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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 prob

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
> lol 72% It takes 33 bits to single out a human. 72% means a substantial fraction of a bit -- it's not much, but combine it with a few dozen other clues of similar magnitude and you're really getting somewhere.
542354234235 6y ago
>Ultimately it puts people into 2 bins which are both huge and disparate and reduce complexe multi-dimensional elements to a meaningless binary Binary, yes. Meaningless, no. Having multi-dimensional information is better than binary information, but having binary information is better than no information (or guessing). Telling me the temperature, humidity, wind, cloud cover, and precipitation outside gives me more information than just telling me it is hot or cold outside. But knowing if it is hot or cold outside is still far better than not knowing anything. You can still make decisions and take actions based on limited information, which you could not do with no information.

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

> lol 72% It takes 33 bits to single out a human. 72% means a substantial fraction of a bit -- it's not much, but combine it with a few dozen other clues of similar magnitude and you're really getting somewhere.

542354234235 6y ago

>Ultimately it puts people into 2 bins which are both huge and disparate and reduce complexe multi-dimensional elements to a meaningless binary Binary, yes. Meaningless, no. Having multi-dimensional information is better than binary information, but having binary information is better than no information (or guessing). Telling me the temperature, humidity, wind, cloud cover, and precipitation outside gives me more information than just telling me it is hot or cold outside. But knowing if it is hot or cold outside is still far better than not knowing anything. You can still make decisions and take actions based on limited information, which you could not do with no information.