4 ms·

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

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

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!