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The press release from GLAAD and HRC is ridiculously misleading. One of their repeated claims - that the paper has not been peer-reviewed - is directly contrad

The press release from GLAAD and HRC is ridiculously misleading. One of their repeated claims - that the paper has not been peer-reviewed - is directly contradicted by the first sentence of the first page of the manuscript, and their other criticisms are similarly baseless. Mistakes that obvious imply to me that their goal is not an honest debate but rather to stir the pot and promote misinformation. The alternative is that no one from either organization read the pre-print with any scrutiny. In my opinion, it's especially telling that visiting GLAAD's site (including the press release) prompts an immediate pop-over asking for donations. Who is the unethical actor here, I wonder...? Edit: Can anyone downvoting me please stand up and tell me why?

maehwasu 9y ago
Not sure why downvoted--OP is pointing out clear, obvious lies from organizations with a vested interest in the topic. Is the assertion here that lies from gay people should be ignored?
foldr 9y ago
The other criticisms seemed perfectly cogent to me. A lot of people just don't know what "peer reviewed" actually means. I think that is the most likely cause of the error, rather than malice. It's pretty normal for charities to encourage donations, so I'm not sure what your problem is with that. You seem to be hinting at the idea that they have deliberately released an inaccurate press release to encourage donations, but there's no reason for them to bother doing that when there are many uncontroversial instances of homophobia that they could refer to.
- pigscantfly 9y ago
  Thank you for responding. You're right about the donations; I'm sure this pop-over exists across their site and is not inherently sinister, but including a call for donations specifically over this divisive, misleading press release irks me, because it seems to encourage people to wage scientific debate via lobbying rather than more research, which is the opposite of what the world needs right now (see: climate change). However, you're right that it's irrelevant to the actual debate here. On a more specific note, claims like "The study assumed there were only two sexual orientations -- gay and straight -- and does not address bisexual individuals." (without mention that this is addressed in the paper and that better labels would likely improve results) and repeated hand-waving about hairstyles (without mention of the sections of the paper devoted to feature analysis which point to structural facial features giving the strongest signal to the model) do not present methodological flaws with the study and/or are misleading. Prof. Kosinski and Yilun Wang have issued a very polite rebuttal (here)[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3NORLoKWdz3big4xuk7Z4/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3N...] which details these and many other weaknesses with the press release. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone at GLAAD or HRC to understand what peer review means, and in fact, I'm sure they do.
  - fleitz 9y ago
    Science isn't about debate, you either falsify the null hypothesis or you don't. The last thing an issue like climate change needs is a falsifiable hypothesis which is why the IPCC never puts one forward. If we want people to stop driving cars, take shorter showers and do other progressive things than the last thing we should do is propose something that could be falsified. It would be as devastating to climate change as the catholic church putting forth a testable hypothesis for the existence of God.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - foldr 9y ago
    The response isn't great either. For example, the contradiction alleged in footnote 1 isn't a contradiction at all, and they don't adequately address the limitations of the study in relation to the absence of non-white individuals in the dataset, or the absence accurate information about individuals' sexuality. All they do is insist without evidence that none of this makes any difference. In fact, the original paper is deeply confused about sexual orientation: >Their sexual orientation was established based on the gender of the partners that they were looking for (according to their profiles). > [...] > Another issue pertains to the quality of the ground truth: it is possible that some of the users categorized as heterosexual were, in fact, gay or bisexual (or vice versa). However, we believe that people voluntarily seeking partners on the dating website have little incentive to misrepresent their sexual orientation. Obviously, bisexual people who say that they are looking for a partner of one or other gender are not "misrepresenting" their sexual orientation!
fleitz 9y ago
GLAAD and HRC are advocacy groups, not organizations dedicated to truth. If a lie creates advocacy that's perfectly within their purview as advocates. As with all organizations the purpose of organizations are to perpetuate themselves.
TFortunato 9y ago
Not one of the downvoters, but did want to respond to a few points. On peer review: 1) The uploaded version of the preprint that was linked is currently version 7. Version 1 did not contain the "this is a peer reviewed article" boiler-plate at the top. It's very possible that GLAAD/HRC saw the original manuscript without this notice. 2) Given that all 7 versions have been posted in the past 9 days, one might reasonably conclude that this is still a work-in-progress and peer review is still currently on-going, (the boilerplate being added in anticipation of the review being completed. Again, the paper is very clearly still being worked on.) On misinformation: Yes I will give you that some of the criticisms might seem over-the-top to the HN crowd, but I think they are understandable given what GLAAD's / HRC's focus is, plus the fact that they aren't addressing "trained scientists." That being said, I don't think their criticisms are completely baseless. I think anyone with technical training, particularly in data analysis / machine learning, is familiar with the phrase: "Garbage In - Garbage Out." And I think it is absolutely correct to point out that maybe if your training data is dating site photos, predominantly of white people in a narrow age range, that you may not have exactly proven your claims that you have "advance[d] our understanding of the origins of sexual orientation and the limits of human perception." That maybe you've just learned some interesting features of current trends in dating site photos. The tragic thing is that both sides (GLAAD & HRC vs. the researchers) claim to care about the privacy and safety of individuals. And kudos to them for thinking of the social implications of this kind of research! (We all know how good phrenology turned out) Because of these implications, I absolutely think it's right for us to question the conclusions of this research (that you can detect sexual orientation from facial morphology, and that this is evidence of the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation), given their actual methods (we threw a bunch of dating site photos at a neural-net classifier, and compared to self-reported sexual orientation) All that said, I do think that the paper is likely to be more nuanced than the conclusions reported / the abstract make it out to be (have not finished reading the paper yet). But unfortunately, because of the way science is reported, where the headline is going to be some bombastic "AI can tell if you are gay or straight from just a picture!", there is probably some pressure to voice their criticisms just as loudly.
- vadansky 9y ago
  >maybe you've just learned some interesting features of current trends in dating site photos. Again, I hate to keep parroting what another HN said, but I hate to see misinformation repeated: >The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial features: https://osf.io/fk3xr/ https://osf.io/fk3xr/ (page 13) >VGG-Face aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation, image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for this paper was done by logistic regression on the facial features reported by VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality. The algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all. Basically, it's not as simple as "All the gay participants had rainbow flags in the background of their photo so let's ignore this study"

maehwasu 9y ago

Not sure why downvoted--OP is pointing out clear, obvious lies from organizations with a vested interest in the topic. Is the assertion here that lies from gay people should be ignored?

foldr 9y ago

The other criticisms seemed perfectly cogent to me. A lot of people just don't know what "peer reviewed" actually means. I think that is the most likely cause of the error, rather than malice. It's pretty normal for charities to encourage donations, so I'm not sure what your problem is with that. You seem to be hinting at the idea that they have deliberately released an inaccurate press release to encourage donations, but there's no reason for them to bother doing that when there are many uncontroversial instances of homophobia that they could refer to.

pigscantfly 9y ago
Thank you for responding. You're right about the donations; I'm sure this pop-over exists across their site and is not inherently sinister, but including a call for donations specifically over this divisive, misleading press release irks me, because it seems to encourage people to wage scientific debate via lobbying rather than more research, which is the opposite of what the world needs right now (see: climate change). However, you're right that it's irrelevant to the actual debate here. On a more specific note, claims like "The study assumed there were only two sexual orientations -- gay and straight -- and does not address bisexual individuals." (without mention that this is addressed in the paper and that better labels would likely improve results) and repeated hand-waving about hairstyles (without mention of the sections of the paper devoted to feature analysis which point to structural facial features giving the strongest signal to the model) do not present methodological flaws with the study and/or are misleading. Prof. Kosinski and Yilun Wang have issued a very polite rebuttal (here)[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3NORLoKWdz3big4xuk7Z4/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UuEcSNFMduIaf0cOWdWbOV3N...] which details these and many other weaknesses with the press release. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone at GLAAD or HRC to understand what peer review means, and in fact, I'm sure they do.
- fleitz 9y ago
  Science isn't about debate, you either falsify the null hypothesis or you don't. The last thing an issue like climate change needs is a falsifiable hypothesis which is why the IPCC never puts one forward. If we want people to stop driving cars, take shorter showers and do other progressive things than the last thing we should do is propose something that could be falsified. It would be as devastating to climate change as the catholic church putting forth a testable hypothesis for the existence of God.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- foldr 9y ago
  The response isn't great either. For example, the contradiction alleged in footnote 1 isn't a contradiction at all, and they don't adequately address the limitations of the study in relation to the absence of non-white individuals in the dataset, or the absence accurate information about individuals' sexuality. All they do is insist without evidence that none of this makes any difference. In fact, the original paper is deeply confused about sexual orientation: >Their sexual orientation was established based on the gender of the partners that they were looking for (according to their profiles). > [...] > Another issue pertains to the quality of the ground truth: it is possible that some of the users categorized as heterosexual were, in fact, gay or bisexual (or vice versa). However, we believe that people voluntarily seeking partners on the dating website have little incentive to misrepresent their sexual orientation. Obviously, bisexual people who say that they are looking for a partner of one or other gender are not "misrepresenting" their sexual orientation!

fleitz 9y ago

GLAAD and HRC are advocacy groups, not organizations dedicated to truth. If a lie creates advocacy that's perfectly within their purview as advocates. As with all organizations the purpose of organizations are to perpetuate themselves.

TFortunato 9y ago

Not one of the downvoters, but did want to respond to a few points. On peer review: 1) The uploaded version of the preprint that was linked is currently version 7. Version 1 did not contain the "this is a peer reviewed article" boiler-plate at the top. It's very possible that GLAAD/HRC saw the original manuscript without this notice. 2) Given that all 7 versions have been posted in the past 9 days, one might reasonably conclude that this is still a work-in-progress and peer review is still currently on-going, (the boilerplate being added in anticipation of the review being completed. Again, the paper is very clearly still being worked on.) On misinformation: Yes I will give you that some of the criticisms might seem over-the-top to the HN crowd, but I think they are understandable given what GLAAD's / HRC's focus is, plus the fact that they aren't addressing "trained scientists." That being said, I don't think their criticisms are completely baseless. I think anyone with technical training, particularly in data analysis / machine learning, is familiar with the phrase: "Garbage In - Garbage Out." And I think it is absolutely correct to point out that maybe if your training data is dating site photos, predominantly of white people in a narrow age range, that you may not have exactly proven your claims that you have "advance[d] our understanding of the origins of sexual orientation and the limits of human perception." That maybe you've just learned some interesting features of current trends in dating site photos. The tragic thing is that both sides (GLAAD & HRC vs. the researchers) claim to care about the privacy and safety of individuals. And kudos to them for thinking of the social implications of this kind of research! (We all know how good phrenology turned out) Because of these implications, I absolutely think it's right for us to question the conclusions of this research (that you can detect sexual orientation from facial morphology, and that this is evidence of the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation), given their actual methods (we threw a bunch of dating site photos at a neural-net classifier, and compared to self-reported sexual orientation) All that said, I do think that the paper is likely to be more nuanced than the conclusions reported / the abstract make it out to be (have not finished reading the paper yet). But unfortunately, because of the way science is reported, where the headline is going to be some bombastic "AI can tell if you are gay or straight from just a picture!", there is probably some pressure to voice their criticisms just as loudly.

vadansky 9y ago
>maybe you've just learned some interesting features of current trends in dating site photos. Again, I hate to keep parroting what another HN said, but I hate to see misinformation repeated: >The paper states that they used an existing net, VGG-Face, to exact facial features: https://osf.io/fk3xr/ https://osf.io/fk3xr/ (page 13) >VGG-Face aims at representing a given face as a vector of scores that are as unaffected as possible by facial expression, background, lighting, head orientation, image properties such as brightness or contrast, and other factors that can vary across different images of the same person. All the heavy lifting for this paper was done by logistic regression on the facial features reported by VGG-Face, they didn't train a DNN specifically for identifying sexuality. The algo wouldn't have seen clothing at all. Basically, it's not as simple as "All the gay participants had rainbow flags in the background of their photo so let's ignore this study"