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I only skimmed the paper, so I'm not claiming to know much about it, but one thing to keep in mind here is that a fair coin has a 50% accuracy using the same terminology as the headline. I'm not saying 72% is not an interesting achievement, its just that "you can do about 50% better than random chance" describes my gut feeling about how much you could actually see in someones face.
I only skimmed the paper, so I'm not claiming to know much about it, but one thing to keep in mind here is that a fair coin has a 50% accuracy using the same terminology as the headline. I'm not saying 72% is not an interesting achievement, its just that "you can do about 50% better than random chance" describes my gut feeling about how much you could actually see in someones face.
> 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%).
It's a study which shows that pictures that people select to represent themselves publicly have features that indicate political leaning.
Also, whoever makes the first app for this will go viral 100%.
> Both in real life and in our sample, the classification of political orientation is to some extent enabled by demographic traits clearly displayed on participants’ faces. For example, as evidenced in literature and Table 1, in the U.S., white people, older people, and males are more likely to be conservatives.
Most people can predict a person's political orientation of their own country with >50% accuracy as well just by looking at a face. Black or latino? probably liberal. Old white person? probably conservative. If you can see more than just their face it's even easier (wearing religious paraphernalia? LGBT paraphernalia? etc?)
What I thought was interesting was:
> The algorithm could successfully predict political orientation across countries
I was under the impression that "liberal" and "conservative" had different meanings in UK vs. USA so how could it do this?
> Their facial images (one per person) were obtained from their profiles on Facebook or a popular dating website. Not sure I’m entirely comfortable with that.
In the US, African Americans vote overwhelmingly for democrats for example. Skin color therefore becomes a very good predictor of political orientation. You can probably extend this to states being populated from various migration waves, say 'people who look like Danes vote for republicans because state X was populated by Danes and votes Republican' . Carry this across generations/education, and you may have an explanation.