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Does every aspect of spontaneous human thought need to be given a -ism name and be tagged as a sin? "Face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching, which is the way

Does every aspect of spontaneous human thought need to be given a -ism name and be tagged as a sin? "Face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching, which is the way cognition operates on a fundamental level. Cognition is about finding statistical regularities in perception data, then using these regularities to make predictions about the future. So, on a completely unconscious level, you are using your memory of thousands of past experiences with people you know to predict a stranger's characteristics based on their appearance (among many other things). Sometimes, the generalization does not work and your unconscious predictions turn out to be mistaken. The only way not to make mistakes is not to think. And for that, you would have to turn your brain off entirely, since these thoughts are not occurring at a conscious, rational level that you can deliberately police.

presumeaway 12y ago
Cognitionism! Yeah, it's silly. I think it's not too unlike calling everything "hacking." I "hacked" my eyesight by looking out the window for a minute at the end of every chapter, etc. I moved more and lost weight, brilliant body "hack." We like to use language to make concepts more or less appealing, and assign them ethical value, even if it's incorrect, or impossible.
- yzzxy 12y ago
  I hate this kind of thing. Hack should almost always mean subverting a system IMHO, except for less common definitions of the word (hack up, MIT hacking).
ryanmonroe 12y ago
If a subset of these inferences are shown to be wrong, wouldn't you want to make a conscious effort to stop making them? It would seem that becoming less biased in your evaluation of people would benefit both you and those you're evaluating.
- lhnz 12y ago
  Conscious inference isn't always less wrong than unconscious inference. And it's likely that a subset of all perceptions might always be found to not match reality. High availability consciousness would probably require artificial intelligence, and even then there's simply too much data for us to be conscious of everything at all times.
  - 001sky 12y ago
    Consciousness is bandwidth constrained. Subconscious is very lite computationally. In the context of scarce resources, it's better to have a calculation from the subconscious rather than to wait in line for a week to use the mainframe.
- ams6110 12y ago
  These inferences are developed over millenia of evolution. They are probably not wrong. Being able to judge trustworthiness, aggression, etc. based on a quick assesment of face is valuable for survival.
  - tashi 12y ago
    An alternative theory is that we have evolved just to be good at distinguishing changing facial expressions (and body language), especially within our own social groups. Using this skill to match people's expressions with their behavior over time would give us a tool for making good predictions. But if we then met a complete stranger or tribe whose face at rest, say purely through random variation of bone structure, happened to look more aggressive or happier or more sneaky than the resting faces of our friends, it would lead us to make biased and unjustified predictions.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    More likely it's just pattern matching. Just like people are more likely to relax in a room painted green, than one painted red. It has nothing to do with evolving to like green rooms.
pessimizer 12y ago
Finding statistical regularities based on irrelevant data, though, changes with fashion. The face you would trust in 1970 isn't the face you'd trust now, isn't the face you'd trust in the 40s. Whether you grew up in Chicago or Dallas, Germany or India makes a difference. Your race and views on race make a difference. It's important that we work to not be as stupid, and that we help others to not be as stupid as is natural, easy, and lazy.
- jiggy2011 12y ago
  > Finding statistical regularities based on irrelevant data, though, changes with fashion. The face you would trust in 1970 isn't the face you'd trust now, isn't the face you'd trust in the 40s. Whether you grew up in Chicago or Dallas, Germany or India makes a difference. Your race and views on race make a difference. Does it? I can't find any mention of this in the article.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    It's both obviously true at the most trivial inspection and mentioned multiple times in the article. ---- "People tend to draw inferences about personality characteristics, above and beyond what we might assume based on things like gender, ethnicity, or expression. Social attributions from faces alone tend to be constructed from how common facial features are within a culture, cross-cultural norms (e.g., inferences on masculinity/femininity), and idiosyncrasies like resemblance to friends, colleagues, loved ones, and, importantly, ourselves. Olivola's research has shown that these facial attributions people make have serious implications for how people are treated, and their outcomes in life. The especially unfortunate part of these inferences is how heavily they factor into critical decisions, in lieu of actual facts. "'The fact that social decisions are influenced by facial morphology would be less troubling if it were a strong and reliable indicator of people’s underlying traits,' the researchers write in today's article. 'Unfortunately, careful consideration of the evidence suggests that it is not.'" ----- "Olivola has also done studies that show in conservative-leaning states, finding that the more 'traditionally Republican' a person's face is deemed to look, the more votes he/she gets. Even if they're a Democrat. And the correlation between facial competence and vote share is strongest among voters who are lacking in political knowledge."
snogglethorpe 12y ago
The thing is though, in many cases, these correlations are not based on long personal experience, they're "imported" from other sources (parents, friends, media, etc)... and that process is crazily lossy...
bjourne 12y ago
Pretty sure he used the word faceism to highlight that the behavior is essentially the same as racism. Your idea about generalizing knowledge based on past experiences gives to much credit to the human thought process. People are happy to think whatever the people around them think and then, after they have already picked their position, come up with arguments supporting that position.
logicchains 12y ago
If anyone's interested in reading more about this, the [pseudo]science of determining personality based on a person's face is termed 'Physiognomy'. There seems to be little convincing evidence to support its efficacy. The most compelling, if anecdotal, example listed on Wikipedia is: A physiognomist named Yoshito Mizuno was employed from 1936 to 1945 by the Imperial Japanese Naval Aeronautics Department, examining candidates for the Naval Air Corps, after - to their surprise - Admiral Yamamoto's staff discovered that he could predict with over 80% accuracy the qualifications of candidates to become successful pilots.
emotionalcode 12y ago
You can also get in the habit of questioning every thought you have. Which is somewhat madness, and can be a very hard habit to break. Making decisions and choices is a tediously slow and cautious process. Building methods of thinking without deconstructing them before they are built, is also very difficult. You don't have to not think, you just have to be skeptical of your own thoughts. It's not perfect, but neither is the process of building a sequence of associative correlations and calling it common sense.
paulojreis 12y ago
> "Face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching, which is the way cognition operates on a fundamental level. (...) Cognition is about finding statistical regularities in perception data, then using these regularities to make predictions about the future I'm sorry, but don't you think that you're maybe oversimplifying cognition and the human mind, at large? I can't believe that "face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching - certainly a big chunk of the process is "hard-wired" and not based on pattern-matching. I can see the "appeal", mostly in CS people, to "reduce" cognition (to something "doable" with a computer). But overzealous simplifications are detrimental to knowledge.
- delluminatus 12y ago
  So are unnecessary complications, or trying to maintain a mystical shroud of fundamental complexity around what is essentially an extremely sophisticated structure of very simple parts. I like your use of scare quotes around "reducing" cognition, as though it's irreducible. I'm not sure why people persist in claiming that their brains are the only things in the world that we can't come to understand as a system of simple parts.
  - paulojreis 12y ago
    > So are unnecessary complications, or trying to maintain a mystical shroud of fundamental complexity around what is essentially an extremely sophisticated structure of very simple parts. How can you be sure of that? What if they are complex? Or if only one or two of the parts are extremely complicated? How simple a "part" has to be, in order to be "very simple"? What about the role of the other systems that are part of the same "macrosystem" (the organism)? You can certainly model and, in a way, predict a neuron firing pattern. You can't, however, predict how will my day change if a beautiful stranger smiles at me during my morning commute (even if these reactions and changes are produced by "very simple parts"). There's no mystical shroud here; just acknowledging that emergent behavior is complex. > I like your use of scare quotes around "reducing" cognition, as though it's irreducible. Don't get me wrong: I don't believe it is irreducible. I just believe that a reductionist approach - or "isolating" simple parts - won't take us far in understanding it. "Organic" (I can't find a better word) systems aren't easily reducible to parts as an electronic or mechanic system. Even if they're made of very simple parts, making sense of the emergent behavior they produce is hard. > I'm not sure why people persist in claiming that their brains are the only things in the world that we can't come to understand as a system of simple parts. No such claim was made here. We may come to understand "the brains" as a system of simple parts. However, we're not sure of that; acting as if it was a sure-thing is faith, not so much different from religious faith.

presumeaway 12y ago

Cognitionism! Yeah, it's silly. I think it's not too unlike calling everything "hacking." I "hacked" my eyesight by looking out the window for a minute at the end of every chapter, etc. I moved more and lost weight, brilliant body "hack." We like to use language to make concepts more or less appealing, and assign them ethical value, even if it's incorrect, or impossible.

yzzxy 12y ago
I hate this kind of thing. Hack should almost always mean subverting a system IMHO, except for less common definitions of the word (hack up, MIT hacking).

ryanmonroe 12y ago

If a subset of these inferences are shown to be wrong, wouldn't you want to make a conscious effort to stop making them? It would seem that becoming less biased in your evaluation of people would benefit both you and those you're evaluating.

lhnz 12y ago
Conscious inference isn't always less wrong than unconscious inference. And it's likely that a subset of all perceptions might always be found to not match reality. High availability consciousness would probably require artificial intelligence, and even then there's simply too much data for us to be conscious of everything at all times.
- 001sky 12y ago
  Consciousness is bandwidth constrained. Subconscious is very lite computationally. In the context of scarce resources, it's better to have a calculation from the subconscious rather than to wait in line for a week to use the mainframe.
ams6110 12y ago
These inferences are developed over millenia of evolution. They are probably not wrong. Being able to judge trustworthiness, aggression, etc. based on a quick assesment of face is valuable for survival.
- tashi 12y ago
  An alternative theory is that we have evolved just to be good at distinguishing changing facial expressions (and body language), especially within our own social groups. Using this skill to match people's expressions with their behavior over time would give us a tool for making good predictions. But if we then met a complete stranger or tribe whose face at rest, say purely through random variation of bone structure, happened to look more aggressive or happier or more sneaky than the resting faces of our friends, it would lead us to make biased and unjustified predictions.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- Houshalter 12y ago
  More likely it's just pattern matching. Just like people are more likely to relax in a room painted green, than one painted red. It has nothing to do with evolving to like green rooms.

pessimizer 12y ago

Finding statistical regularities based on irrelevant data, though, changes with fashion. The face you would trust in 1970 isn't the face you'd trust now, isn't the face you'd trust in the 40s. Whether you grew up in Chicago or Dallas, Germany or India makes a difference. Your race and views on race make a difference. It's important that we work to not be as stupid, and that we help others to not be as stupid as is natural, easy, and lazy.

jiggy2011 12y ago
> Finding statistical regularities based on irrelevant data, though, changes with fashion. The face you would trust in 1970 isn't the face you'd trust now, isn't the face you'd trust in the 40s. Whether you grew up in Chicago or Dallas, Germany or India makes a difference. Your race and views on race make a difference. Does it? I can't find any mention of this in the article.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  It's both obviously true at the most trivial inspection and mentioned multiple times in the article. ---- "People tend to draw inferences about personality characteristics, above and beyond what we might assume based on things like gender, ethnicity, or expression. Social attributions from faces alone tend to be constructed from how common facial features are within a culture, cross-cultural norms (e.g., inferences on masculinity/femininity), and idiosyncrasies like resemblance to friends, colleagues, loved ones, and, importantly, ourselves. Olivola's research has shown that these facial attributions people make have serious implications for how people are treated, and their outcomes in life. The especially unfortunate part of these inferences is how heavily they factor into critical decisions, in lieu of actual facts. "'The fact that social decisions are influenced by facial morphology would be less troubling if it were a strong and reliable indicator of people’s underlying traits,' the researchers write in today's article. 'Unfortunately, careful consideration of the evidence suggests that it is not.'" ----- "Olivola has also done studies that show in conservative-leaning states, finding that the more 'traditionally Republican' a person's face is deemed to look, the more votes he/she gets. Even if they're a Democrat. And the correlation between facial competence and vote share is strongest among voters who are lacking in political knowledge."

snogglethorpe 12y ago

The thing is though, in many cases, these correlations are not based on long personal experience, they're "imported" from other sources (parents, friends, media, etc)... and that process is crazily lossy...

bjourne 12y ago

Pretty sure he used the word faceism to highlight that the behavior is essentially the same as racism. Your idea about generalizing knowledge based on past experiences gives to much credit to the human thought process. People are happy to think whatever the people around them think and then, after they have already picked their position, come up with arguments supporting that position.

logicchains 12y ago

If anyone's interested in reading more about this, the [pseudo]science of determining personality based on a person's face is termed 'Physiognomy'. There seems to be little convincing evidence to support its efficacy. The most compelling, if anecdotal, example listed on Wikipedia is: A physiognomist named Yoshito Mizuno was employed from 1936 to 1945 by the Imperial Japanese Naval Aeronautics Department, examining candidates for the Naval Air Corps, after - to their surprise - Admiral Yamamoto's staff discovered that he could predict with over 80% accuracy the qualifications of candidates to become successful pilots.

emotionalcode 12y ago

You can also get in the habit of questioning every thought you have. Which is somewhat madness, and can be a very hard habit to break. Making decisions and choices is a tediously slow and cautious process. Building methods of thinking without deconstructing them before they are built, is also very difficult. You don't have to not think, you just have to be skeptical of your own thoughts. It's not perfect, but neither is the process of building a sequence of associative correlations and calling it common sense.

paulojreis 12y ago

> "Face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching, which is the way cognition operates on a fundamental level. (...) Cognition is about finding statistical regularities in perception data, then using these regularities to make predictions about the future I'm sorry, but don't you think that you're maybe oversimplifying cognition and the human mind, at large? I can't believe that "face-ism" is essentially pattern-matching - certainly a big chunk of the process is "hard-wired" and not based on pattern-matching. I can see the "appeal", mostly in CS people, to "reduce" cognition (to something "doable" with a computer). But overzealous simplifications are detrimental to knowledge.

delluminatus 12y ago
So are unnecessary complications, or trying to maintain a mystical shroud of fundamental complexity around what is essentially an extremely sophisticated structure of very simple parts. I like your use of scare quotes around "reducing" cognition, as though it's irreducible. I'm not sure why people persist in claiming that their brains are the only things in the world that we can't come to understand as a system of simple parts.
- paulojreis 12y ago
  > So are unnecessary complications, or trying to maintain a mystical shroud of fundamental complexity around what is essentially an extremely sophisticated structure of very simple parts. How can you be sure of that? What if they are complex? Or if only one or two of the parts are extremely complicated? How simple a "part" has to be, in order to be "very simple"? What about the role of the other systems that are part of the same "macrosystem" (the organism)? You can certainly model and, in a way, predict a neuron firing pattern. You can't, however, predict how will my day change if a beautiful stranger smiles at me during my morning commute (even if these reactions and changes are produced by "very simple parts"). There's no mystical shroud here; just acknowledging that emergent behavior is complex. > I like your use of scare quotes around "reducing" cognition, as though it's irreducible. Don't get me wrong: I don't believe it is irreducible. I just believe that a reductionist approach - or "isolating" simple parts - won't take us far in understanding it. "Organic" (I can't find a better word) systems aren't easily reducible to parts as an electronic or mechanic system. Even if they're made of very simple parts, making sense of the emergent behavior they produce is hard. > I'm not sure why people persist in claiming that their brains are the only things in the world that we can't come to understand as a system of simple parts. No such claim was made here. We may come to understand "the brains" as a system of simple parts. However, we're not sure of that; acting as if it was a sure-thing is faith, not so much different from religious faith.