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Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

nature.com

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Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#151
post #45

So, unless I read the abstract wrong, this is identifying age, race, and gender, then making categorical qualifiers based on those distinctions. While using ML to do the facial recognition to distinguish a person's age, race and gender is neat - categorizing their political affiliation with a 72% accuracy rate is fairly nominal, given the tools used by modern parties to garner donations and directed online advertisin…

"VGGFace224 was used to convert facial images into face descriptors, or 2,048-value-long vectors subsuming their core features." So they had more than age, race, and gender, but it doesn't really say how things were weighted.

I believe that these descriptors are created only based off the visual image:

A face descriptor is obtained from the learned networks as follows: the centre 224 × 224 crop of the face image is used. The shorter side is resized to 256, and the CNNs descriptor is computed for this region by extracting the deep features from the layer adjacent to the classifier layer. This leads to a 2048 dimensional descriptor, which is then L2 normalised.

https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1710.08092/

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read a paper like this I'm looking for four things: (1) the data, (2) the benchmarks, (3) the architecture, (4) the controls/ablation. 1. The data: "We used a sample of 1,085,795 participants from three countries (the U.S., the UK, and Canada; see Table 1) and their self-reported political orientation, age, and gender. Their facial images (one per person) were obtained from their profiles on Facebook or a popu…

Geography and income are two powerful conditioners. These can leak in so many ways: uncropped background (geography), image color and quality (income), eyeglass shape (geography and income). This study really needs more controls. Geography and income would be a nice start. But then the data wouldn't represent the natural world: nature as it is. Raw data is the correct thing to use, because it's what a hypothetical ot…

Uh, the headline claim is about faces, how does it make sense to then insist that you must leave the background in?

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#153
post #78

My political orientiations have changed a few times over the last 10 years but my face hasn’t. This can’t actually work...

You think your face hasn't changed over the last 10 years?

You think there isn't a relationship between age and politics?

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#154

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> You wouldn't dare accuse people of colour of imitating slave traders

Not just imitating, but being slave traders too, either in the past or even today. Plenty of tribes in Africa sold other Africans to Europeans, and slavery is still very much a thing in Africa today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa

https://qz.com/africa/1333946/global-slavery-index-africa-ha...

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#155
> The highest predictive power was afforded by head orientation (58%), followed by emotional expression (57%). Liberals tended to face the camera more directly, were more likely to express surprise, and less likely to express disgust. Facial hair and eyewear predicted political orientation with minimal accuracy (51–52%).

This is really interesting. I never considered head orientation or expression to be a factor. Then again, it sorta makes sense. Speaking very generally, liberal leaning people on social media probably tend to be more likely to post pictures of themselves in a humorous or "soy face" expression, and conservative-leaning types may try to look strong or aggressive.

Also, I automatically assumed features like "handlebar moustache" would mean more likely to be conservative, but it sounds like facial hair wasn't as big a factor.

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I agree that Hitler was evil on a scale unlike any other. I also think comparisons should be carefully thought out and not tossed out carelessly. I do disagree with the notion that we should never compare to Hitler and the Nazis. To completely refrain makes them a one off, and treats them as if that could never happen again. I think the tools available to dictators today make the rise of someone or something like tha…

Hitler is a Saint compared to Stalin and Mao, maybe even the Kims in NK.

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geography and income are two powerful conditioners. These can leak in so many ways: uncropped background (geography), image color and quality (income), eyeglass shape (geography and income). This study really needs more controls. Geography and income would be a nice start. But then the data wouldn't represent the natural world: nature as it is. Raw data is the correct thing to use, because it's what a hypothetical ot…

Uh, the headline claim is about faces , how does it make sense to then insist that you must leave the background in?

That wasn't the claim. The claim here is that we should scrub certain faces from the dataset in order to change the dataset in a certain favorable way.

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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> Casual comparisons like yours means that the lessons learnt from the holocaust will lose their power and ultimately be forgotten. While I agree with the message of your comment (i.e. the critique of everybody using the word Nazi for everything they don't like), I feel you make another mistake here by - probably unconsciously - reducing Hitler's misdeed to the Holocaust. This is very upsetting to huge populations of…

i took pains specifically not to do that. Nowhere in my comment did i limit Hitlers impact to Jews alone. You failed to read my comment properly. Any reference to the Jewish holocaust was in the context of the parent comment. Please read my comment again and don't shoehorn your preconceived notions into what i said. i was very conscious in my wording. One thing i took for granted was that the parent and his family were not victimised by the germans like other minorities. Or if he did, he doesn't care so much

Re: Facial recognition can predict person’s political orientation with 72% accuracy

#160
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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If coloured people begang doing things that very much looked like what others have suffered through as slaves they would most definitely be called out. Israel is not like the Nazis but they are one of the closest things we have seen since and not just a single fluke but again and again.

> If coloured people begang doing things that very much looked like what others have suffered through as slaves they would most definitely be called out.

They do, and they aren't.

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