Live data from Hacker News

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

nature.com

411–420 of 421 posts

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

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "scrapped illegally" mean? I've never encountered this term. I can see how scrapping might be a violation of some websites terms of use, but I've never seen "scrapped illegally" used. Do you have any examples?

- I have personal information on linkedin - I have agreed with LinkedIn that they may use my personal information for a set of well-defined uses (basically things on the LinkedIn website/service, and some 3rd party services they use to run the website/service). - LinkedIn promise that they will not share my identifiable personal information with 3rd parties for any use - LinkedIn's terms of use state that nobody may…

Just like the US isn't the entire world, neither is EU.

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one calculate a metric like that?

They explain: they tested predictions on pairs of faces of teh same gender, ethnicity and age. The result was 69% instead of 72% apparently.

Hmm, the actual phrasing is:

> The accuracy is expressed as AUC, or a fraction of correct guesses when distinguishing between all possible pairs of faces—one conservative and one liberal.

I've never seen something like this. Maybe this is a normal procedure?

But I would be worried that the number of old black conservative women would be really small. Seems a bit sketchy

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

#413
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The GP shouldn't have included that flamebait, but please don't respond to flamebait by bursting entirely into flames. That's going the wrong way down a one-way street, since we're trying for exactly the opposite here. Of course it's a highly emotional topic and justly so, but one of our intentions here is that we all work on self-regulation around this kind of thing (e.g. processing strong reactions internally befor…

fair enough. I am still shocked by the indifference of the other comments though.

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

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please state what you want to say. No need to be passive aggressive.

You quoted the part about controlling for age, then described the sort of mistake that comes from not controlling for age. So I would like to know what you think it means, in order to meet you where you are. I'm not expressing aggression toward you.

My interpretation of control is fixing all other variables (the ones they mentioned) except for the one being measured (political orientation). If that's not what they did I'm happy to learn.

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one calculate a metric like that?

By performing the analysis within each of those subgroups.

`f(x) = return 'Liberal'` will get you a great accuracy running the analysis within a subset of black women.

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

#416
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not do ideological flamewar on HN. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I admit that I am impressed that the comment id of your reply to parent comment is smaller than the comment id of this comment. I didn't think you had it in you.

It took me a while to figure out what you meant by this, but I think(?) I get it now—in which case, I'm glad you noticed the attempt to be even-handed. When I post twin scoldings like that, though, what's significant is the pox on both flamewar houses. You shouldn't attach any significance to which of the two got posted first because that's entirely random.

I don't especially try to find opposing belligerents to moderate when a fight breaks out; that would just be a different form of bias. But it's handy when it comes up naturally, because it neutralizes the "you're only doing this because you disagree with me" objection which usually comes up, and which I'm always bracing myself for, otherwise.

I think this reaction must be biologically rooted somehow, because it's so common, and recognizably the same "no fair!" reaction that one can observe in small children and sometimes in animals. That's not a criticism, and certainly not a personal criticism—my point is that we all have this.

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

#417
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please consider that "conservatism" in 2021 isn't just a political leaning - it requires one to believe a very great number of hateful beliefs that are provably false, and therefore to be constantly disgusted and angry. Is it so unreasonable that these feelings of disgust and anger are simply readable by machines on people's faces?

Please don't take HN threads into political or ideological flamewar. The core value of this site is curiosity and flamewar is the single greatest poison to it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You quoted the part about controlling for age, then described the sort of mistake that comes from not controlling for age. So I would like to know what you think it means, in order to meet you where you are. I'm not expressing aggression toward you.

My interpretation of control is fixing all other variables (the ones they mentioned) except for the one being measured (political orientation). If that's not what they did I'm happy to learn.

In that case I don't understand your original comment, as it describes the sort of mistake that arises when you don't control for other factors, but you appear to accept that they did.

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

#419
post #116

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

Oh man, a whole new generation will get thisliberaldoesnotexist.com, thisconservativesdoesnotexist.com, thisfascistdoesnotexist.com ..

On a serious note, sounds like the dating and hiring sites are going to need to hire an all new layer of ethicists and legal teams to defend against algorithmic discrimination.

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interpretation of control is fixing all other variables (the ones they mentioned) except for the one being measured (political orientation). If that's not what they did I'm happy to learn.

In that case I don't understand your original comment, as it describes the sort of mistake that arises when you don't control for other factors, but you appear to accept that they did.

My original comment said:

> So if I just assign the majority label to all of the population of a given demographics group, I would get the same result right? i.e., predicting "left" for all minorities under 30. You would also get ~70% accuracy.

I meant that even if you control age, gender, ethnicity, a very trivial predictor (i.e., always predicting the majority label) could yield similar performance. What I meant to say was that their model may not perform as well as they made it sound.

Post reply on HN