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> one that was reporting some degree of success in determining whether someone was homosexual via ML Yes, which was also phrenological in nature. > one that w

> one that was reporting some degree of success in determining whether someone was homosexual via ML Yes, which was also phrenological in nature. > one that was reporting some degree of success in determining whether someone was homosexual via ML I've yet to see any "uncomfortable truth" from psychometric research that wasn't relatively easily explained as culturally tied. > but as long as they continue to maintain a relatively consistent relationship to observable reality The point is that neither this study nor the homosexuality study have a relatively consistent relationship to observable reality. Your priors on us being able to predict, independent of social conditioning, some arbitrary social attribute based on someone's face should be very, very low. And "predicting" some arbitrary social attribute based on social conditioning is just encoding social bias into the model, which is bad. > and that if we had continually given higher credence to feelings the Enlightenment and most scientific progress we've had would have been far slower if it had happened at all. You mean like all the scientific progress that came out of phrenological research?

JoshuaDavid 6y ago
> Your priors on us being able to predict, independent of social conditioning, some arbitrary social attribute based on someone's face should be very, very low. What does "independent of social conditioning" mean here? Can you give some examples of social attributes that arise independent of social conditioning?
- core-questions 6y ago
  It's tactical nihilism. Guess what: most of us can make some pretty intelligent guesses about things just based on looking at them. The observation may not be perfect, it may not even be true, but if the goal of the observation is to inform a system for self-preservation, false positives might be totally acceptable if the cost of taking a preservative action is not too high. For example, avoiding a person your subconscious tells you is dangerous - you can ignore it and overrule it, or you can give in and take the safe action. Much of the time, the latter is the better choice, even if you didn't need to be scared, even if there was no danger, because you have no better way of knowing in advance what the situation truly is. Should we use this kind of heuristic in law enforcement? No, this is not Minority Report or the Asimov world of Multivac; while it may be useful for an aggregate at scale we will not get good enough accuracy to know much about individuals. However, it's entirely possible it will tell us about the behaviours of groups of people, and that could still be useful for policy decisions.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > Guess what: most of us can make some pretty intelligent guesses about things just based on looking at them. Surely not based on looking at the blurry, low-quality camera images that are the usual focus for mass facial recognition. Train a system for that and it will just focus on the most visible traits, that we all know about. And those same traits have problematic correlations with social disadvantage and marginalization, that will impact any assessment you might want to make.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > What does "independent of social conditioning" mean here? So we know, for example, that if you train a model to predict "criminality" based on face here in the US, it will find that race is a strong predictor of criminality. The first problem with this specific example is that the data is biased: certain communities are overpoliced. We know, for example, that black and white people use marijuana at around the same rate, but that black people are more likely to be arrested for use. So they'll be more likely to be represented in a dataset of "criminals" even if they aren't actually more criminal. So that's one social factor. But let's pretend that we can construct a socially untainted dataset that represents the true underlying crime rate, we correlate it with face images, and the racial disparity still exists. I want to reiterate that we're well off into the world of fantasy here, but for demonstration purposes. There are generally 3 conclusions you can draw from a correlation like this: A directly causes B, B directly causes A, or something else more complex is at play. It's unlikely for facial structure changes to directly cause criminality, and unless you're Pinocchio, criminal behavior isn't going to directly cause changes in your face. So what more complex thing is at play? Well one answer is genes. It could be that the genes that make someone darker also make them more naturally predisposed to violence. That is, some factor C directly causes both A and B. Or it could be even more complex, for example that socially, people who exhibit black skin are more likely to be placed in conditions that breed criminal behavior[0]. Since economic and social status are heritable, and so is skin color, this seems reasonable to conclude, and there's lots of other evidence that this is the case. But if that's the case, then looking at a picture of a face doesn't actually have predictive power. At best it just recognizes that your average black person is likely to have been raised in a situation where they were more likely to commit a crime. It doesn't have any predictive power about a black person who wasn't raised in those conditions. So by independent of social condition, what I mean is that such a model isn't useful unless you ascribe to the belief that the genes that cause facial structures are correlated with the genes that cause criminal behavior (which presupposes that those genes exist). Otherwise you aren't actually looking at even a direct correlation and in fact it's very likely that if you divide your subpopulation up in smart ways, you'll find that there are groups against which you are unfairly biased. Just because the social signifiers in the study we're looking at aren't as obvious to you or I as skin tone doesn't mean they aren't there, and again that presumes the data is good, which we know it isn't. > Can you give some examples of social attributes that arise independent of social conditioning? I don't know that I fully explained this above, so let's create another fantasy world to explain this more concretely. Let's agree that murder is bad. This is solely a social agreement, but we decide on it based on ethical beliefs. Imagine that in this fantasy world there are genes that cause one to occasionally enter a bloodlust that forces one to go on a relatively uncontrollable killing rampage. Or for a more direct fantasy example, turn into a werewolf that then goes into a relatively uncontrollable killing rampage. Or be an Orc which is "naturally" evil (this is actually a relatively common fantasy trope, huh). This genetic marker would imply a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior, despite any social conditioning. Compare this to a relatively normal human child who is trained from a young age that they are "no one", a part of a greater movement that requires assassinating the wrong people, and that this assassination is sometimes necessary for the greater good. Both are more likely than your average person to commit a crime, but one was conditioned to this socially while one was genetically predisposed. If this cult holds onto family lines, there will be similarities between cult members, but people who escape the cult or who were never a part of it might be unjustly thought to be criminal, solely because they resembled the cult. To jump back to the original statement, this means that if you set up a confusion matrix that includes "family of cult members" as a category, your model will perform badly and discriminate negatively agains them. You can see why this might cause huge issues like, for example, causing the justice system to chase or harass people who are related to criminals. Hopefully that explains. It's essentially a correlation vs. causation issue. [0]: I should note here that this is true whether you ascribe to the belief that "black culture" encourages/celebrates criminality, or the belief that "white supremacist and social structures" push black people into situations where they can't avoid crime.
core-questions 6y ago
> I've yet to see any "uncomfortable truth" from psychometric research that wasn't relatively easily explained as culturally tied. So you're not aware of race and IQ studies, where differences have persisted relatively consistently over a hundred years of research despite decades of effort to reduce any possible influence of cultural components? If you're not aware of this, it's literally because it's an uncomfortable truth that is deliberately obfuscated and underreported to avoid controversy. Nevertheless, it persists as a datapoint. > The point is that neither this study nor the homosexuality study have a relatively consistent relationship to observable reality. You assert this, but I don't know it to be the case. There's also no reason to immediately discount early research in this direction; you run the risk of being like Minsky, fighting against the utility of the Perceptron, which has become the basis of these shiny new ML systems after a long hiatus. > And "predicting" some arbitrary social attribute based on social conditioning is just encoding social bias into the model, which is bad. This is silly, because it means you want to pretend we live in a vaccuum where society doesn't exist and where people don't have outward indications of internal traits (whether deliberate or not). Sure, such things are hard to predict totally accurately and are highly context specific, but not out of the question for reasonable predictions given a big enough dataset. Again, I won't pretend these things have been trained on really solid, representative data, yet... but that's only a matter of time, and when it does happen, it has to be data that represents reality _as it is_, not some dreamed up reality where the social issues and complexities we have today aren't included. You can look at a person and tell me a lot about them and you can be pretty confident; you can guess their background, gender, how much they take care of themselves, what their likely socioeconomic status is, maybe even more just from looking at them. Not perfectly, but enough to inform predictions that have evolutionary consequences - otherwise, Nature would not have wasted massive amounts of neural wetware on them to start with. You do this every day whether you'd like to admit it or not; depending on where you live your personal safety may highly depend upon it, too. Think about this: you may not like this research, but just like with gun control, trying to prevent people from doing it will just push it underground, and if there is predictive power with this, if it is only underground, it will only be used for bad purposes.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > So you're not aware of race and IQ studies, where differences have persisted relatively consistently over a hundred years of research despite decades of effort to reduce any possible influence of cultural components? I'm certainly aware of such studies, I'm also aware that pretty much every study that has found some difference in IQ between races has been found to contain social conditioning issues. Whether that was early on issues like nutrition that caused entire standard deviation jumps in IQ, or more recent discoveries like how the race of the test proctor can impact IQ and similar studies, or that if you pay someone more prior to an IQ test, they'll perform better. Because of all of these confounding factors, it's not really possible to draw any conclusions from what we know to be a bunch of variously flawed studies. To me, the most uncomfortable truth revealed by all this research is how willing some people are to jump at ultimately tenuous research that supports racist preconceptions. > You assert this, but I don't know it to be the case. That's okay. > This is silly, because it means you want to pretend we live in a vaccuum where society doesn't exist and where people don't have outward indications of internal traits (whether deliberate or not). No, I am well aware that society exists and people can have outward indications of traits. My point is that we should not build systems that discriminate based on those things. And there's no point in building a system that can recognize a person's gender or social class or whatnot if we won't use it, and any use of such a system will be discriminatory and harmful, you're welcome to try and provide a counterexample though. > Think about this: you may not like this research, but just like with gun control, trying to prevent people from doing it will just push it underground, and if there is predictive power with this, if it is only underground, it will only be used for bad purposes. This doesn't follow. If it's not underground it will also only be used for bad purposes, but be developed more quickly. And social pressure to not work on or be involved with such tools means that it will be used for significantly fewer bad purposes. Using facial recognition for policing is a bad purpose. We were going that direction, now we're not, not because the police don't want to, but because social pressure against researchers, by other researchers, caused them to stop developing the products in that realm. That's a clear win.

JoshuaDavid 6y ago

> Your priors on us being able to predict, independent of social conditioning, some arbitrary social attribute based on someone's face should be very, very low. What does "independent of social conditioning" mean here? Can you give some examples of social attributes that arise independent of social conditioning?

core-questions 6y ago
It's tactical nihilism. Guess what: most of us can make some pretty intelligent guesses about things just based on looking at them. The observation may not be perfect, it may not even be true, but if the goal of the observation is to inform a system for self-preservation, false positives might be totally acceptable if the cost of taking a preservative action is not too high. For example, avoiding a person your subconscious tells you is dangerous - you can ignore it and overrule it, or you can give in and take the safe action. Much of the time, the latter is the better choice, even if you didn't need to be scared, even if there was no danger, because you have no better way of knowing in advance what the situation truly is. Should we use this kind of heuristic in law enforcement? No, this is not Minority Report or the Asimov world of Multivac; while it may be useful for an aggregate at scale we will not get good enough accuracy to know much about individuals. However, it's entirely possible it will tell us about the behaviours of groups of people, and that could still be useful for policy decisions.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > Guess what: most of us can make some pretty intelligent guesses about things just based on looking at them. Surely not based on looking at the blurry, low-quality camera images that are the usual focus for mass facial recognition. Train a system for that and it will just focus on the most visible traits, that we all know about. And those same traits have problematic correlations with social disadvantage and marginalization, that will impact any assessment you might want to make.
joshuamorton 6y ago
> What does "independent of social conditioning" mean here? So we know, for example, that if you train a model to predict "criminality" based on face here in the US, it will find that race is a strong predictor of criminality. The first problem with this specific example is that the data is biased: certain communities are overpoliced. We know, for example, that black and white people use marijuana at around the same rate, but that black people are more likely to be arrested for use. So they'll be more likely to be represented in a dataset of "criminals" even if they aren't actually more criminal. So that's one social factor. But let's pretend that we can construct a socially untainted dataset that represents the true underlying crime rate, we correlate it with face images, and the racial disparity still exists. I want to reiterate that we're well off into the world of fantasy here, but for demonstration purposes. There are generally 3 conclusions you can draw from a correlation like this: A directly causes B, B directly causes A, or something else more complex is at play. It's unlikely for facial structure changes to directly cause criminality, and unless you're Pinocchio, criminal behavior isn't going to directly cause changes in your face. So what more complex thing is at play? Well one answer is genes. It could be that the genes that make someone darker also make them more naturally predisposed to violence. That is, some factor C directly causes both A and B. Or it could be even more complex, for example that socially, people who exhibit black skin are more likely to be placed in conditions that breed criminal behavior[0]. Since economic and social status are heritable, and so is skin color, this seems reasonable to conclude, and there's lots of other evidence that this is the case. But if that's the case, then looking at a picture of a face doesn't actually have predictive power. At best it just recognizes that your average black person is likely to have been raised in a situation where they were more likely to commit a crime. It doesn't have any predictive power about a black person who wasn't raised in those conditions. So by independent of social condition, what I mean is that such a model isn't useful unless you ascribe to the belief that the genes that cause facial structures are correlated with the genes that cause criminal behavior (which presupposes that those genes exist). Otherwise you aren't actually looking at even a direct correlation and in fact it's very likely that if you divide your subpopulation up in smart ways, you'll find that there are groups against which you are unfairly biased. Just because the social signifiers in the study we're looking at aren't as obvious to you or I as skin tone doesn't mean they aren't there, and again that presumes the data is good, which we know it isn't. > Can you give some examples of social attributes that arise independent of social conditioning? I don't know that I fully explained this above, so let's create another fantasy world to explain this more concretely. Let's agree that murder is bad. This is solely a social agreement, but we decide on it based on ethical beliefs. Imagine that in this fantasy world there are genes that cause one to occasionally enter a bloodlust that forces one to go on a relatively uncontrollable killing rampage. Or for a more direct fantasy example, turn into a werewolf that then goes into a relatively uncontrollable killing rampage. Or be an Orc which is "naturally" evil (this is actually a relatively common fantasy trope, huh). This genetic marker would imply a genetic predisposition to criminal behavior, despite any social conditioning. Compare this to a relatively normal human child who is trained from a young age that they are "no one", a part of a greater movement that requires assassinating the wrong people, and that this assassination is sometimes necessary for the greater good. Both are more likely than your average person to commit a crime, but one was conditioned to this socially while one was genetically predisposed. If this cult holds onto family lines, there will be similarities between cult members, but people who escape the cult or who were never a part of it might be unjustly thought to be criminal, solely because they resembled the cult. To jump back to the original statement, this means that if you set up a confusion matrix that includes "family of cult members" as a category, your model will perform badly and discriminate negatively agains them. You can see why this might cause huge issues like, for example, causing the justice system to chase or harass people who are related to criminals. Hopefully that explains. It's essentially a correlation vs. causation issue. [0]: I should note here that this is true whether you ascribe to the belief that "black culture" encourages/celebrates criminality, or the belief that "white supremacist and social structures" push black people into situations where they can't avoid crime.

core-questions 6y ago

> I've yet to see any "uncomfortable truth" from psychometric research that wasn't relatively easily explained as culturally tied. So you're not aware of race and IQ studies, where differences have persisted relatively consistently over a hundred years of research despite decades of effort to reduce any possible influence of cultural components? If you're not aware of this, it's literally because it's an uncomfortable truth that is deliberately obfuscated and underreported to avoid controversy. Nevertheless, it persists as a datapoint. > The point is that neither this study nor the homosexuality study have a relatively consistent relationship to observable reality. You assert this, but I don't know it to be the case. There's also no reason to immediately discount early research in this direction; you run the risk of being like Minsky, fighting against the utility of the Perceptron, which has become the basis of these shiny new ML systems after a long hiatus. > And "predicting" some arbitrary social attribute based on social conditioning is just encoding social bias into the model, which is bad. This is silly, because it means you want to pretend we live in a vaccuum where society doesn't exist and where people don't have outward indications of internal traits (whether deliberate or not). Sure, such things are hard to predict totally accurately and are highly context specific, but not out of the question for reasonable predictions given a big enough dataset. Again, I won't pretend these things have been trained on really solid, representative data, yet... but that's only a matter of time, and when it does happen, it has to be data that represents reality _as it is_, not some dreamed up reality where the social issues and complexities we have today aren't included. You can look at a person and tell me a lot about them and you can be pretty confident; you can guess their background, gender, how much they take care of themselves, what their likely socioeconomic status is, maybe even more just from looking at them. Not perfectly, but enough to inform predictions that have evolutionary consequences - otherwise, Nature would not have wasted massive amounts of neural wetware on them to start with. You do this every day whether you'd like to admit it or not; depending on where you live your personal safety may highly depend upon it, too. Think about this: you may not like this research, but just like with gun control, trying to prevent people from doing it will just push it underground, and if there is predictive power with this, if it is only underground, it will only be used for bad purposes.

joshuamorton 6y ago
> So you're not aware of race and IQ studies, where differences have persisted relatively consistently over a hundred years of research despite decades of effort to reduce any possible influence of cultural components? I'm certainly aware of such studies, I'm also aware that pretty much every study that has found some difference in IQ between races has been found to contain social conditioning issues. Whether that was early on issues like nutrition that caused entire standard deviation jumps in IQ, or more recent discoveries like how the race of the test proctor can impact IQ and similar studies, or that if you pay someone more prior to an IQ test, they'll perform better. Because of all of these confounding factors, it's not really possible to draw any conclusions from what we know to be a bunch of variously flawed studies. To me, the most uncomfortable truth revealed by all this research is how willing some people are to jump at ultimately tenuous research that supports racist preconceptions. > You assert this, but I don't know it to be the case. That's okay. > This is silly, because it means you want to pretend we live in a vaccuum where society doesn't exist and where people don't have outward indications of internal traits (whether deliberate or not). No, I am well aware that society exists and people can have outward indications of traits. My point is that we should not build systems that discriminate based on those things. And there's no point in building a system that can recognize a person's gender or social class or whatnot if we won't use it, and any use of such a system will be discriminatory and harmful, you're welcome to try and provide a counterexample though. > Think about this: you may not like this research, but just like with gun control, trying to prevent people from doing it will just push it underground, and if there is predictive power with this, if it is only underground, it will only be used for bad purposes. This doesn't follow. If it's not underground it will also only be used for bad purposes, but be developed more quickly. And social pressure to not work on or be involved with such tools means that it will be used for significantly fewer bad purposes. Using facial recognition for policing is a bad purpose. We were going that direction, now we're not, not because the police don't want to, but because social pressure against researchers, by other researchers, caused them to stop developing the products in that realm. That's a clear win.