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Comment by dm319 | Hacker News Reader

>That said, this research is impressive, as well as terrifying and depressing.

I know why you say this, but it's only terrifying because there are so many idiots around. All this study says is that there is a strong genetic/developmental component to sexuality - something we've known about for decades.

Telling people they can't be gay is like telling people they can't be tall, or black.

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> All this study says is that there is a strong genetic/developmental component to sexuality - something we've known about for decades.

It doesn't say that. The effects could very well be presented by how people with different sexual orientations present themselves (sub)consciously to attract similar people.

Well a lot of the differences are in the shapes and proportions of the face. A subset are to do things changeable things like hair.

I am less concerned that there may be visibly identifiable characteristics of homosexuality. I am more concerned that these features can be automatically discerned by computers on a massive scale. It's one thing for an individual homophobe to call out someone because they look gay. It's quite another for a government or organization to do that to millions of people in seconds, and then act upon it at scale.

Do you think the authors of the paper are the first to think of this idea of detecting personal traits with facial features? How much cost do you think it takes for implementing detection with this particular set of features?

If it can be done it will be done. In this particular case it doesn't even cost much. You should have started to be concerned when machine learning evolved into a paradigm that is only possible to achieve any kind of real world performance with an amount of data and computing resources available only to megacorps and governments.

> If it can be done it will be done. Nonsense. Scientists and grad students have ethical standards and refrain from unethical research all the time. This paper was written by a business school grad student, who may be more interested in clicks than in moving the state of the art forward.

I think what I implied was it will be done by entities without moral considerations, such as capitals and governments. In this sense it's not very productive to censor individual researchers from publicizing these kind of findings. Technology will evolve. The question to ask is who will control the technology. By censoring you're just blinding yourself from what's coming. And my second point was the imbalance of power started when individual control of intelligence capabilities was no longer possible after the field moved to "data driven" and "deep learning" paradigms.

You can study the idea and science without doing the deed. The U.S. could have learned about atomic bombs without dropping one. Tech companies can learn about image recognition without categorizing everyone based on their photo.

I love the fact that the authors also see that implication and include a warning.

> Additionally, given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people’s intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women.

It's also saying that being gay has an effect of facial shape, for which there is current zero evidence, and phrenology is junk science.

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