it is tied to personality traits. Given that, it makes
| sense that it is possible to predict political orientation
| through looks alone. After all, looks are also inherited
| traits.
|
| The article gets into this a little bit. They are able to
| predict traits like intelligence and honesty by looks alone.
| tcmb wrote:
| That reasoning sounds like a logical fallacy:
|
| 1. Personality traits are inherited 2. Personality traits
| influence political views 3. Looks are inherited ->
| Therefore, looks influence political views (?)
|
| "A is X and does Y" "B is also X, so B does Y as well."
| weberer wrote:
| I think the statement is that looks and political views are
| both observable variables that are dependent the same
| latent variable (genetics). And that through this link, you
| may be able to (at least partially) infer one observable
| variable when given the other.
| MikeHolman wrote:
| I think this is a very dangerous line of study. I can easily
| see these results getting used to forward racism and other
| appearance based discrimination.
| xmaayy wrote:
| I really hope not. 72% is impressive. But, when you're
| thinking of making any real world decisions based on it,
| 72% shouldn't really be considered much better than chance.
| jfengel wrote:
| You shouldn't make any decisions on it, but it's striking
| that it works at all. It would be interesting to know
| why.
|
| I have my suspicions about that, which are that people
| tend to mimic those they see around them. Which could
| well extend to how they hold their faces unconsciously.
| It would be not unlike the way we develop similar accents
| to those around us, just with different muscles. But
| that's a hypothesis that would have to be tested.
|
| Sadly, if it holds up, it almost certainly would lead to
| people making real world decisions.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I think people are already making those real world
| decisions, with or without being able to automate the
| process. The real implication here is that political
| ideology owes more to raw emotional biases than it does
| to analysis and introspection. It echoes a person's
| general attitude toward life in the absence of specifics.
| I would say this is not a revolutionary observation, but
| it's a confirmation through experimental means.
| Krasnol wrote:
| This is Hitlers head/nose measuring all over again....
| plutonorm wrote:
| Truth doesn't really care about your sensibilities. It
| seems there is actually an art to finding the mind's
| construction in the face!
|
| What this is really telling us is that we should not be
| judging others on their political, sexual, ideological,
| whatever-ical affiliations. A person is a person and we
| should value them for that and only that. These other
| qualities may be more or less useful in some sense, but not
| in the sense that counts - that they are a thinking feeling
| person who deserves our respect.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| > Truth doesn't really care about your sensibilities.
|
| I think the GP was questioning the wisdom of seeking a
| detail answer on this question; not whether or not the
| question _has_ an objectively true answer.
| majormajor wrote:
| Do you think people hundreds of years ago with different
| common political views - some of which we'd find
| abhorrent now - had different faces too?
|
| Someone should test this classifier on old images. Maybe
| it's just identifying fashion, not facial structure.
| Applejinx wrote:
| No, what would change is that you'd get people from
| hundreds of years ago expressing conservatism or
| liberalism _for the time_. It's neither fashion nor
| facial structure, it's more or less intensity of facial
| scrunch vs. innocence, or wariness vs invitation. This is
| going to hold true for all humans and indeed for similar
| enough animals so long as they have the ability for
| comparable postures and expressions (dogs and cats would
| have the capacity for posture but I think dogs are more
| capable of brow expression/mobility, and of course
| monkeys and apes are close parallels to human expression)
|
| So you could, in a limited sense, tell whether you've got
| a hippie cat or one who wants the hippies to get off its
| litterbox :) the latter will give you more side-eye, and
| more of a narrowed gaze.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| A lot has changed, including nutrition. I would not be
| surprised if 17th century skeletons and body builds were
| observably different from the contemporary ones. In fact,
| at least height and weight of an average person is fairly
| different compared to the past.
| majormajor wrote:
| And those are all non-genetic factors along the lines of
| other non-controversial things like "how wealthy you are
| will influence your political views," versus things
| supporting the "all political views are sacrosanct and
| can't be judged, because people can't help themselves"
| direction that 'plutonorm was suggesting.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > What this is really telling us is that we should not be
| judging others on their political, sexual, ideological,
| whatever-ical affiliations.
|
| 1. Where did you get that from the article?!
|
| 2. One of these things is not like the others. Many
| "political" beliefs are perfectly well worth judging
| people on.
|
| Nazism is a political belief. Fascism is a political
| belief. White supremacism is a political belief - it's
| also racist, but it's a belief about how society is to be
| arranged, which is to say, with white people in charge.
|
| And Trumpism is a political belief, one that requires you
| to believe the most horrible lies and revere the most
| horrible human.
|
| I have absolutely not the slightest issue in the world
| judging people to be loathsome because of their loathsome
| political beliefs.
|
| I have no problems detesting Nazis, Fascists, the KKK or
| any number of people with proudly evil political beliefs.
|
| Why one might think political beliefs are off-limits with
| respect to moral, ethical or personal judgements is hard
| to understand. Surely then one could hang the word
| "political" on any vile belief and then say, "You can't
| judge me! I want redheads to be sterilized, but for
| political reasons only!"
|
| Indeed, the sorts of people who demand that humans not be
| loathed for their political beliefs are often people who
| have loathsome political beliefs.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| > Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of
| humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that
| individuals should not be judged or constrained by the
| average properties of their group.
|
| - Steve Pinker
| mywittyname wrote:
| I honestly don't see the danger here. This is an
| incremental addition to an already very large body of
| research that's existed for a while.
|
| And racism isn't rational. You can't combat racism by
| suppressing research. If a study came out demonstrating
| that Alpha Race is smarter than Beta Race, and that Beta
| Races is smarter than Gamma Race. The racist Betas might
| use that study to justify their hate for Gammas, but they'd
| find an entire different reason to hate Alphas.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Traditionally, by saying they have the wrong
| personalities.
| gnaritas wrote:
| There's no such thing as a dangerous line of study.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Personality is only weakly tied to political view according
| to the above comment... so... ?
| dheera wrote:
| I would be very interested if instead if they first passed it
| through an indepedently-trained emotion classifier, and then
| look to see if the emotion vectors alone can predict liberal
| vs. conservative to some degree.
| marstall wrote:
| theory: seeing as these are pictures that were very specifically
| "taken" in a given context - with a camera, by someone, for
| something (dating, facebook, etc.), would it be possible that the
| algorithm is picking up differences more in how people relate to
| those conditions, vs facial morphology? For example in the
| example photo, i would have also guessed that the model was a
| liberal. But I think it was more about the something in the WAY
| she was smiling and posing for the camera, and i guess also her
| specific grooming - hair and makeup.
| cwkoss wrote:
| I wonder if accuracy for women is higher? I'd expect so,
| because women, via makeup, tend to have more cultural
| information encoded on their faces.
| Kluny wrote:
| It's an easy trick when there's only two options: red and blue.
|
| - The rest of the word.
| yikesshescute wrote:
| Then going long or short on a security is easy?
| firebaze wrote:
| Reality please don't bite me. This will probably be an Oxymoron
| :)
|
| An interesting question, to me, is: how would you (personally)
| react if such an controversial and stigmatized factoid would be
| proven true at more than 5 sigma?
|
| Would you be shocked? Or would you accept the outcome? And which
| of both would tell what of yourself?
| karmasimida wrote:
| Is this surprising?
|
| We all know there is a demographics/ethnics factor in people's
| political affiliation.
| mabbo wrote:
| I think the key line is how much better this system is than
| humans attempting the same task:
|
| > Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of
| liberal-conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance
| (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item
| personality questionnaire (66%).
|
| This isn't a matter of "recognize that old white people are
| conservative", because people will do that already, and they know
| all those biases. And the system doesn't lose much accuracy when
| comparing otherwise similar people.
|
| This system is picking up on things we don't notice. Maybe it's
| the photos themselves (they are self-selected), maybe it's micro
| expressions in the face, maybe it's something else entirely.
|
| But damn it's neat and maybe frightening. Imagine if your next
| hiring manager had a quiet little camera in the corner and chose
| you based on your predicted approval of unions.
| boublepop wrote:
| > This isn't a matter of "recognize that old white people are
| conservative", because people will do that already
|
| I think your giving too much credit to humans, and ignoring the
| fact that most people would lose a lot of point due to a bias
| towards expectation that people who are attractive or look well
| off or happy would share their own political beliefs.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Presumably some humans are terrible at this and others are as
| good or better than the machine. Of course, even someone who
| was very good (say 80% accurate) would be wrong about 1 person
| in 5.
|
| Being honest about this equips a person with a useful hunch
| capability that will provide a long-term edge (perhaps as a
| detective, or in sales, or any of many other contexts where
| people-reading can help); less honest practitioners might
| become con artists, or consultants/coaches whose methods are
| not reproducible or even formalized such as Dave Grossman:
| https://www.insider.com/bulletproof-dave-grossman-police-tra...
| cambalache wrote:
| > This system is picking up on things we don't notice.
|
| In the case of men at least some studies have found a
| correlation between testosterone level and political
| orientation, something that matches well with my anecdotal
| observations. It is not outlandish to think this manifests in
| visual cues in even something as limited as a pic.
|
| https://www.mdcthereporter.com/low-testosterone-left/
| drno123 wrote:
| I have no idea why this comment got downvoted. This is the
| most scientific explanation possible. In males, more
| testosterone induces more risk taking, while low testosterone
| is linked to risk avoidance. Left-wing policies ("nanny
| state") cater to people who avoid risks; people who are risk
| takers prefer right wing policies. Testosterone also affects
| muscle growth and facial characteristics.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Probably being penalized for linking to an overtly snarky
| opinion article rather than a scholarly source. Jack-in-
| the-box links tend not to fare well on HN.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I've learned some things about testosterone 'cos it's
| interesting. You're slanting it.
|
| People with more testosterone are more unsatisfied,
| aggressive, sexually driven, restless, and disappointed.
| This has nothing to do with something as apparently
| laudable as risk-taking vs. risk-avoiding, and in fact it's
| quite easy to be loaded with testosterone and yet
| constantly fretting over enemies and bad stuff you expect
| to happen, leading to conservative choices (not risky or
| experimental choices).
|
| Aggressiveness and dissatisfaction are a better match for
| testosterone, which MAY lead to risk taking but are just as
| likely to lead to efforts to control and suppress perceived
| risks.
|
| There's merit in the effects of testosterone but you're off
| base in terms of what you think it does.
| souprock wrote:
| Aggressiveness is only indirectly related to
| testosterone. Testosterone makes a person defend status.
| Researchers have created situations where status is
| determined by generosity, and they found that in these
| situations the people with more testosterone were more
| generous.
|
| Aggressiveness is only going to have that association
| with testosterone when aggressiveness seems like the best
| strategy to maintain status.
| dpoochieni wrote:
| Haha every older man I know who does testosterone is more
| satisfied and overall happier. Where did you find this?
| cmehdy wrote:
| What makes you think your hiring manager isn't already doing
| that based on their interaction with you and your looks? Even
| simply subconsciously?
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| The point is this system would perform better than them.
| Maybe we will need to learn how to lie to robots?
| cmehdy wrote:
| On the other hand their mental coin flip is going to be
| documented nowhere, whereas the use of ML in their decision
| could be traceable and they could get sued for it.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| You haven't already? I thought we had plenty of practice
| most teenagers do so until turn eighteen, many answer
| recruiting personality surveys with what they think the
| employer wants, etc.
|
| Heck one of the middle school career day quiz suggestions
| recommended looking at what is listed with and without the
| plan on going to college option check.
| yarcob wrote:
| As noted by gus_massa in another thread, the 55% figure for
| human accuracy is from a different study with a different
| datasets, so it's questionable how comparable the results are.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I would like to see more comparisons against the _best_ humans
| at a task
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| _But damn it 's neat and maybe frightening. Imagine if your
| next hiring manager had a quiet little camera in the corner and
| chose you based on your predicted approval of unions._
|
| This is the dystopian vision of the future I come to HN for.
| Bravo!
|
| (It's also why I do ML, since I'll be on the front lines to
| notice if something like that is being deployed. Or at least
| somewhat more likely.)
| mabbo wrote:
| > This is the dystopian vision of the future I come to HN for
|
| It's what I'm here for. Fascinating technology- how might I
| ruin the world with it?
| alcover wrote:
| Sorry for my platitude but ML is only a tool. Nefarious
| usage gets counter-balnced by e.g. identifying tumours.
| SolarNet wrote:
| > I think the key line is how much better this system is than
| humans attempting the same task:
|
| My key issue is: why does that matter, humans _should not be
| doing it in the first place_ , why do we need a machine that's
| even better at it?
| csomar wrote:
| This should be impressive considering that humans are very good
| at picking other human faces.
| corpMaverick wrote:
| Who knew. Being a progressive/moderate makes people more
| attractive...and improves your sense of humor.
| [deleted]
| dilawar wrote:
| May be the world polarising into two kind of extreme
| polarisization: one with a sense of humor and one without it. And
| it has a noticeable effect on the face. I'd love to see few
| samples of faces from each class.
| umvi wrote:
| Both the far left and far right have no sense of humor because
| both have lost all sense of reasonableness.
|
| On the right you have Trump cultists who loyally cling to every
| word he utters, regardless of it is true or not, spreading lies
| and misinformation on social media about voter fraud, vaccines,
| etc. You also have covid denial on the right where "the
| constitution" is used as a bludgeon to resist any reasonable
| public health policy like mask usage.
|
| On the left you have the wokeness mobs that go around trying to
| cancel/censor/destroy every historical figure/book/statue who
| didn't live a perfect life and destroying careers of anyone who
| says the wrong word or makes a bad analogy. You also have covid
| zealotry on the left where "covid deaths prevented" is
| prioritized above _all else_ and we can 't re-open schools, re-
| open businesses, visit grandparents, or otherwise get back to
| normal life (even after mass vaccination) until 100% of _all_
| remaining unknowns are known (even if it takes another 2 years
| of masking, zooming, and hermiting).
|
| These are all very recent examples.
| A12-B wrote:
| The far left is pretty good at making fun of the right for
| saying silly things like this, actually.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| This made me think a bit - I imagine most of the polarization
| these days comes from a vocal minority of either side, and that
| 95%+ of people are much more relaxed about politics (and still
| have a sense of humour) than we imagine from the media.
|
| So it would be interesting to see if hyperpartisans could be
| separated from moderates by their appearance (just to be clear,
| I dont believe in phrenology, I imagine its information leaking
| from other aspects of presentation and background).
|
| With respect to humour, the modern lack of humor seems to focus
| on not offending people, which I admit I dont understand but I
| could guess is predicated on the feeling that laughter is
| somehow equated to divisive mocking, as opposed to fun. I bring
| this up only because it reminds me a lot of Umberto Eco's "The
| Name of The Rose" where the 13th century religious leaders were
| arguing that laughter was inappropriate, and Jesus never
| laughed, somehow rooted in the belief that finding humor in
| things admitted the possibility of laughing at aspects of
| religion and therefore not taking them seriously.
|
| Anyway, your comment made me think, so thanks.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Or alternatively, two groups who each think the other has no
| sense of humour.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| I'm incredibly curious which political group has a sense of
| humor in your mind. Because I'm going to guess most folks would
| say, "my political group".
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Can you read my mind?!? ::Looks at you with suspicion::
|
| In all seriousness, I haven't followed closely, so I don't
| know who hates Dr. Seuss lately, they are the baddies.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| I think it's yet another situation where everyone is
| escalating hard from "hey, there are some stereotypes in
| this particular media that are problematic when presented
| uncritically".
|
| That initial idea somehow turns into, "The left hates Dr.
| Seuss" and wild slippery slopes about book burning.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| The left is literally pushing for the banning of a
| childhood classic with no racial problems. No slippery
| slope needed.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That isn't true. There was a scholarly paper that came
| out in 2019 observing that a few of Dr Seuss's many
| children's books included racial stereotypes that are
| dated to the point of being offensive, and that
| Geisel/Seuss had also produced a _lot_ of adult cartoons
| that were overtly racist, a complicating factor for
| educators who used his books to to educate children about
| discrimination.
|
| https://sophia.stkate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=105
| 0&c...
|
| Recently the publisher announced it was going to stop
| selling those - I think it was 6 books out of 107 in the
| catalog. There was no pressure campaign or wave of
| outrage driving it.
|
| Perhaps you should choose better news sources, as the
| ones you are using seem to be serving you poorly.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Ebay is banning accounts that sell Dr. Seuss books. Fact.
|
| The outrage over racial overtones came from a left
| aligned organization. Fact.
|
| It was carried on and cheered on by left leaning people.
| Fact.
|
| People on the right don't use words like "problematic"
| and "racialized undertones"
|
| That's on you guys.
|
| This is from The horses mouth:
|
| " Six popular Dr. Seuss books -- including And to Think
| That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran the Zoo --
| "will stop being published because of racist and
| insensitive imagery, the business that preserves and
| protects the author's legacy said Tuesday," The
| Associated Press reported.
|
| "These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and
| wrong," Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press
| in a statement marking the late author and illustrator's
| birthday."
|
| ^ The above is just stupid.
| sethc2 wrote:
| And I always thought it was funny how in classic books from
| authors like Jane Austen they'd always talk about a person's
| physiognomy, and how you could draw strong conclusions about them
| from it. Maybe it wasn't so bogus after all?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I think there's quite likely something to that. I seem to have
| better-than-average intuition in this area and it's handy, but
| not reliable enough that I'm willing to build causal
| explanations on it.
|
| Sadly, uncritical application of physiognomy has led to many
| bad outcomes involving discrimination or institutionalization,
| and the ideas are often used to prop up racism or other sorts
| of prejudice, so it's not much different from pseudosciences
| like phrenology or palm reading. Consider too that in Austen's
| time manual labor was much more common and social/job mobility
| much lower, so there were a lot of subtle clues that could be
| picked up from someone's appearance. Think how many folk tales
| center on someone's ability (or not) to cross social boundaries
| by modifying their appearance.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| A data point suggesting bias is more accurate than a coin flip...
| bichiliad wrote:
| > Accuracy was similar across countries (the U.S., Canada, and
| the UK)
|
| This sounds more like people who are from minority groups (or who
| look like they are, to a computer vision algorithm) are more
| likely to agree with left-leaning policies, which probably has
| more to do with the policies in those countries than it does with
| any sort of genetic features. I feel like this might not work as
| well in non-Western countries, for example.
| ucha wrote:
| "Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age,
| gender, and ethnicity."
| callesgg wrote:
| So your race accounts for less than 3% despite 89% of all
| black people voting left, that seams strange.
|
| I did not do the full math but just the ballpark numbers I
| entered in to my calculator says that it should account for
| about 11%.
|
| * 89% according to numbers from nbc
|
| Edit: So say I assume that every African American person I
| see votes left. 13% of the population is African American 89%
| of them actually vote left. 13% * 89% = 11% Then I simply
| guess on all non African American a 50/50 shot. I should then
| be right 50% + 11% = 61% of the time.
| rayiner wrote:
| The study looked at political orientation (liberal versus
| conservative or left versus right), not political
| affiliation (Democrat versus republican). 89% of African
| Americans vote Democrat for complex historical and
| sociological reasons. But they have a large diversity of
| political opinions: https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-
| roots-of-black-politic.... About 30% of Black people today
| identify as conservative, versus 10% in 1970. But
| Democratic Party affiliation has been in the 90% range
| throughout that whole period.
| [deleted]
| callesgg wrote:
| Hum i take this back the calculation should be 0.13 * 0.89
| + 0.87 * 0.5 = 55% total accuracy
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Is it also 72% accurate for income level?
|
| I think the incomes of people on the right skew lower, or they
| have fashions for makeup, facial hair etc. I'd be interested in
| an adversarial attack on the classifier.
| gruez wrote:
| Can we run the model in reverse (eg. deepdream) to see what the
| stereotypical liberal/conservative looks like?
| jm_l wrote:
| The main classifier they use is using logistic regression, so
| no. They do mention that a deep nn had similar performance, but
| even if you deep-dreamed it you wouldn't get images, you would
| get feature sets, since they first run the photos through a
| feature extraction model (i.e. the input to the nn is not raw
| pixels).
| [deleted]
| randcraw wrote:
| I wonder if the study accurately reflects the lack of political
| common ground in the population. Are only 28% of us "moderates"?
|
| It'd be interesting to do the same analysis with photos of people
| taken 10, 20, 30, 40,... 100 years ago to see if the intersection
| (28%) grows/shrinks historically. Were we always so easily
| politically separable by our appearance alone?
|
| Has our appearance always revealed our political leanings, or do
| we now dress in order to make a political statement?
| crazygringo wrote:
| There's no definitive definition of "moderate".
|
| People who want to argue most people are moderate say the
| political middle is the 75% middle of the bell curve, while
| people who want to argue most people are partisan say the
| political middle is only the middle 20% of the bell curve.
|
| What _is_ accurate to say is that political views in _Congress_
| have bifurcated (not a bell curve), and that people in America
| have "sorted" -- decades ago many conservatives were Democrats
| and many liberals were Republicans, but now Republicans are
| virtually all conservative and Democrats are virtually all
| liberal. And people's political identities have become more
| important to them.
|
| But it also continues to be accurate that when people are
| surveyed according to their actual political positions on
| issues (as opposed to party affiliation), political views of
| citizens are still strongly bell-shaped -- they cluster in the
| middle. (Contrasted with congresspeople who cluster at two
| peaks.)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _of the bell curve_
|
| There is no bell curve. Political orientation is largely a
| self-referencing phenomenon. Outside the political elite, who
| have a high degree of ideological coherence, knowing a
| person's views on one issue is a loose predictor on their
| views on another. Gun-toting anti-abortion lesbians and pro-
| immigration free-market feminists are real, and they aren't
| some striking minority.
| crazygringo wrote:
| There's a bell curve on each issue independently. This has
| been well established by surveys.
|
| And therefore _however_ you want to aggregate issues into
| an axis, you 'll invariably find the political distribution
| to be normal.
|
| It doesn't have anything to do with how coherent or not you
| find each party's platform to be.
|
| So yes, it is fair to say that political views are bell
| curve-shaped. It's not an artifact of political parties.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _There 's a bell curve on each issue independently.
| This has been well established by surveys._
|
| I'd be curious to see the data. Measuring agreement is
| challenging. (Strongly Agree versus Agree mean different
| things to different people.) And polarizing issues tend
| to be multi-modal, thereby defying normal
| characterization.
|
| Where one can create an objective x-axis, _e.g._ with
| increasing strength of regulation on a topic, one
| frequently sees non-normal preference patterns.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The political scientist Morris Fiorina is who you want to
| start with. His book "Culture War? The Myth of a
| Polarized America" provides a great overview with lots of
| data.
|
| A central finding is precisely that people appear
| polarized when you measure badly, but when you really
| delve into their nuanced beliefs with better surveys and
| more accurate questions, the bell curve is apparent
| everywhere and polarization disappears.
|
| And I don't know where one sees non-normal preference
| patterns. Regulation is a great example -- very few
| people believe in zero regulation, and very few in
| extreme regulation. People overwhelmingly prefer a
| moderate amount. Of course, whatever the objective
| measurement is, you may need a logarithmic scale or
| something else for it to show up as truly Gaussian -- as
| well as not limiting the range of responses. But on any
| modern issue of society-wide disagreement, one virtually
| always finds it to have a single central peak (as opposed
| to two peaks or more, or increasing/decreasing
| monotonically).
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| > Their facial images (one per person) were obtained from their
| profiles on Facebook or a popular dating website.
|
| Not sure I'm entirely comfortable with that.
| jpxw wrote:
| Perhaps conservatives and liberals upload different kinds of
| face images to the internet.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| Not the issue.
|
| The issue is potentially being included in a study
| unintentionally, that is impossible to anonymize, without
| prior knowledge or consent.
| motohagiography wrote:
| > _These self-selected, naturalistic images combine many
| potential cues to political orientation, ranging from facial
| expression and self-presentation to facial morphology._
|
| I was going to ask how they controlled for the presence of
| compound bows & deer, trucks, and tank tops in the photos, but
| this implies they did not. Another one would be lighting palette,
| since that's going to be biased to regions as well. There is
| something to be said for it, as I'd say I have a %72 chance of
| guessing someones political orientation by looking at them as
| well, which someone once explained to me as being the effect of
| testosterone levels on the region around their eyes, but that
| sounded like folksy bro science.
| [deleted]
| bigwavedave wrote:
| > I was going to ask how they controlled for the presence of
| compound bows & deer, trucks, and tank tops in the photos, but
| this implies they did not. Another one would be lighting
| palette
|
| No need to read into implications. From TFA:
|
| _" The procedure is presented in Fig. 1: To minimize the role
| of the background and non-facial features, images were tightly
| cropped around the face and resized to 224 x 224 pixels."_
|
| While tightly cropping the face isn't perfect, it does address
| three of the four things you were specifically wondering about.
| ralusek wrote:
| I was going to ask the same about colored hair, facial
| asymmetry, hammer and sickles on shirts, and scowls.
| zbendefy wrote:
| Altough random guessing is 50% right?
| reaperducer wrote:
| Generally speaking, these sorts of things don't make any sense to
| me. People change as they age, as they get new experiences, when
| they live in different places. How can someone's face tell you
| what their political orientation is?
|
| When I lived in Texas, I was considered a liberal. When I moved
| to Chicago, I was considered a conservative. When I moved to
| Seattle, I was considered a conservative. When I moved to the
| desert southwest, I was considered a liberal. Nothing about my
| face changed. Just my address.
| kicat wrote:
| I only skimmed the paper, so I'm not claiming to know much about
| it, but one thing to keep in mind here is that a fair coin has a
| 50% accuracy using the same terminology as the headline. I'm not
| saying 72% is not an interesting achievement, its just that "you
| can do about 50% better than random chance" describes my gut
| feeling about how much you could actually see in someones face.
| stanrivers wrote:
| This is an important point - 72% is interesting, but its a 22%
| added to the chance to guess correctly... still interesting
| though
| rory wrote:
| It says in the article that humans got just 55% (so 10% better
| than random chance) on the same test.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The humans are probably overthinking it. You get ~55% by
| assuming by answering "Biden" for everybody.
| leereeves wrote:
| According to Wikipedia only 51.3% voted for Biden/Harris.
| relaxing wrote:
| The dataset was not restricted to voters.
| leereeves wrote:
| Do you have data that includes non-voters? I haven't seen
| any; most polls are limited to voters.
| standardUser wrote:
| There were tons of national polls done for Trump's
| approval that included all adults (instead of likely or
| registered voters). Trump fared noticeably worse in the
| polls of all adults throughout his presidency.
| leereeves wrote:
| Approval isn't the same thing as preference among two
| choices. Trump received a considerably higher percentage
| of votes than his approval rating.
| simiones wrote:
| In fact, the dating site dataset was ~54% conservative
| according to their explanations of included data, but the
| point stands.
| sct202 wrote:
| I wonder if that 55% is from mturk or other survey sites that
| can be somewhat questionable in terms of quality with how
| much people are paying attention versus maximizing their
| hourly survey earnings.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| It says on a similar test - it's a reference to a different
| study with a different data set.
| wycy wrote:
| They do note the random chance bit, and they also note that
| it's better than humans could judge on their own and even,
| surprisingly, better than judged by a personality
| questionnaire.
|
| > Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of
| liberal-conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance
| (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item
| personality questionnaire (66%).
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Were the humans experts or just random people though?
|
| The real question is whether the tool can beat a lookup table
| of age, race, and gender probabilities. The tool isn't going
| to be winning points of phrenology here. Weight, hair color,
| and hairstyle would also likely tell you a lot.
|
| I don't have any particular reason to believe this tool
| wouldn't work, but let's not pretend it's getting their by
| phrenology-esque topologies of people's faces.
|
| A randomly chosen black individual in the united states has a
| > 72% chance of leaning democrat. A randomly chosen hispanic
| individual is ~55-65% chance of leaning democrat. I don't
| find it crazy to imagine they've got a few other smaller
| features to boost it.
| wycy wrote:
| It further notes:
|
| > Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for
| age, gender, and ethnicity.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| How does one calculate a metric like that?
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Simplistically, let's take the above statistic "A
| randomly chosen black individual in the united states has
| a 72% chance of leaning democrat" at face value. So, a
| coin flip would be lower than 50-50 because someone of
| that race in that country does not have a 50 50 chance.
| So you would adjust the chance to 72-28 and compare that
| to the Facial recognition results. If you find that the
| results are the same, then you know that the Facial
| Recognition not picking up on anything beyond race. If
| the results are different, you know the FR is picking up
| on something in addition to race.
|
| Really it is more complex than that, but fundamentally
| you try to say "how accurate can we be using _just_ age,
| gender, and ethnicity" and use that as your controlled
| benchmark.
| tylerrobinson wrote:
| By performing the analysis within each of those
| subgroups.
| simiones wrote:
| They explain: they tested predictions on pairs of faces
| of teh same gender, ethnicity and age. The result was 69%
| instead of 72% apparently.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Did it? If you control for gender but not sex, you can
| use the difference to predict ideology. And for
| ethnicity, there are subethnicities that matter too -
| white Italian and white German have different
| proclivities.
| simias wrote:
| 72% is a very significant deviation from 50% though, I wasn't
| expecting such a result.
|
| >The highest predictive power was afforded by head orientation
| (58%), followed by emotional expression (57%). Liberals tended
| to face the camera more directly, were more likely to express
| surprise, and less likely to express disgust.
|
| Emotional expression makes some sense in hindsight but I
| wouldn't have though that head orientation would correlate.
| It's interesting to know how we betray ourselves with these
| minute details of body language.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Though, these seems a bit odd; how many people are expressing
| _disgust_ in dating profiles?
| Applejinx wrote:
| Those categorizations are opposites on a continuum of
| various kinds of muscle tension, notably brow scrunch
| muscles. Surprise is literally brow up and jaw slack,
| disgust involves brow scrunch and lip tightening. Facial
| expressions also bleed through to our experienced emotions,
| so going around with face scrunched a lot will MAKE you
| more suspicious and disgusted with things.
| statstutor wrote:
| A 72% score on this scale is equivalent to confidently knowing
| 44% of the answers, and coin-flipping the rest.
|
| It's doing something that untrained humans are not capable of
| [edited to add: although humans were apparently tested by a
| different method, so this is not properly comparable], but is
| still a failing grade by usual methods of assessing human
| knowledge.
| magwa101 wrote:
| Better than polling and probably better than voting. Just walk by
| a camera and get the "i voted" sticker. Love it.
| jlev wrote:
| When are people going to stop rebuilding high tech phrenology?
| Bakary wrote:
| When it will cease to be profitable or seemingly so
| stanrivers wrote:
| So... now, is it because people that came from the same regions a
| long time ago all happened to tend towards a certain political
| leaning and that just has stayed within families for that long?!
| Like a culture thing, but within families?
|
| In general, though, its amazing how little control we have over
| who we are despite the feeling that we are in control of it.
| roamerz wrote:
| Could be but not across the board true. My parents are deeply
| liberal to the point of the Constitution be damned so long as
| their views are enacted in some way. I am just the opposite - a
| constitution conservative. I am aware of several friends
| families that are the same or opposite.
|
| I think the key to you last comment is how much intellectual
| control someone has over their emotional response. I like to
| think I am pretty good with that at this present time. That was
| not always the case and may not always be the case.
| paulsutter wrote:
| > the relative universality of the conservative-liberal spectrum
|
| Grey tribe members may beg to differ
|
| https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/rise-liberaltarian
| input_sh wrote:
| Anyone not living in a two-party system begs to differ,
| especially those living in countries where liberals are
| conservatives (in a sense the term conservative is used within
| the US).
| swebs wrote:
| Not really. Other country's liberals are the USA's
| Libertarians. They're much different than neocons.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I want a facial recognition tool that tells me what information I
| am leaking. We need a haveibeenpwned for facial recognition.
| marstall wrote:
| how about this tool in realtime, a kind of biofeedback
| mechanism that trains you to look conservative, liberal, sexy,
| dangerous, harmless etc.?
| cwkoss wrote:
| That could definitely be productized, even if it didn't work
| very well.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| We have that, it's called acting class.
| yikesshescute wrote:
| Why play defense when you can play offense?
| jrd259 wrote:
| So now I want to know 1. what is the eigenface for each of the
| two clusters? What does the perfect liberal look like? 2. What is
| the political orientation of https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
| zwieback wrote:
| The article discusses the underlying correlations at work but I
| think the title is a bit sensationalistic. Would expect more from
| Nature.
| k0htlane wrote:
| Note that it's not published in the journal Nature, but in
| another (lower-impact) journal of the same publisher
| (Scientific Reports).
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| So, unless I read the abstract wrong, this is identifying age,
| race, and gender, then making categorical qualifiers based on
| those distinctions. While using ML to do the facial recognition
| to distinguish a person's age, race and gender is neat -
| categorizing their political affiliation with a 72% accuracy rate
| is fairly nominal, given the tools used by modern parties to
| garner donations and directed online advertising - no offense.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" VGGFace224 was used to convert facial images into face
| descriptors, or 2,048-value-long vectors subsuming their core
| features."_
|
| So they had more than age, race, and gender, but it doesn't
| really say how things were weighted.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I don't really buy this study. If humans can't get a better
| accuracy than 55%, I'm convinced this vector is leaking some
| obvious (maybe high-frequency) information that doesn't have
| anything to do with the face. E.g location of the person.
| notahacker wrote:
| Apart from the 55% human accuracy, which apparently comes
| from a completely unrelated study, the bit that really
| stands out to me is it reports the accuracy only drops from
| 72% to 68% when controlling for demographic accuracy in the
| US (a little more noticeable in the UK). Considering
| demographics alone gets you 60-90% accuracy on voting
| intention for many US demographics, it strikes me as
| extremely odd it would have have so little impact on the
| model.
| quasirandom wrote:
| When I read a paper like this I'm looking for four things:
| (1) the data, (2) the benchmarks, (3) the architecture, (4)
| the controls/ablation.
|
| 1. _The data:_
|
| "We used a sample of 1,085,795 participants from three
| countries (the U.S., the UK, and Canada; see Table 1) and
| their self-reported political orientation, age, and gender.
| Their facial images (one per person) were obtained from
| their profiles on Facebook or a popular dating website...
| Facial images were processed using Face++37 to detect
| faces. Images were cropped around the face-box provided by
| Face++ (red frame on Fig. 1) and resized to 224 x 224
| pixels."
|
| 2. _The benchmarks:_
|
| "For example, when asked to distinguish between two faces--
| one conservative and one liberal--people are correct about
| 55% of the time."
|
| 3. _The controls:_
|
| "What would an algorithm's accuracy be when distinguishing
| between faces of people of the same age, gender, and
| ethnicity? To answer this question, classification
| accuracies were recomputed using only face pairs of the
| same age, gender, and ethnicity."
|
| A. _A complaint:_
|
| Geography and income are two powerful conditioners. These
| can leak in so many ways: uncropped background (geography),
| image color and quality (income), eyeglass shape (geography
| and income). This study really needs more controls.
| Geography and income would be a nice start.
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| What stood out to me was
|
| > Their facial images (one per person) were obtained from
| their profiles on Facebook or a popular dating website
|
| so of course the first thing to comes to mind is "how
| good of a predictor is just knowing which of those two
| sites the image came from?"
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| _Geography and income are two powerful conditioners.
| These can leak in so many ways: uncropped background
| (geography), image color and quality (income), eyeglass
| shape (geography and income). This study really needs
| more controls. Geography and income would be a nice
| start._
|
| But then the data wouldn't represent the natural world:
| nature as it is.
|
| Raw data is the correct thing to use, because it's what a
| hypothetical other person would also use if you ran the
| same experiment yourself.
| [deleted]
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Uh, the headline claim is about _faces_ , how does it
| make sense to then insist that you must leave the
| background in?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| That wasn't the claim. The claim here is that we should
| scrub certain faces from the dataset in order to change
| the dataset in a certain favorable way.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| No that's not the claim. A control is to understand how
| your model works, it's not what you release as the final
| product.
| quasirandom wrote:
| It would be nice to see a logistic regression using at
| least some of the features known to be useful (including
| geography and income).
|
| That way we can see how much of the performance is from
| magic AI pixie dust, and how much is from basic 19th
| century statistics.
|
| Every time I read a paper like this, I have this Margaret
| Mitchell talk [1] in the back of my mind.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/XR8YSRcuVLE
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Yep, these papers don't usually pass the sniff test. My
| bet is you can predict the phone brand from the camera
| grain and that correlates with geography & income.
| marklubi wrote:
| This reminds me of an early ML study about detecting skin
| cancer from pictures with a high accuracy rate.
|
| The problem was, that with the ML, they ended up building
| a ruler classifier, because most of the pictures with
| skin cancer happened to also have a ruler in them to
| measure the size.
| quasirandom wrote:
| Or the commercial model that identifies criminals from
| their photograph. Turns out people who frown are
| criminals. People who smile aren't. Or so you'd believe
| if you anchored your expectations comparing mug shots to
| social media profile pictures.
| im3w1l wrote:
| It might pick up on scars, tattoos and piercings,
| testosterone level, diet (in particular weight), bags-
| under-eyes, glasses.
| blowski wrote:
| My political leanings change based on how recently a drank
| a cup of tea. This obsession with a left-right spectrum is
| a big part of the problem now.
|
| You think teachers are underpaid? Oh obviously you must be
| a pro-abortion, $15 minimum wage supporting, transgender-
| rights activist.
|
| What's that you say, Christian bakers should be allowed to
| refuse to bake a cake with a pro-gay message on it? Oh, you
| must be a gun-toting, pro-life, anti-immigratnt Trump
| fanatic.
|
| This kind of sorting people into simple binary categories,
| and giving them a "shopping bag" full of opinions they're
| supposed to hold helps nobody.
|
| I'm not sure how this was relevant in anyway to your
| comment, but I just kinda jumped on my soapbox there.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| I hope you're right, otherwise we're in for some kind of AI
| phrenology nightmare in the not too distant future.
| tomrod wrote:
| We're pretty much there today.
| mellavora wrote:
| except for the phrenology part :)
| tomrod wrote:
| I have built ML workflow for over a decade now. The
| amount of hogwash I've seen hocked definitely classifies
| as phrenology :)
| gus_massa wrote:
| The 55% is very fuzzy. They cite
| https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Konstantin-
| Tskhay/publi...
|
| The only relevant 55% that I can find is:
|
| > _Allport and Kramer (1946) randomly presented 20 yearbook
| photographs of Jews and Non-Jews to 223 undergraduate
| students for 15 s each and asked them to categorize the
| person in each photograph as Jewish or non-Jewish, or to
| pass on the trial by indicating a lack of knowledge. The
| reported median identification for the sample was slightly
| above chance (55.5%; Allport & Kramer, 1946). Moreover,
| they found that highly prejudiced people were more accurate
| at distinguishing Jews from non-Jews_
|
| So it's not the same set of photos and not the same
| question.
| harias wrote:
| >So they had more than age, race, and gender,
|
| Doesn't have to be that way. It could be age, age+1, age+2
| ....
| theonlyklas wrote:
| I believe that these descriptors are created only based off
| the visual image:
|
| _A face descriptor is obtained from the learned networks as
| follows: the centre 224 x 224 crop of the face image is used.
| The shorter side is resized to 256, and the CNNs descriptor
| is computed for this region by extracting the deep features
| from the layer adjacent to the classifier layer. This leads
| to a 2048 dimensional descriptor, which is then L2
| normalised._
|
| https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1710.08092/
| hirundo wrote:
| They tested this question specifically:
|
| > Both in real life and in our sample, the classification of
| political orientation is to some extent enabled by demographic
| traits clearly displayed on participants' faces. For example
| ... white people, older people, and males are more likely to be
| conservatives. What would an algorithm's accuracy be when
| distinguishing between faces of people of the same age, gender,
| and ethnicity? To answer this question, classification
| accuracies were recomputed using only face pairs of the same
| age, gender, and ethnicity ... The accuracy dropped by only
| 3.5% on average
| rsynnott wrote:
| I suspect there are a lot of less obvious things they'd need
| to control for. Off the top of my head, weight would be an
| obvious one; in developed countries urban areas (particularly
| large urban areas) generally have a lower average BMI than
| rural and suburban areas, and there's also typically a major
| political difference between rural and urban areas.
| Leherenn wrote:
| But wouldn't this be a reasonable feature used by the
| classifier to reach its conclusion? They can't control for
| everything, it would become meaningless.
|
| I think the questions about age/sex/ethnicity are sensible
| in that it's a valid question to ask whether it's just
| doing the naive/obvious thing or something more. But if you
| keep on removing the less obvious things then of course
| you'll reach a point where it's no better than a coin flip
| because it's basically comparing blank pictures.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| From there, it would seem that cues might come from how
| 'kempt' they appear, whether the head shot was from a party
| or for a resume, perhaps color and style of clothing, ...
| I.e., maybe not strictly the face.
| evan_ wrote:
| If they're wearing a face mask, if they're carrying a tiki
| torch or storming the capitol building...
| tyingq wrote:
| _" To minimize the role of the background and non-facial
| features, images were tightly cropped around the face"_
|
| Though cropping can only do so much.
| [deleted]
| kevinventullo wrote:
| If the total population sampling is the same, I would expect
| the accuracies to remain the same. E.g. if I can get 72%
| accuracy in the total population just by looking at
| age/race/gender, doesn't that exactly mean the accuracies in
| each individual category are on average 72%?
| mattnewton wrote:
| Not necessarily because each age/race/gender tuple can be
| present in the test dataset different amounts, and either
| be a stronger or weaker indicator to the model.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Still, it's some kind of weighted average, right? Like
| that 3.5% drop seems to say more about the test data used
| than the model performance per se.
| [deleted]
| karaterobot wrote:
| Does anyone know what the accuracy of a prediction is if you
| use only those three factors -- age, race, and gender?
| gamegoblin wrote:
| All numbers are Biden-Trump in 2020:
|
| People under 30: 60-36.
|
| White men: 38-61
|
| Black women: 90-9
|
| So there are definitely some strong predictors there.
|
| Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/2016-2020-electoral-
| maps-exi...
| evgen wrote:
| If only the researchers were as smart as you apparently
| think you are and somehow remembered to control for these
| very obvious factors. Oh yeah, they did.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| I was not commenting on the main article about the
| research, but instead on the comment by user karaterobot
| that I am responding to which -- if I am interpreting it
| correctly -- asks the question how good one can guess
| purely based on those 3 demographic axes.
|
| As you note, the researcher's predictor appears to do
| better than random even controlling for these obvious
| demographic skews, which is fascinating.
| stkdump wrote:
| Actually, you have to answer something more from the
| other side: for a randomly picked person (voter), i.e.
| considering the distribution of race, gender and age in
| the population: how likely is a guess just based on these
| factors correct. The number you come up with might
| actually not be as far from 50% as you would expect.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| You can basically determine this by looking at voter/exit
| poll results, and any single criteria would give ~55% at
| best.
| Defenestresque wrote:
| This is the exact question I came to the comments to find.
|
| The abstract states:
|
| >Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age,
| gender, and ethnicity.
|
| To give some context, chance is 50%, human guess is 55% and a
| 100-question questionnaire is 66%.
|
| Personally, I am surprised that the accuracy remained that
| high when controlling for the three variables I would have
| considered most telling in the determination (age, gender and
| race).
|
| I'd be very curious to know what exactly the algorithm is
| determining from the face photos outside of those obvious
| variables. I know with a ML algorithm it's practically
| impossible to determine why the classification was made, but
| does anyone human here have any thoughts?
| EGreg wrote:
| In fact, I'd put it another way. I'm surprised the accuracy
| was not higher when you ADDED IN the three variables to the
| 69%.
|
| Could it be a version of this: https://hackernoon.com/dogs-
| wolves-data-science-and-why-mach...
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