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Phrenology was bad because it was scientifically invalid. I don't see any problem with predicting traits from appearances, at least, not intrinsically if the da

by darawk 6y ago

Phrenology was bad because it was scientifically invalid. I don't see any problem with predicting traits from appearances, at least, not intrinsically if the data is accurate.

whymauri 6y ago
There will be no accurate data for this because traits are subjective. Unlike other subjective predictive modeling, like sentiment analysis, I cannot feasibly think of a use-case for this that is not deeply disturbing. I really don't want my field to regress towards 19th-century pseudoscience when we can empower other scientific advancements that will yield immediate benefits.
- darawk 6y ago
  > There will be no accurate data for this because traits are subjective. Unlike other subjective predictive modeling, like sentiment analysis, I cannot feasibly think of a use-case for this that is not deeply disturbing. This is a strange point. Are personality types subjective? Is IQ? Maybe they are, but we still sometimes find them useful to quantify. If it's ok to predict these things from your answers to questions...why isn't it ok to predict them from pictures of your face?
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    Ignoring the (many) arguments that IQ is not really a great marker for intelligence, there's basically no value in trying to predict IQ based on facial structure. Unless it is quite literally 100% accurate (which it is not), you will end up mispredicting people's "intelligence". Even if this is ultimately just randomly distributed (and it probably won't be), you'll be needlessly treating people unfairly for no reason. So yes, I think I can state pretty concretely that there's no value in trying to predict IQ from face shape.
    - darawk 6y ago
      > Ignoring the (many) arguments that IQ is not really a great marker for intelligence, there's basically no value in trying to predict IQ based on facial structure. Unless it is quite literally 100% accurate (which it is not), you will end up mispredicting people's "intelligence". Even if this is ultimately just randomly distributed (and it probably won't be), you'll be needlessly treating people unfairly for no reason. The presence of error in a prediction makes that prediction valueless?
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        When doing anything prediction-y, you need to take the relative value of false positives and negatives into account. Can you describe a situation where the harm caused to someone by mis-classifying their IQ is outweighed by the increased efficiency from...being able to more quickly identify someone's IQ? Like, can you even describe a situation where this will be used ethically at all? What use is there for predicting someone's IQ with dubious accuracy, assuming you already have their permission?
        darawk 6y ago
        Sure. But you also need to account for the actual baseline you're comparing to. Whatever process it might be that's taking someone's IQ as an input is right now being handled in some subjective manner by other humans. Do you think their error rate is zero? These things don't need to be perfect to be good. They just need to be better than what we're doing now. And as per all the recent unrest, it turns out that what we're doing now isn't all that great.
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        > Whatever process it might be that's taking someone's IQ as an input is right now being handled in some subjective manner by other humans. Yes. > Do you think their error rate is zero? Well it depends. Do I think the error rate of IQ as a predictor of underlying intelligence is flawed? Yes. Do I think that IQ as a measure of IQ is flawed? Still, often, yes. > These things don't need to be perfect to be good. To my point above, I generally am not a fan of IQ in general. Psychology researchers are consistently finding new and interesting ways that IQ tests are socially/culturally/environmentally influenced and that exams may not be fair. If your claim is that you can somehow train an algorithm to look at someone's face and evaluate their underlying intelligence better than the tools we have today, honestly "delusional" is the first word that comes to mind. That's just not something that currently available tools can do. And thought experiments about a "perfect" classifier aren't interesting when we're discussing applied ethics. And that comes with the huge, enormous, gigantic, asterisk that you can even measure "intelligence". Like, it comes with the caveat that you can even reasonably define intelligence. We generally measure intelligence as correlated with success at some metric: math problems, visual puzzles, chess, reading comprehension, whatever. If you're contending that a hypothetical model could predict underlying intelligence better than the measures we have today, how would we even know? When training a model you have an evaluation function. If the evaluation function is flawed (which is essentially your contention, and which I absolutely agree with), the trained model will exhibit biases that reflect the flaws of the evaluation function. An ML model isn't suddenly going to solve the cultural issues we have with measuring IQ. It will encode the same biases that society does, because the model will try as hard as it can to do exactly what the human proctors would have done. These are exactly the kinds of broader ethical questions that Timnit points out we need to worry about.
  - baddox 6y ago
    Specific results for some specific IQ test are not subjective, but intelligence is a subjective trait. IQ is not an objective measure of intelligence.
    - darawk 6y ago
      I know. My point is not about IQ. My point is that people find IQ to be a useful measure of things, in certain situations. We can use something else, like the big 5 personality inventory, if you like. The point is just that subjective characteristics of a person are things that we quantify and sometimes care about measuring.
      - baddox 6y ago
        And the times when we find ourselves wanting to quantify and measure them in order to make decisions that impact people’s lives them are precisely when we need to be extremely careful, because they are subjective traits.
        darawk 6y ago
        Of course we should be careful. But we should also keep in mind what the baseline is. The baseline is subjective evaluations by other humans. If we don't build models, it's not like we're going to live in a world where nobody's subjective personality traits are evaluated. They still will be. They'll just be evaluated by other humans in an opaque, un-monitorable way. Using models at least makes it transparent, and something that we can iterate on to remove bias. There are no effective ways i'm aware of to de-bias humans.
        baddox 6y ago
        If the human baseline is bad, that doesn't imply that it's better to use computers to do the same task much faster while obfuscating accountability.
        darawk 6y ago
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  There are lots of things about appearance that are deliberate signaling. It's all subjective but it's not meaningless or pseudoscience to read those signals.
  - whymauri 6y ago
    Emotional cues, yes. Acute health or distress, to an extent, yes. Personality, aptitude, criminality, intelligence, empathy, etcetera... that's almost surely pseudoscience.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Appearance includes hair, piercings, tattoos. Those definitely say things about personality!
baddox 6y ago
> Phrenology was bad because it was scientifically invalid. Well, that's not a very full story. It was scientifically invalid because it modeled mental traits based on the shape of the skull, and that's the important part. If you trained a model to predict traits based on accurate data about skull shape and traits, I'm confident that the algorithm would happily do that. Phrenology would still be bad regardless of what technical methods are used to do phrenology.
- darawk 6y ago
  What is your argument that it's still bad? That was kind of a non-sequitur. If we have a model that takes in skull measurements and accurately predicts whether you are an introvert or extrovert...what is the problem with that?

by darawk 6y ago

Phrenology was bad because it was scientifically invalid. I don't see any problem with predicting traits from appearances, at least, not intrinsically if the data is accurate.

whymauri 6y ago

There will be no accurate data for this because traits are subjective. Unlike other subjective predictive modeling, like sentiment analysis, I cannot feasibly think of a use-case for this that is not deeply disturbing. I really don't want my field to regress towards 19th-century pseudoscience when we can empower other scientific advancements that will yield immediate benefits.

darawk 6y ago
> There will be no accurate data for this because traits are subjective. Unlike other subjective predictive modeling, like sentiment analysis, I cannot feasibly think of a use-case for this that is not deeply disturbing. This is a strange point. Are personality types subjective? Is IQ? Maybe they are, but we still sometimes find them useful to quantify. If it's ok to predict these things from your answers to questions...why isn't it ok to predict them from pictures of your face?
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Ignoring the (many) arguments that IQ is not really a great marker for intelligence, there's basically no value in trying to predict IQ based on facial structure. Unless it is quite literally 100% accurate (which it is not), you will end up mispredicting people's "intelligence". Even if this is ultimately just randomly distributed (and it probably won't be), you'll be needlessly treating people unfairly for no reason. So yes, I think I can state pretty concretely that there's no value in trying to predict IQ from face shape.
  - darawk 6y ago
    > Ignoring the (many) arguments that IQ is not really a great marker for intelligence, there's basically no value in trying to predict IQ based on facial structure. Unless it is quite literally 100% accurate (which it is not), you will end up mispredicting people's "intelligence". Even if this is ultimately just randomly distributed (and it probably won't be), you'll be needlessly treating people unfairly for no reason. The presence of error in a prediction makes that prediction valueless?
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      When doing anything prediction-y, you need to take the relative value of false positives and negatives into account. Can you describe a situation where the harm caused to someone by mis-classifying their IQ is outweighed by the increased efficiency from...being able to more quickly identify someone's IQ? Like, can you even describe a situation where this will be used ethically at all? What use is there for predicting someone's IQ with dubious accuracy, assuming you already have their permission?
      - darawk 6y ago
        Sure. But you also need to account for the actual baseline you're comparing to. Whatever process it might be that's taking someone's IQ as an input is right now being handled in some subjective manner by other humans. Do you think their error rate is zero? These things don't need to be perfect to be good. They just need to be better than what we're doing now. And as per all the recent unrest, it turns out that what we're doing now isn't all that great.
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        > Whatever process it might be that's taking someone's IQ as an input is right now being handled in some subjective manner by other humans. Yes. > Do you think their error rate is zero? Well it depends. Do I think the error rate of IQ as a predictor of underlying intelligence is flawed? Yes. Do I think that IQ as a measure of IQ is flawed? Still, often, yes. > These things don't need to be perfect to be good. To my point above, I generally am not a fan of IQ in general. Psychology researchers are consistently finding new and interesting ways that IQ tests are socially/culturally/environmentally influenced and that exams may not be fair. If your claim is that you can somehow train an algorithm to look at someone's face and evaluate their underlying intelligence better than the tools we have today, honestly "delusional" is the first word that comes to mind. That's just not something that currently available tools can do. And thought experiments about a "perfect" classifier aren't interesting when we're discussing applied ethics. And that comes with the huge, enormous, gigantic, asterisk that you can even measure "intelligence". Like, it comes with the caveat that you can even reasonably define intelligence. We generally measure intelligence as correlated with success at some metric: math problems, visual puzzles, chess, reading comprehension, whatever. If you're contending that a hypothetical model could predict underlying intelligence better than the measures we have today, how would we even know? When training a model you have an evaluation function. If the evaluation function is flawed (which is essentially your contention, and which I absolutely agree with), the trained model will exhibit biases that reflect the flaws of the evaluation function. An ML model isn't suddenly going to solve the cultural issues we have with measuring IQ. It will encode the same biases that society does, because the model will try as hard as it can to do exactly what the human proctors would have done. These are exactly the kinds of broader ethical questions that Timnit points out we need to worry about.
- baddox 6y ago
  Specific results for some specific IQ test are not subjective, but intelligence is a subjective trait. IQ is not an objective measure of intelligence.
  - darawk 6y ago
    I know. My point is not about IQ. My point is that people find IQ to be a useful measure of things, in certain situations. We can use something else, like the big 5 personality inventory, if you like. The point is just that subjective characteristics of a person are things that we quantify and sometimes care about measuring.
    - baddox 6y ago
      And the times when we find ourselves wanting to quantify and measure them in order to make decisions that impact people’s lives them are precisely when we need to be extremely careful, because they are subjective traits.
      - darawk 6y ago
        Of course we should be careful. But we should also keep in mind what the baseline is. The baseline is subjective evaluations by other humans. If we don't build models, it's not like we're going to live in a world where nobody's subjective personality traits are evaluated. They still will be. They'll just be evaluated by other humans in an opaque, un-monitorable way. Using models at least makes it transparent, and something that we can iterate on to remove bias. There are no effective ways i'm aware of to de-bias humans.
        baddox 6y ago
        If the human baseline is bad, that doesn't imply that it's better to use computers to do the same task much faster while obfuscating accountability.
        darawk 6y ago
Dylan16807 6y ago
There are lots of things about appearance that are deliberate signaling. It's all subjective but it's not meaningless or pseudoscience to read those signals.
- whymauri 6y ago
  Emotional cues, yes. Acute health or distress, to an extent, yes. Personality, aptitude, criminality, intelligence, empathy, etcetera... that's almost surely pseudoscience.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Appearance includes hair, piercings, tattoos. Those definitely say things about personality!

baddox 6y ago

> Phrenology was bad because it was scientifically invalid. Well, that's not a very full story. It was scientifically invalid because it modeled mental traits based on the shape of the skull, and that's the important part. If you trained a model to predict traits based on accurate data about skull shape and traits, I'm confident that the algorithm would happily do that. Phrenology would still be bad regardless of what technical methods are used to do phrenology.

darawk 6y ago
What is your argument that it's still bad? That was kind of a non-sequitur. If we have a model that takes in skull measurements and accurately predicts whether you are an introvert or extrovert...what is the problem with that?