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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

#341

Post by anigbrowl »

drno123 wrote: post #296
cambalache wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This system is picking up on things we don't notice. In the case of men at least some studies have found a correlation between testosterone level and political orientation, something that matches well with my anecdotal observations. It is not outlandish to think this manifests in visual cues in even something as limited as a pic. https://www.mdcthereporter.com/low-testosterone-left/

I have no idea why this comment got downvoted. This is the most scientific explanation possible. In males, more testosterone induces more risk taking, while low testosterone is linked to risk avoidance. Left-wing policies (“nanny state”) cater to people who avoid risks; people who are risk takers prefer right wing policies. Testosterone also affects muscle growth and facial characteristics.

Probably being penalized for linking to an overtly snarky opinion article rather than a scholarly source. Jack-in-the-box links tend not to fare well on HN.

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

#342

Post by jm_l »

gruez wrote: post #116

Can we run the model in reverse (eg. deepdream) to see what the stereotypical liberal/conservative looks like?

The main classifier they use is using logistic regression, so no. They do mention that a deep nn had similar performance, but even if you deep-dreamed it you wouldn't get images, you would get feature sets, since they first run the photos through a feature extraction model (i.e. the input to the nn is not raw pixels).

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

#343

Post by Applejinx »

drno123 wrote: post #296
cambalache wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This system is picking up on things we don't notice. In the case of men at least some studies have found a correlation between testosterone level and political orientation, something that matches well with my anecdotal observations. It is not outlandish to think this manifests in visual cues in even something as limited as a pic. https://www.mdcthereporter.com/low-testosterone-left/

I have no idea why this comment got downvoted. This is the most scientific explanation possible. In males, more testosterone induces more risk taking, while low testosterone is linked to risk avoidance. Left-wing policies (“nanny state”) cater to people who avoid risks; people who are risk takers prefer right wing policies. Testosterone also affects muscle growth and facial characteristics.

I've learned some things about testosterone 'cos it's interesting. You're slanting it.

People with more testosterone are more unsatisfied, aggressive, sexually driven, restless, and disappointed. This has nothing to do with something as apparently laudable as risk-taking vs. risk-avoiding, and in fact it's quite easy to be loaded with testosterone and yet constantly fretting over enemies and bad stuff you expect to happen, leading to conservative choices (not risky or experimental choices).

Aggressiveness and dissatisfaction are a better match for testosterone, which MAY lead to risk taking but are just as likely to lead to efforts to control and suppress perceived risks.

There's merit in the effects of testosterone but you're off base in terms of what you think it does.

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

#344

Post by usaar333 »

hntrader wrote: post #240
gzer0 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points and summary. Adding on to that, the following was from the abstract about 2 sentences in. Seems like some users do enjoy jumping straight to the comments! * 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%). * Accuracy was similar across countries…

"controlling for ... ethnicity" There's significant signal buried in here that is likely not controlled for, depending on how granular their controls are. White-German and White-Italian are much more (10-13 percent) likely to be conservative leaning than White-Irish or White-British. Hispanic-Cuban are more likely to be conservative leaning than Hispanic-Mexican.

Their section about demographics controls in the paper was really unclear (kinda surprised you can get this published being so vague).

What does a final number with the controls active even mean? I doubt accuracy was identical within each grouping they used. Even the groupings are really unclear in the paper (at most 4 ethnic groups，no idea how they did age, etc.)

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

#345

Post by callesgg »

callesgg wrote: post #49
ucha wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity."

So your race accounts for less than 3% despite 89% of all black people voting left, that seams strange. I did not do the full math but just the ballpark numbers I entered in to my calculator says that it should account for about 11%. * 89% according to numbers from nbc Edit: So say I assume that every African American person I see votes left. 13% of the population is African American 89% of them actually vote left. 1…

Hum i take this back the calculation should be 0.13 * 0.89 + 0.87 * 0.5 = 55% total accuracy

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

#346

Post by astura »

ebegnwgnen wrote: post #86
MattGaiser wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of scraped dating website datasets lying around.

Yes, but I suppose you can't use them in a publication on Nature if they are scrapped illegally. This dataset directly from the dating website

1) Web scraping is not "illegal"

2) I haven't the slightest clue why you think scraped data can't be used in a publication - some results from first page of Google Scholar:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187802961...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004209802091819...

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

#347

Post by Applejinx »

rsynnott wrote: post #215
simias wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

72% is a very significant deviation from 50% though, I wasn't expecting such a result. >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. Emotional expression makes some sense in hindsight but I wouldn't have though that head orientation…

Though, these seems a bit odd; how many people are expressing _disgust_ in dating profiles?

Those categorizations are opposites on a continuum of various kinds of muscle tension, notably brow scrunch muscles. Surprise is literally brow up and jaw slack, disgust involves brow scrunch and lip tightening. Facial expressions also bleed through to our experienced emotions, so going around with face scrunched a lot will MAKE you more suspicious and disgusted with things.

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

#348

Post by anigbrowl »

sethc2 wrote: post #331

And I always thought it was funny how in classic books from authors like Jane Austen they’d always talk about a person’s physiognomy, and how you could draw strong conclusions about them from it. Maybe it wasn’t so bogus after all?

I think there's quite likely something to that. I seem to have better-than-average intuition in this area and it's handy, but not reliable enough that I'm willing to build causal explanations on it.

Sadly, uncritical application of physiognomy has led to many bad outcomes involving discrimination or institutionalization, and the ideas are often used to prop up racism or other sorts of prejudice, so it's not much different from pseudosciences like phrenology or palm reading. Consider too that in Austen's time manual labor was much more common and social/job mobility much lower, so there were a lot of subtle clues that could be picked up from someone's appearance. Think how many folk tales center on someone's ability (or not) to cross social boundaries by modifying their appearance.

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

#349

Post by anigbrowl »

marstall wrote: post #270
MattGaiser wrote: post #22

I want a facial recognition tool that tells me what information I am leaking. We need a haveibeenpwned for facial recognition.

how about this tool in realtime, a kind of biofeedback mechanism that trains you to look conservative, liberal, sexy, dangerous, harmless etc.?

We have that, it's called acting class.

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

#350

Post by toomuchtodo »

cwkoss wrote: post #310
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dating app that constrains to like minded potential partners, instead of relying on political signaling in profiles.

We know incest increases the likelihood of genetic disease. I wonder if a dating app could make a "faces too similar" filter to reduce chances of genetic disease in offspring based on just faces.

Having kids with a cousin is about the same genetic risk as a woman over 35 having a child.
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