> It sounded kind of like you thought it wouldn't be possible to get interesting results which tell you something you didn't already know from ML with much bett

> It sounded kind of like you thought it wouldn't be possible to get interesting results which tell you something you didn't already know from ML with much better than random chance. In general I do think this is true, but it's not verifiable. Like I said, in general I think that the priors that underlying facial structure should be strongly correlated with sexual orientation are very low. It's not impossible, just unlikely, so when you get "results", the most likely explanation is not that you've found something profound, but that you're encoding social biases. And so from the perspective of a researcher, you haven't actually accomplished your goals (of discovering something profound), you've instead committed a relatively elementary error that legitimizes certain forms of stereotyping. And again I note that my priors suggest that this is the most likely outcome.