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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 structur

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.
      - darawk 6y ago
        IQ isn't the point though. I'm not a huge fan of IQ specifically either. Your original objection was intrinsic to the idea of detecting things from faces. These objections are to the quality of the measures. I'm not going to defend IQ as a useful measure, because it has a ton of problems and that's not my point here. > 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. Of course. But so what? There are people using IQ now for things. An ML model isn't going to magically make those biases worse, either. What it's going to do is bring them to the surface, so that they are quantifiable and we can actually do something about them. ML is the solution to the bias problem. Right now these evaluations are being made by other humans. Humans who we cannot statistically debias. Humans who's biases we can't even effectively interrogate. The reason people are making all these memes about biased AI is not that it's more biased than humans, it's that the bias is more measurable.

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.
    - darawk 6y ago
      IQ isn't the point though. I'm not a huge fan of IQ specifically either. Your original objection was intrinsic to the idea of detecting things from faces. These objections are to the quality of the measures. I'm not going to defend IQ as a useful measure, because it has a ton of problems and that's not my point here. > 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. Of course. But so what? There are people using IQ now for things. An ML model isn't going to magically make those biases worse, either. What it's going to do is bring them to the surface, so that they are quantifiable and we can actually do something about them. ML is the solution to the bias problem. Right now these evaluations are being made by other humans. Humans who we cannot statistically debias. Humans who's biases we can't even effectively interrogate. The reason people are making all these memes about biased AI is not that it's more biased than humans, it's that the bias is more measurable.