4 ms·

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
Tarsul 6y ago
question would be if a trained human is better than a machine. AlphaGo was deemed stronger than humans only once it beat the best Go player.
gus_massa 6y ago
The 55% accuracy is a from a cite about a different study with a different set of photos and a different question. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232255935_Accuracy_in_Categorizing_Perceptually_Ambiguous_Groups_A_Review_and_Meta-Analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232255935_Accuracy_...
- dmurray 6y ago
  Oh, that's really important. It's the only important comparison - I don't believe 72% means anything on its own. The study either needs to try the exact same methodology on humans, or to find a metastudy that consistently shows humans perform well below that on these tests. To be fair to the authors, the information isn't hidden. It's prominent in the introduction, just not in the abstract.
  - SamBam 6y ago
    Why does this need to be better than humans to be interesting? It's still extremely interesting to me that a program can determine with over 70% accuracy a person's political orientation from a cropped photo, without taking age sex or race into consideration. Among other things, it means it can do that to 10 million photos, which you'd have to pay a lot of humans to do if you wanted it done otherwise.
    - dmurray 6y ago
      Because comparing against a "competent human" is enough of a control group to be sure that it's finding interesting signal in the data and not just exploiting something trivial like race or political clothing. It doesn't need to be better than humans to be interesting. Coming pretty close would do. But if you told me humans score 90% on the same pictures, I'd believe there's something unrepresentative about the sample pictures, because I don't expect humans to have that accuracy.
    - gus_massa 6y ago
      There are a lot of other cues. Oversimplifying, here in Argentina you can have a few clues from facial hair in men: Beard like Che Guevara -> Left Moustache like Saddam Hussein -> Right There are exemptions, and most people shave all facial hair, so it's more complicated, but there are many easy clues in the face. Are the easy clues enough to explain a ~70% or they did something really interesting?
      - ramblerman 6y ago
        Yet Alberto, the current leftwing president has a moustache like Saddam Hussein.

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

Tarsul 6y ago

question would be if a trained human is better than a machine. AlphaGo was deemed stronger than humans only once it beat the best Go player.

gus_massa 6y ago

The 55% accuracy is a from a cite about a different study with a different set of photos and a different question. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232255935_Accuracy_in_Categorizing_Perceptually_Ambiguous_Groups_A_Review_and_Meta-Analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232255935_Accuracy_...

dmurray 6y ago
Oh, that's really important. It's the only important comparison - I don't believe 72% means anything on its own. The study either needs to try the exact same methodology on humans, or to find a metastudy that consistently shows humans perform well below that on these tests. To be fair to the authors, the information isn't hidden. It's prominent in the introduction, just not in the abstract.
- SamBam 6y ago
  Why does this need to be better than humans to be interesting? It's still extremely interesting to me that a program can determine with over 70% accuracy a person's political orientation from a cropped photo, without taking age sex or race into consideration. Among other things, it means it can do that to 10 million photos, which you'd have to pay a lot of humans to do if you wanted it done otherwise.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    Because comparing against a "competent human" is enough of a control group to be sure that it's finding interesting signal in the data and not just exploiting something trivial like race or political clothing. It doesn't need to be better than humans to be interesting. Coming pretty close would do. But if you told me humans score 90% on the same pictures, I'd believe there's something unrepresentative about the sample pictures, because I don't expect humans to have that accuracy.
  - gus_massa 6y ago
    There are a lot of other cues. Oversimplifying, here in Argentina you can have a few clues from facial hair in men: Beard like Che Guevara -> Left Moustache like Saddam Hussein -> Right There are exemptions, and most people shave all facial hair, so it's more complicated, but there are many easy clues in the face. Are the easy clues enough to explain a ~70% or they did something really interesting?
    - ramblerman 6y ago
      Yet Alberto, the current leftwing president has a moustache like Saddam Hussein.