If you can guesstimate someones age bracket, gender, and whether or not they're white you can also probably hit a similar accuracy.
Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
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Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#102I just wish people called it 'correlates' instead of prediction since ML algo's often fall in the correlation category, not the predicting one.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#103My political orientiations have changed a few times over the last 10 years but my face hasn’t. This can’t actually work...
First, your face has changed over the past 10 years because of the aging, the way you take care of your face, your health, your mental and emotional state, your sleep, your nutrition, and many other factors.
Second, the model in the paper did not only look at the face, but at the entire photograph. How you choose to present yourself on a dating site has also changed over the 10 years: the quality of the photo, what haircut you choose, how closely you shave, whether you're tanned, your facial expression, whether you wear glasses, what objects, landscapes, and colors can be seen in the background, etc.
Finally, and most importantly: Even if your dating site profile picture hasn't changed in lockstep with your political leanings, that's fine -- they can make some errors and still get the 72% accuracy they report.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do note the random chance bit, and they also note that it's better than humans could judge on their own and even, surprisingly, better than judged by a personality questionnaire. > 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%).
Were the humans experts or just random people though? The real question is whether the tool can beat a lookup table of age, race, and gender probabilities. The tool isn't going to be winning points of phrenology here. Weight, hair color, and hairstyle would also likely tell you a lot. I don't have any particular reason to believe this tool wouldn't work, but let's not pretend it's getting their by phrenology-esque to…
It further notes:
> Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#105"The dating website sample was provided by a popular dating website in 2017. It contains profile images uploaded by 977,777 users; their location (country); and self-reported political orientation, gender, and age." It doesn't sound like people were consenting/aware that they'll endup on a facial recognition study. But I'm not even surprised dating website would sell their such data
It's possible that the dating website got 1 million users and couldn't find product market fit. They then pivoted to selling their users data.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#106Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#107May be the world polarising into two kind of extreme polarisization: one with a sense of humor and one without it. And it has a noticeable effect on the face. I'd love to see few samples of faces from each class.
This made me think a bit - I imagine most of the polarization these days comes from a vocal minority of either side, and that 95%+ of people are much more relaxed about politics (and still have a sense of humour) than we imagine from the media.
So it would be interesting to see if hyperpartisans could be separated from moderates by their appearance (just to be clear, I dont believe in phrenology, I imagine its information leaking from other aspects of presentation and background).
With respect to humour, the modern lack of humor seems to focus on not offending people, which I admit I dont understand but I could guess is predicated on the feeling that laughter is somehow equated to divisive mocking, as opposed to fun. I bring this up only because it reminds me a lot of Umberto Eco's "The Name of The Rose" where the 13th century religious leaders were arguing that laughter was inappropriate, and Jesus never laughed, somehow rooted in the belief that finding humor in things admitted the possibility of laughing at aspects of religion and therefore not taking them seriously.
Anyway, your comment made me think, so thanks.
Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy
#108May be the world polarising into two kind of extreme polarisization: one with a sense of humor and one without it. And it has a noticeable effect on the face. I'd love to see few samples of faces from each class.
Both the far left and far right have no sense of humor because both have lost all sense of reasonableness. On the right you have Trump cultists who loyally cling to every word he utters, regardless of it is true or not, spreading lies and misinformation on social media about voter fraud, vaccines, etc. You also have covid denial on the right where "the constitution" is used as a bludgeon to resist any reasonable publ…
The far left is pretty good at making fun of the right for saying silly things like this, actually.