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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

#81

Post by sakopov »

imwillofficial wrote: post #19
jagged-chisel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More echo chamber...

Can you explain to me how that’s a bad thing? Differences among people do not make them more United and their bonds stronger. Literally the opposite is true.

It's a terrible thing that politics influence this at all. A few months ago I was discussing this with my SO and we came to the conclusion that ~5 years ago neither of us would care about each other's political stances. Today, politics have infiltrated literally every single facet of life and became a mania of sorts for many even non-political types. Ignoring it is difficult to say the least. With that said, political differences, in my humble opinion, is a great thing as long as they're not radical and within normal realms. But, in a polarized climate we live in now radical political views are all the rage and it'd be very hard to dismiss in a relationship.

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

#82

Post by bluefirebrand »

imwillofficial wrote: post #19
jagged-chisel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More echo chamber...

Can you explain to me how that’s a bad thing? Differences among people do not make them more United and their bonds stronger. Literally the opposite is true.

> Differences among people do not make them more United and their bonds stronger. Literally the opposite is true

I tend to agree. It's why I find all of the recent "Diversity is our strength" stuff so puzzling.

I'm not against diversity, I just recognize that it generally results in at least some interpersonal challenges to overcome, not necessarily unity.

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

#84

Post by AlexandrB »

rory wrote: post #12
minitoar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty well established that age, gender, and skin color are correlated with one’s voting habits. Here are some stats: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-20...

From the article: > Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity.

Given the US 2-party system wouldn't accuracy be 50% if you just labelled everyone "Democrat". 69% doesn't sound "high" in that context.

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

#85

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

tyingq wrote: post #45
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #25

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 don't really buy this study. If humans can't get a better accuracy than 55%, I'm convinced this vector is leaking some obvious (maybe high-frequency) information that doesn't have anything to do with the face. E.g location of the person.

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

#86

Post by ebegnwgnen »

MattGaiser wrote: post #59
ebegnwgnen wrote: post #28

"The dating website sample was provided by a popular dating website in 2017. It contains profile images uploaded by 977,777 users; their location (country); and self-reported political orientation, gender, and age." It doesn't sound like people were consenting/aware that they'll endup on a facial recognition study. But I'm not even surprised dating website would sell their such data

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

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

#87

Post by umvi »

dilawar wrote: post #10

May be the world polarising into two kind of extreme polarisization: one with a sense of humor and one without it. And it has a noticeable effect on the face. I'd love to see few samples of faces from each class.

Both the far left and far right have no sense of humor because both have lost all sense of reasonableness.

On the right you have Trump cultists who loyally cling to every word he utters, regardless of it is true or not, spreading lies and misinformation on social media about voter fraud, vaccines, etc. You also have covid denial on the right where "the constitution" is used as a bludgeon to resist any reasonable public health policy like mask usage.

On the left you have the wokeness mobs that go around trying to cancel/censor/destroy every historical figure/book/statue who didn't live a perfect life and destroying careers of anyone who says the wrong word or makes a bad analogy. You also have covid zealotry on the left where "covid deaths prevented" is prioritized above all else and we can't re-open schools, re-open businesses, visit grandparents, or otherwise get back to normal life (even after mass vaccination) until 100% of all remaining unknowns are known (even if it takes another 2 years of masking, zooming, and hermiting).

These are all very recent examples.

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

#88

Post by throwaway3699 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #82
imwillofficial wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain to me how that’s a bad thing? Differences among people do not make them more United and their bonds stronger. Literally the opposite is true.

> Differences among people do not make them more United and their bonds stronger. Literally the opposite is true I tend to agree. It's why I find all of the recent "Diversity is our strength" stuff so puzzling. I'm not against diversity, I just recognize that it generally results in at least some interpersonal challenges to overcome, not necessarily unity.

You have been found to have committed wrongthink by an automated bot. Please prepare for unpersoning. Have a nice day.

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

#89

Post by leereeves »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #41
rory wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says in the article that humans got just 55% (so 10% better than random chance) on the same test.

The humans are probably overthinking it. You get ~55% by assuming by answering "Biden" for everybody.

According to Wikipedia only 51.3% voted for Biden/Harris.

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

#90

Post by mabbo »

I think the key line is how much better this system is than humans attempting the same task:

> 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%).

This isn't a matter of "recognize that old white people are conservative", because people will do that already, and they know all those biases. And the system doesn't lose much accuracy when comparing otherwise similar people.

This system is picking up on things we don't notice. Maybe it's the photos themselves (they are self-selected), maybe it's micro expressions in the face, maybe it's something else entirely.

But damn it's neat and maybe frightening. Imagine if your next hiring manager had a quiet little camera in the corner and chose you based on your predicted approval of unions.

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