5 ms·
I only skimmed the paper, so I'm not claiming to know much about it, but one thing to keep in mind here is that a fair coin has a 50% accuracy using the same te
by kicat 6y ago
I only skimmed the paper, so I'm not claiming to know much about it, but one thing to keep in mind here is that a fair coin has a 50% accuracy using the same terminology as the headline. I'm not saying 72% is not an interesting achievement, its just that "you can do about 50% better than random chance" describes my gut feeling about how much you could actually see in someones face.
- statstutor 6y agoA 72% score on this scale is equivalent to confidently knowing 44% of the answers, and coin-flipping the rest. It's doing something that untrained humans are not capable of [edited to add: although humans were apparently tested by a different method, so this is not properly comparable], but is still a failing grade by usual methods of assessing human knowledge.
- stanrivers 6y agoThis is an important point - 72% is interesting, but its a 22% added to the chance to guess correctly... still interesting though
- rory 6y agoIt says in the article that humans got just 55% (so 10% better than random chance) on the same test.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoThe humans are probably overthinking it. You get ~55% by assuming by answering "Biden" for everybody.
- leereeves 6y agoAccording to Wikipedia only 51.3% voted for Biden/Harris.
- relaxing 6y agoThe dataset was not restricted to voters.
- leereeves 6y agoDo you have data that includes non-voters? I haven't seen any; most polls are limited to voters.
- standardUser 6y agoThere were tons of national polls done for Trump's approval that included all adults (instead of likely or registered voters). Trump fared noticeably worse in the polls of all adults throughout his presidency.
- leereeves 6y agoApproval isn't the same thing as preference among two choices. Trump received a considerably higher percentage of votes than his approval rating.
- simiones 6y agoIn fact, the dating site dataset was ~54% conservative according to their explanations of included data, but the point stands.
- sct202 6y agoI wonder if that 55% is from mturk or other survey sites that can be somewhat questionable in terms of quality with how much people are paying attention versus maximizing their hourly survey earnings.
- itsdrewmiller 6y agoIt says on a similar test - it's a reference to a different study with a different data set.
- wycy 6y agoThey do note the random chance bit, and they also note that it's better than humans could judge on their own and even, surprisingly, better than judged by a personality questionnaire. > Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%).
- klmadfejno 6y agoWere the humans experts or just random people though? The real question is whether the tool can beat a lookup table of age, race, and gender probabilities. The tool isn't going to be winning points of phrenology here. Weight, hair color, and hairstyle would also likely tell you a lot. I don't have any particular reason to believe this tool wouldn't work, but let's not pretend it's getting their by phrenology-esque topologies of people's faces. A randomly chosen black individual in the united states has a > 72% chance of leaning democrat. A randomly chosen hispanic individual is ~55-65% chance of leaning democrat. I don't find it crazy to imagine they've got a few other smaller features to boost it.
- wycy 6y agoIt further notes: > Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity.
- klmadfejno 6y agoHow does one calculate a metric like that?
- tylerrobinson 6y agoBy performing the analysis within each of those subgroups.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
- simias 6y ago72% is a very significant deviation from 50% though, I wasn't expecting such a result. >The highest predictive power was afforded by head orientation (58%), followed by emotional expression (57%). Liberals tended to face the camera more directly, were more likely to express surprise, and less likely to express disgust. Emotional expression makes some sense in hindsight but I wouldn't have though that head orientation would correlate. It's interesting to know how we betray ourselves with these minute details of body language.
- rsynnott 6y agoThough, these seems a bit odd; how many people are expressing _disgust_ in dating profiles?
- Applejinx 6y agoThose categorizations are opposites on a continuum of various kinds of muscle tension, notably brow scrunch muscles. Surprise is literally brow up and jaw slack, disgust involves brow scrunch and lip tightening. Facial expressions also bleed through to our experienced emotions, so going around with face scrunched a lot will MAKE you more suspicious and disgusted with things.