3 ms·

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 me

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.

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.