Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 421 posts

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

#371

Post by nullserver »

retrac wrote: post #181
utborin wrote: post #138

There's an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections, so let's get these out of the way here. - Yes, they controlled for objects appearing in the pictures that might indicate political affiliation. The images are tightly cropped around the face. See Methods. - Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a human classifi…

I suspect we're going to see the same thing we saw in the model that can detect sexual orientation with much better than chance odds. It was, apparently, detecting that gay men tend to take or select images of themselves for a dating profile using a different angle, better lighting, and possibly differences in things like hairstyle and beards. Very anecdotally, I've noticed a possible weak correlation between certain…

Got into Art a few years ago. Took classes and everything.

People like when I take photos now because my come out better. I simply got a lot better at understanding lighting and angles.

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

#372

Post by Pfhreak »

imwillofficial wrote: post #366
anigbrowl wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't true. There was a scholarly paper that came out in 2019 observing that a few of Dr Seuss's many children's books included racial stereotypes that are dated to the point of being offensive, and that Geisel/Seuss had also produced a lot of adult cartoons that were overtly racist, a complicating factor for educators who used his books to to educate children about discrimination. https://sophia.stkate.edu/cgi/…

Ebay is banning accounts that sell Dr. Seuss books. Fact. The outrage over racial overtones came from a left aligned organization. Fact. It was carried on and cheered on by left leaning people. Fact. People on the right don’t use words like “problematic” and “racialized undertones” That’s on you guys. This is from The horses mouth: “ Six popular Dr. Seuss books — including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Stree…

You can add the word fact after a sentence, that doesn't make it a fact. Fact. ;)

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

#373

Post by nkurz »

It seems strange to me that the authors of paper seem to have made no attempt to determine which factors the model is using to differentiate between images. Or even to ask the human comparisons how they obtained their greater than chance results. Instead, both the humans and the computer model seem to be considered to be considered perfect "black boxes", which give entirely inscrutable answers.

It's not that it's always trivial to figure out what's happening inside a model like this, but I'm surprised that no attempt seems to have been made: modifying images and seeing which increases the scores, bringing in a co-author who actually understands what the model is doing, seeing if they can obtain similar results with a more interpretable model. Am I wrong, and in fact fining out what's actually happening is impossible, or of no benefit?

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

#374

Post by imwillofficial »

imwillofficial wrote: post #366
anigbrowl wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't true. There was a scholarly paper that came out in 2019 observing that a few of Dr Seuss's many children's books included racial stereotypes that are dated to the point of being offensive, and that Geisel/Seuss had also produced a lot of adult cartoons that were overtly racist, a complicating factor for educators who used his books to to educate children about discrimination. https://sophia.stkate.edu/cgi/…

Ebay is banning accounts that sell Dr. Seuss books. Fact. The outrage over racial overtones came from a left aligned organization. Fact. It was carried on and cheered on by left leaning people. Fact. People on the right don’t use words like “problematic” and “racialized undertones” That’s on you guys. This is from The horses mouth: “ Six popular Dr. Seuss books — including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Stree…

You’re right about me saying fact not making it a fact. Fact. (Oh god I don’t think I can stop now...)

However, I just shared a bunch of open source facts with you. All sourced from left leaning sources as to be somewhat unbiased (even though my bias on this subject is probably pretty heavy)

This isn’t about winning an online argument, it’s about a call for reason when things have become so silly that we are a step away from the Grinch being canceled because his big nose looks Jewish and that’s Nazism or something.

Not one single neo Nazi has ever been uplifted and supported in their beliefs by classic children’s books.

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

#375

Post by s1artibartfast »

hntrader wrote: post #250
jbob2000 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profile photo with a person wearing a baseball cap and Oakleys? Yup, that’s a republican.

If it's that easy then why was human guessing only 55 percent accurate?

My guess would be sampling bias. Most people base their model on small geographically restricted samples, and are heavily biased by media. It is possible that some people can repeatedly perform better than 55%.

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

#376

Post by unanswered »

nullserver wrote: post #370
cies wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The words conservative and liberal have wildly other meanings outside of the US. Even in the US they are not well agreed upon (especially the definitions, people seem to know which one to pick though when they have to).

Some dumbed down US conservative principles. A conservative may only care about some of these. Financial: balanced budget types. Government: Common defense, otherwise minimal. Responsibility: Your job to feed and cloth yourself. Morals: don’t kill babies. Religious: Act like God watches you and you will be judged.

[flagged]

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

#377

Post by anigbrowl »

imwillofficial wrote: post #366
anigbrowl wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't true. There was a scholarly paper that came out in 2019 observing that a few of Dr Seuss's many children's books included racial stereotypes that are dated to the point of being offensive, and that Geisel/Seuss had also produced a lot of adult cartoons that were overtly racist, a complicating factor for educators who used his books to to educate children about discrimination. https://sophia.stkate.edu/cgi/…

Ebay is banning accounts that sell Dr. Seuss books. Fact. The outrage over racial overtones came from a left aligned organization. Fact. It was carried on and cheered on by left leaning people. Fact. People on the right don’t use words like “problematic” and “racialized undertones” That’s on you guys. This is from The horses mouth: “ Six popular Dr. Seuss books — including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Stree…

I thought that adding factual and documentary context in a polite way might elevate the conversation, but it looks like you prefer being rude and angry.

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

#378

Post by PicassoCTs »

utborin wrote: post #138

There's an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections, so let's get these out of the way here. - Yes, they controlled for objects appearing in the pictures that might indicate political affiliation. The images are tightly cropped around the face. See Methods. - Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a human classifi…

Seems like a lot of medical/living history can be derived from the face. Rings around the eyes tell of 2nd jobs and long hours. Sunburned skin tells about work outside exposed to UV. Bad shaves tell about a lack of time and money, lack of makeup, tells a story about a lack of time for luxurys. Substance abuse skin tells of hard times.

All in all, this sounds like a nice tool to detect anglo-sphere wide signs of a middle class that lost out to globalization. Which in itself makes it valuable to judge credit-history by look.

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

#379

Post by timoth3y »

utborin wrote: post #138

There's an avalanche of people commenting on this who didn't bother to check the article before raising their methodological objections, so let's get these out of the way here. - Yes, they controlled for objects appearing in the pictures that might indicate political affiliation. The images are tightly cropped around the face. See Methods. - Yes, this is significantly better than both a coin flip and a human classifi…

> What would an algorithm’s accuracy be when distinguishing between faces of people of the same age, gender, and ethnicity? To answer this question, classification accuracies were recomputed using only face pairs of the same age, gender, and ethnicity

Perhaps I am reading this wrong, but this is not controlling for demographics. If, for example, 70% of older white men are conservative, you could reach 70% accuracy by predicting all older white men are conservative.

Yes, it's much better than a coin flip, but random 50/50 guessing would be a ver bad strategy.

It's really a shame that they did not have humans and their system classify the same out-of-sample data so we could compare apples to apples. Perhaps they will in later research.

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

#380

Post by dmurray »

SamBam wrote: post #360
dmurray wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's really important. It's the only important comparison - I don't believe 72% means anything on its own. The study either needs to try the exact same methodology on humans, or to find a metastudy that consistently shows humans perform well below that on these tests. To be fair to the authors, the information isn't hidden. It's prominent in the introduction, just not in the abstract.

Why does this need to be better than humans to be interesting? It's still extremely interesting to me that a program can determine with over 70% accuracy a person's political orientation from a cropped photo, without taking age sex or race into consideration. Among other things, it means it can do that to 10 million photos, which you'd have to pay a lot of humans to do if you wanted it done otherwise.

Because comparing against a "competent human" is enough of a control group to be sure that it's finding interesting signal in the data and not just exploiting something trivial like race or political clothing.

It doesn't need to be better than humans to be interesting. Coming pretty close would do. But if you told me humans score 90% on the same pictures, I'd believe there's something unrepresentative about the sample pictures, because I don't expect humans to have that accuracy.

Post reply on HN