6 ms·

There's an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections, so let's get these out

There's an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections, so let's get these out of the way here. - Yes, they controlled for objects appearing in the pictures that might indicate political affiliation. The images are tightly cropped around the face. See Methods. - Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a human classifier. They gave the same test to humans, who did much worse than the model. See Abstract, Introduction, and Results. - Yes, this is doing more than just detecting a person's race, age, and/or gender. The classifier is still accurate when they compare people with the same race, age, and gender. See Results. If you want to discuss actual limitations in the study, here are some the author points out: - "A more detailed picture could be obtained by exploring the links between political orientation and facial features extracted from images taken in a standardized setting while controlling for facial hair, grooming, facial expression, and head orientation." - "Another factor affecting classification accuracy is the quality of the political orientation estimates. While the dichotomous representation used here (i.e., conservative vs. liberal) is widely used in the literature, it offers only a crude estimate of the complex interpersonal differences in ideology. Moreover, self-reported political labels suffer from the reference group effect: respondents’ tendency to assess their traits in the context of the salient comparison group."

vipa123 6y ago
You sir/madame, are a saint!
gzer0 6y ago
Good points and summary. Adding on to that, the following was from the abstract about 2 sentences in. Seems like some users do enjoy jumping straight to the comments! * 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%). * Accuracy was similar across countries (the U.S., Canada, and the UK), environments (Facebook and dating websites), and when comparing faces across samples. * Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity.
- hntrader 6y ago
  "controlling for ... ethnicity" There's significant signal buried in here that is likely not controlled for, depending on how granular their controls are. White-German and White-Italian are much more (10-13 percent) likely to be conservative leaning than White-Irish or White-British. Hispanic-Cuban are more likely to be conservative leaning than Hispanic-Mexican.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    In the US or generally?
    - hntrader 6y ago
      In the US
    - cies 6y ago
      The words conservative and liberal have wildly other meanings outside of the US. Even in the US they are not well agreed upon (especially the definitions, people seem to know which one to pick though when they have to).
      - nullserver 6y ago
        Some dumbed down US conservative principles. A conservative may only care about some of these. Financial: balanced budget types. Government: Common defense, otherwise minimal. Responsibility: Your job to feed and cloth yourself. Morals: don’t kill babies. Religious: Act like God watches you and you will be judged.
        unanswered 6y ago
        Oh, we're doing straw men now? Let me try! Some smarted-up US leftist principles. A leftist may care about more than these. Financial: You can never run out of other peoples' money. Government: is there to control peoples' lives as much as possible. Responsibility: is Nazi propaganda. Morals: what you do doesn't matter, as long as you say the right things. Religious: Religion is evil and people should think for themselves. Also you have to believe whatever scientists and/or leftist politicians tell you or else you're a Nazi. Say what you will about European leftism; at least it isn't like this.
fcantournet 6y ago
So even filtering for the extremely limited number of things that you allow us to find problematic, by their own admission : - they know that it's actually probably "working" (lol 72%) because of other biases they didn't take into account - Ultimately it puts people into 2 bins which are both huge and disparate and reduce complexe multi-dimensional elements to a meaningless binary. cool cool cool.
- SamBam 6y ago
  I don't really understand this comment. You don't think it's surprising or interesting that it could predict with 70% accuracy the political orientation of two different older white males? Or two younger non-white females? I found this to be a surprising result. What the mechanism? Is it the haircut? The facial expression? The quality of the photo? Maybe. Do those count as "biases that they don't take into account?" Could be. Would it be interesting to learn what those "biases" are? Yes!
- gzer0 6y ago
  This is statistically significant. The implications are massive. The authors are signalling it might be worthwhile to take a look at the exponential growth of these technologies. 72% is much better than: * random chance (50%) * human accuracy (55%) * 100-item personality questionnaire (66%)
- pretendscholar 6y ago
  Scoffing at 22% over random? Lets play poker some time.
- andybak 6y ago
  Surely the ability to sort people into meaningless bins on facial features alone is worthy of note? Let's say you created an arbitrary classification ("number of letters in street address" or "cosine of age in minutes") and an alorithm could predict that based on a photo alone. That would surely indicate that the classification wasn't arbitrary and there was something more interesting happening? At the very least you'd want to dig deeper.
- abecedarius 6y ago
mywittyname 6y ago
There's evidence of inheritability of political orientation, since it is tied to personality traits. Given that, it makes sense that it is possible to predict political orientation through looks alone. After all, looks are also inherited traits. The article gets into this a little bit. They are able to predict traits like intelligence and honesty by looks alone.
- MikeHolman 6y ago
  I think this is a very dangerous line of study. I can easily see these results getting used to forward racism and other appearance based discrimination.
  - plutonorm 6y ago
    Truth doesn't really care about your sensibilities. It seems there is actually an art to finding the mind's construction in the face! What this is really telling us is that we should not be judging others on their political, sexual, ideological, whatever-ical affiliations. A person is a person and we should value them for that and only that. These other qualities may be more or less useful in some sense, but not in the sense that counts - that they are a thinking feeling person who deserves our respect.
    - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
      > Truth doesn't really care about your sensibilities. I think the GP was questioning the wisdom of seeking a detail answer on this question; not whether or not the question has an objectively true answer.
    - majormajor 6y ago
      Do you think people hundreds of years ago with different common political views - some of which we'd find abhorrent now - had different faces too? Someone should test this classifier on old images. Maybe it's just identifying fashion, not facial structure.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
retrac 6y ago
I suspect we're going to see the same thing we saw in the model that can detect sexual orientation with much better than chance odds. It was, apparently, detecting that gay men tend to take or select images of themselves for a dating profile using a different angle, better lighting, and possibly differences in things like hairstyle and beards. Very anecdotally, I've noticed a possible weak correlation between certain kinds of beard styles and political leanings in men.
- SamBam 6y ago
  Obviously it's looking at something. I feel like everyone is jumping to assuming the authors are implying it's somehow in the person's facial structure, but it doesn't say that. If it's looking at the quality of the photo, or the trim of the beard, that's still interesting. Among other things, it means that you know analyses like this might start cropping up everywhere you submit your photo (job application cover letter?), and also that humans might be doing this innately with photos and not even realizing it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - sslayer 6y ago
    This must be how god feels.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    Humans might try, but the same study says they're not good at it with only 55 percent accuracy.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Unfortunately people dont have to be good at something to advocate it or force it on others. Just look at all the 'detoxes, random diets, cultural remedies like trying to cure plague with wisky, bloodletting etc. Our deductive powers havent improved much, they just moved to areas of our lives that are more nebulous. Fundamentally bloodletting and 'looks like a hippie, and hippies shouldn't work for a bank" are about on the same footing
gus_massa 6y ago
> - Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a human classifier. They gave the same test to humans, who did much worse than the model. See Abstract, Introduction, and Results. Where do they say that they gave the same test for to humans? All I find is the reference [15] that points to https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232255935_Accuracy_in_Categorizing_Perceptually_Ambiguous_Groups_A_Review_and_Meta-Analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232255935_Accuracy_... that cite a previous article about a different set of photos and a different question.
- robocat 6y ago
  And some humans may be very good classifiers, or would be if trained.
- dmurray 6y ago
  They very much didn't. Downvoted the GP for taking the snarky tone about "an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections", but then mis-characterizing the methodology himself.
dheera 6y ago
I would be very interested if instead if they first passed it through an indepedently-trained emotion classifier, and then look to see if the emotion vectors alone can predict liberal vs. conservative to some degree.
bhk 6y ago
The 72% number is the result when not controlling for demographics. When controlling for demographics, the results ranged from 65% to 71% accuracy. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1/figures/2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1/figures/2 It makes we wonder what the accuracy would be if they controlled for demographics at a smaller granularity, like sub-ethnicities. Furthermore, it appears that the Canadian dating site data set was 54% conservative, so an algorithm that always guessed conservative would be correct 54% of the time. From the article I can't tell what the balance was for the other data sets.
- itsdrewmiller 6y ago
  "The accuracy is expressed as AUC, or a fraction of correct guesses when distinguishing between all possible pairs of faces—one conservative and one liberal." - so no way to guess better than 50%.
  - bhk 6y ago
    Ah, yes. I missed that.
  - andresp 6y ago
    If they are distinguishing between pairs with different categories then they just need one of the paid to be easily categorised to know the category of the other. How do they control for this?
- bhk 6y ago
  Also: "Overall, the average out-of-sample accuracy was 68%..." (again, this does not control for demographics). I would not call it "prediction" when the "predictor" was trained on the data set you're testing it against. The out-of-sample number would be more fairly called prediction. It's unclear what the number would be for out-of-sample accuracy corrected for demographics, but we could extrapolate a guess of 64%.
anigbrowl 6y ago
avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections This is a norm nowadays, and a bad one. In some cases it's carelessness or laziness (why go to the effort of reading the article when posting an uninformed contradiction will provide free explanations), in others trolling or deliberate propagation of misinformation.
gvd 6y ago
IS it a meat head / not meat head detector?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
PicassoCTs 6y ago
Seems like a lot of medical/living history can be derived from the face. Rings around the eyes tell of 2nd jobs and long hours. Sunburned skin tells about work outside exposed to UV. Bad shaves tell about a lack of time and money, lack of makeup, tells a story about a lack of time for luxurys. Substance abuse skin tells of hard times. All in all, this sounds like a nice tool to detect anglo-sphere wide signs of a middle class that lost out to globalization. Which in itself makes it valuable to judge credit-history by look.
timoth3y 6y ago
> What would an algorithm’s accuracy be when distinguishing between faces of people of the same age, gender, and ethnicity? To answer this question, classification accuracies were recomputed using only face pairs of the same age, gender, and ethnicity Perhaps I am reading this wrong, but this is not controlling for demographics. If, for example, 70% of older white men are conservative, you could reach 70% accuracy by predicting all older white men are conservative. Yes, it's much better than a coin flip, but random 50/50 guessing would be a ver bad strategy. It's really a shame that they did not have humans and their system classify the same out-of-sample data so we could compare apples to apples. Perhaps they will in later research.
dwd 6y ago
I'm surprised they didn't classify and weight for facial features such as general symmetry or eye distance.
lwhi 6y ago
I think people automatically jump to the conclusion that studies like this are linking the development of innate physical characteristics with political allegiance. I can understand why this line of enquiry is troubling; as it obviously ties in with branches of science in the 20th century that were immoral. Logically, some physiology will affect our reasoning from a pretty deferred position. Our genetics predespose our brain chemistry. I'm led to believe the development of certain hormones has been shown to have an affect on our physical features; for instance, increased testosterone, providing a more prominent browline. It doesn't feel proposterous that such physiology might have _some_ bearing on the way we align our worldview. It also doesn't surprise me that these factors might be able to be used to infer correlation when used with a very large dataset. People are nuanced though, and I struggle with the concept that we are total slaves to bodies we're born with. I believe choice (through nurture) allows us a high degree of freedom to counterbalance the initial physiological stack our genetics encourages. If this is true, how is this model's reasoning able to successfully predict political allegiance? I'm imagining the way we present ourselves provides subtle nods to prominent figures we respect and cues towards our politics. We leak information through body language, dress, expression. Is this where the extra inference comes from?

vipa123 6y ago

You sir/madame, are a saint!

gzer0 6y ago

Good points and summary. Adding on to that, the following was from the abstract about 2 sentences in. Seems like some users do enjoy jumping straight to the comments! * 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%). * Accuracy was similar across countries (the U.S., Canada, and the UK), environments (Facebook and dating websites), and when comparing faces across samples. * Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity.

hntrader 6y ago
"controlling for ... ethnicity" There's significant signal buried in here that is likely not controlled for, depending on how granular their controls are. White-German and White-Italian are much more (10-13 percent) likely to be conservative leaning than White-Irish or White-British. Hispanic-Cuban are more likely to be conservative leaning than Hispanic-Mexican.
- xxpor 6y ago
  In the US or generally?
  - hntrader 6y ago
    In the US
  - cies 6y ago
    The words conservative and liberal have wildly other meanings outside of the US. Even in the US they are not well agreed upon (especially the definitions, people seem to know which one to pick though when they have to).
    - nullserver 6y ago
      Some dumbed down US conservative principles. A conservative may only care about some of these. Financial: balanced budget types. Government: Common defense, otherwise minimal. Responsibility: Your job to feed and cloth yourself. Morals: don’t kill babies. Religious: Act like God watches you and you will be judged.
      - unanswered 6y ago
        Oh, we're doing straw men now? Let me try! Some smarted-up US leftist principles. A leftist may care about more than these. Financial: You can never run out of other peoples' money. Government: is there to control peoples' lives as much as possible. Responsibility: is Nazi propaganda. Morals: what you do doesn't matter, as long as you say the right things. Religious: Religion is evil and people should think for themselves. Also you have to believe whatever scientists and/or leftist politicians tell you or else you're a Nazi. Say what you will about European leftism; at least it isn't like this.

fcantournet 6y ago

So even filtering for the extremely limited number of things that you allow us to find problematic, by their own admission : - they know that it's actually probably "working" (lol 72%) because of other biases they didn't take into account - Ultimately it puts people into 2 bins which are both huge and disparate and reduce complexe multi-dimensional elements to a meaningless binary. cool cool cool.

SamBam 6y ago
I don't really understand this comment. You don't think it's surprising or interesting that it could predict with 70% accuracy the political orientation of two different older white males? Or two younger non-white females? I found this to be a surprising result. What the mechanism? Is it the haircut? The facial expression? The quality of the photo? Maybe. Do those count as "biases that they don't take into account?" Could be. Would it be interesting to learn what those "biases" are? Yes!
gzer0 6y ago
This is statistically significant. The implications are massive. The authors are signalling it might be worthwhile to take a look at the exponential growth of these technologies. 72% is much better than: * random chance (50%) * human accuracy (55%) * 100-item personality questionnaire (66%)
pretendscholar 6y ago
Scoffing at 22% over random? Lets play poker some time.
andybak 6y ago
Surely the ability to sort people into meaningless bins on facial features alone is worthy of note? Let's say you created an arbitrary classification ("number of letters in street address" or "cosine of age in minutes") and an alorithm could predict that based on a photo alone. That would surely indicate that the classification wasn't arbitrary and there was something more interesting happening? At the very least you'd want to dig deeper.
abecedarius 6y ago

mywittyname 6y ago

There's evidence of inheritability of political orientation, since it is tied to personality traits. Given that, it makes sense that it is possible to predict political orientation through looks alone. After all, looks are also inherited traits. The article gets into this a little bit. They are able to predict traits like intelligence and honesty by looks alone.

MikeHolman 6y ago
I think this is a very dangerous line of study. I can easily see these results getting used to forward racism and other appearance based discrimination.
- plutonorm 6y ago
  Truth doesn't really care about your sensibilities. It seems there is actually an art to finding the mind's construction in the face! What this is really telling us is that we should not be judging others on their political, sexual, ideological, whatever-ical affiliations. A person is a person and we should value them for that and only that. These other qualities may be more or less useful in some sense, but not in the sense that counts - that they are a thinking feeling person who deserves our respect.
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    > Truth doesn't really care about your sensibilities. I think the GP was questioning the wisdom of seeking a detail answer on this question; not whether or not the question has an objectively true answer.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    Do you think people hundreds of years ago with different common political views - some of which we'd find abhorrent now - had different faces too? Someone should test this classifier on old images. Maybe it's just identifying fashion, not facial structure.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

retrac 6y ago

I suspect we're going to see the same thing we saw in the model that can detect sexual orientation with much better than chance odds. It was, apparently, detecting that gay men tend to take or select images of themselves for a dating profile using a different angle, better lighting, and possibly differences in things like hairstyle and beards. Very anecdotally, I've noticed a possible weak correlation between certain kinds of beard styles and political leanings in men.

SamBam 6y ago
Obviously it's looking at something. I feel like everyone is jumping to assuming the authors are implying it's somehow in the person's facial structure, but it doesn't say that. If it's looking at the quality of the photo, or the trim of the beard, that's still interesting. Among other things, it means that you know analyses like this might start cropping up everywhere you submit your photo (job application cover letter?), and also that humans might be doing this innately with photos and not even realizing it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sslayer 6y ago
  This must be how god feels.
- hntrader 6y ago
  Humans might try, but the same study says they're not good at it with only 55 percent accuracy.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Unfortunately people dont have to be good at something to advocate it or force it on others. Just look at all the 'detoxes, random diets, cultural remedies like trying to cure plague with wisky, bloodletting etc. Our deductive powers havent improved much, they just moved to areas of our lives that are more nebulous. Fundamentally bloodletting and 'looks like a hippie, and hippies shouldn't work for a bank" are about on the same footing

gus_massa 6y ago

> - Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a human classifier. They gave the same test to humans, who did much worse than the model. See Abstract, Introduction, and Results. Where do they say that they gave the same test for to humans? All I find is the reference [15] that points to https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232255935_Accuracy_in_Categorizing_Perceptually_Ambiguous_Groups_A_Review_and_Meta-Analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232255935_Accuracy_... that cite a previous article about a different set of photos and a different question.

robocat 6y ago
And some humans may be very good classifiers, or would be if trained.
dmurray 6y ago
They very much didn't. Downvoted the GP for taking the snarky tone about "an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections", but then mis-characterizing the methodology himself.

dheera 6y ago

I would be very interested if instead if they first passed it through an indepedently-trained emotion classifier, and then look to see if the emotion vectors alone can predict liberal vs. conservative to some degree.

bhk 6y ago

The 72% number is the result when not controlling for demographics. When controlling for demographics, the results ranged from 65% to 71% accuracy. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1/figures/2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79310-1/figures/2 It makes we wonder what the accuracy would be if they controlled for demographics at a smaller granularity, like sub-ethnicities. Furthermore, it appears that the Canadian dating site data set was 54% conservative, so an algorithm that always guessed conservative would be correct 54% of the time. From the article I can't tell what the balance was for the other data sets.

itsdrewmiller 6y ago
"The accuracy is expressed as AUC, or a fraction of correct guesses when distinguishing between all possible pairs of faces—one conservative and one liberal." - so no way to guess better than 50%.
- bhk 6y ago
  Ah, yes. I missed that.
- andresp 6y ago
  If they are distinguishing between pairs with different categories then they just need one of the paid to be easily categorised to know the category of the other. How do they control for this?
bhk 6y ago
Also: "Overall, the average out-of-sample accuracy was 68%..." (again, this does not control for demographics). I would not call it "prediction" when the "predictor" was trained on the data set you're testing it against. The out-of-sample number would be more fairly called prediction. It's unclear what the number would be for out-of-sample accuracy corrected for demographics, but we could extrapolate a guess of 64%.

anigbrowl 6y ago

avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections This is a norm nowadays, and a bad one. In some cases it's carelessness or laziness (why go to the effort of reading the article when posting an uninformed contradiction will provide free explanations), in others trolling or deliberate propagation of misinformation.

gvd 6y ago

IS it a meat head / not meat head detector?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

PicassoCTs 6y ago

Seems like a lot of medical/living history can be derived from the face. Rings around the eyes tell of 2nd jobs and long hours. Sunburned skin tells about work outside exposed to UV. Bad shaves tell about a lack of time and money, lack of makeup, tells a story about a lack of time for luxurys. Substance abuse skin tells of hard times. All in all, this sounds like a nice tool to detect anglo-sphere wide signs of a middle class that lost out to globalization. Which in itself makes it valuable to judge credit-history by look.

timoth3y 6y ago

> What would an algorithm’s accuracy be when distinguishing between faces of people of the same age, gender, and ethnicity? To answer this question, classification accuracies were recomputed using only face pairs of the same age, gender, and ethnicity Perhaps I am reading this wrong, but this is not controlling for demographics. If, for example, 70% of older white men are conservative, you could reach 70% accuracy by predicting all older white men are conservative. Yes, it's much better than a coin flip, but random 50/50 guessing would be a ver bad strategy. It's really a shame that they did not have humans and their system classify the same out-of-sample data so we could compare apples to apples. Perhaps they will in later research.

dwd 6y ago

I'm surprised they didn't classify and weight for facial features such as general symmetry or eye distance.

lwhi 6y ago

I think people automatically jump to the conclusion that studies like this are linking the development of innate physical characteristics with political allegiance. I can understand why this line of enquiry is troubling; as it obviously ties in with branches of science in the 20th century that were immoral. Logically, some physiology will affect our reasoning from a pretty deferred position. Our genetics predespose our brain chemistry. I'm led to believe the development of certain hormones has been shown to have an affect on our physical features; for instance, increased testosterone, providing a more prominent browline. It doesn't feel proposterous that such physiology might have _some_ bearing on the way we align our worldview. It also doesn't surprise me that these factors might be able to be used to infer correlation when used with a very large dataset. People are nuanced though, and I struggle with the concept that we are total slaves to bodies we're born with. I believe choice (through nurture) allows us a high degree of freedom to counterbalance the initial physiological stack our genetics encourages. If this is true, how is this model's reasoning able to successfully predict political allegiance? I'm imagining the way we present ourselves provides subtle nods to prominent figures we respect and cues towards our politics. We leak information through body language, dress, expression. Is this where the extra inference comes from?