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White people also have higher facial variance in general. I vaguely remember in university we had an assignment to generate “eigenfaces” or something and if you partitioned the faces by race the output of the SVD would be much wider for white people. This isn’t especially surprising when you consider the fact that white people have more light/dark contrast, more hair colors, more eye colors, etc. I think a lot of the “bias” complaints levied against algorithms like this are not bias at all, but just humans who are unhappy the world doesn’t quite live up to their idealized model.

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When you sample from a smaller pool you will make uninformed statements like this. Black/Dark people of the world are not limited to Black people in Atlanta. Bet many people here do not know that there are Black people in this world, some who have naturally blonde hair and some who have blue eyes, google it.

Moreover capturing Black/Dark skin and features requires more accurate light metering & lighting because dark skin absorb more light. There's a lot variance in cheekbones, nose and lips.

Humans' features in general, are more complicated then you realize.

Ok but that can still be true (blonde hair, blue eyes) while there still being much more variations in the white population than in the black population.

I'm curious how many white people there are on earth vs how many black people there are, and other races. A couple google searches didn't give me any easy finds

> Ok but that can still be true (blonde hair, blue eyes) while there still being much more variations in the white population than in the black population.

Even the man who coined "Caucasian" as a racial category recognized that there was more physical variance among African populations and individuals than compared with Europeans.

I think there is by far more mitochondrial DNA variations inside Africa than outside.

That’s because “white” and “black” are loose, shifting, ideological constructions with little basis in the scientific reality of human genetic variation. Many “white people” weren’t considered “white” until fairly recently and Africa actually has more human genetic variation than anywhere else.

I always cringe when reading about "race" in the US, the term really (intentionally? ) gives the impression that there is a clear genetic demarcation between people based on skin color.

The US is the only country I am aware of who still uses this term, everywhere else was using some thinking like ethnicity to indicate different culture, origin...

The UN pushed from the 1950 to replace race with culture. Many people around the world now say "But he is from a different culture." Instead of "But he is from a different race."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0031322050034783...

> little basis in the scientific reality of human genetic variation

This meme dates back to a loose claim made by R. Lewontin back in the 70s. In fact, you can very precisely and reliably recreate the "intuitive" human racial categorization using unsupervised algorithms, like doing multi-dimensional clustering over fixation indices. (It does not work using single-dimensional clustering, which is what Lewontin was talking about.)

Modern biologists usually talk in terms of clines rather than races, but this is just using the first derivative instead of the zeroth - you'll get the same result either way.

> Africa actually has more human genetic variation than anywhere else.

SNP diversity has ~nothing to do with phenotypic variance.

Of course the question here is recreate whose “intuitive racial categorization” because all of that is historically and culturally specific. Saying it’s possible for a computer to recreate these categorizations presumes that the categorization has some objective reality outside of this when they’re just a variable heuristic determined by all those inputs.

> all of that is historically and culturally specific

Not really - almost everyone can agree on "middle eastern/north african", "east asian", "south asian", "black african", "white", etc. If you force people to pick a single-digit number of major categories, they're probably going to come up with the same categories that k-means in fixation space would.

This is an evidence-free supposition, consistent with your pattern across this thread of making broad claims without anything to support them. You’ve provided no proof that k-means on a representative sample of phenotypic variation in the groups you cite would return this result.

That almost everyone can agree on these categories is also contrary to reality. For example, many of who you describe as East Asians consider themselves racially distinct both within their societies and from their nearby neighbors. Also, what major categories do mixed race people fall inside?

It's not my job to provide detailed proof on every HN post I make; I'm just pointing out something relevant, and if it interests you, you can go ahead and find where people have already done this. I think I've been specific enough that you can find this stuff on your own. This took me about 1 minute to find: https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/to-classify-humanity...

> many of who you describe as East Asians consider themselves racially distinct

That's why I specifically mentioned the number of racial categories involved. Obviously as the number increases you can have different clustering results.

> Also, what major categories do mixed race people fall inside?

Obviously not into any of them, if we're talking about a simple mechanical classifier with high separation.

The number of racial categories would itself be an arbitrary limit not corresponding to actual genetic variance, nor would classification under such limit capture said variance, and none of it would match up to the folk biology of racial categorization. This is the general problem with reasoning backwards from 19th century gobbledygook about human genetic variation instead of beginning with the genetics themselves.

It may not be “your job” to provide such evidence, but you’ve made a series of specific claims about things like the rate of phenotypic variance among different racial groups. If you don’t want to defend them, that’s your prerogative, but you also can’t expect them to be received as authoritative or remain free of challenge.

Black people can have blond hair and blue eyes also. Common in Melanesians but not unheard of in African Americans either. I had blonde hair when I was a baby and genetically I'm 83% African (average admixture across all Black Americans). An uncle of mine had blue eyes when he was born

You've made the one good point that I've seen in these responses, which is that I think all the pictures were sourced from the US. If black Americans are descended from a relatively narrow geographic region in Africa, that could lead to me underestimating phenotypic variance for black people in general. However, the problem would still exist when the technology is deployed in America.

> some who have naturally blonde hair and some who have blue eyes

I know they exist, but we are talking about statistical properties of entire populations, and these people are very rare.

> Humans' features in general, are more complicated then you realize.

It's not about what I realize - it's about what can be mechanically detected.

What can be mechanically detected is limited to how the data is collected.

You missed this part: "Moreover capturing Black/Dark skin and features require more accurate light metering & lighting because dark skin absorbs more light."

I have to see the images used to train the ML model, to be certain, but based on my experience working in photography and programming, I believe it is more likely than not that they used essentially poor quality images for the training.

Moreover, after the model has been trained, to use the system effectively the facial recognition camera has to be set up to capture both light and dark skin, in the case of dark skin, it typically means not relying on available light alone indoors, an additional camera light must be provided.

The reality is if you want a facial recognition system that accurately detects dark skin it will cost a bit more to do it right.

White people have more facial variance than all the people categorized as not White people? That seems unlikely.

But if it were so, then it sort of invalidates your argument because the bias complaints are that the facial recognition algorithms often misidentifies other races (not generally as white but as perhaps not human)

Specifically the scandal some years ago when black people where being identified as gorillas, it seems obvious to me that if non-white people have less facial variance it should be easier to identify black people as black instead of more difficult.

Some massive majority of human genetic diversity is in Africans alone. I doubt faces don't reflect this.

Did you just say "All y'all look alike!" to non white people?

Is that a bad thing to say now? O_o

I thought it was a basic understanding that unfamiliar people, events, places, etc _do_ look alike, because before you get sufficient experience and exposure, you don't have enough skill to know what features are important to focus on and which ones carry no information.

Its a well known thing that people have a harder time telling the difference but I have not seen it mentioned that software would. For example zebras are all uniquely identifiable by their stripes and other zebra and computers could identify them but I would have no hope.

It's true. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't put the effort in to learn, and especially put the effort into our software.

It's also worth considering what saying that implies to the people you're saying it to. Especially when said dismissively. I'm terrible at names, faces, voices, pretty much any way of telling people apart. But that's my problem, and I need to be careful not to push the burden of that problem onto the people around me.

If you say “i have trouble telling people of ___ race apart” that’s different from “you all look the same”. One is a statement of your own limitations, the other is saying your own limitation is actually someone else’s fault.

The first one CAN also be troubling if you have had ample exposure to become familiar, and are indirectly admitting that you did not believe it to be an important skill to learn.

Lots of white people also look the same, I grew up in a mostly Mexican environment, living in the Bay Area now, I find it difficult to recognize lots of white people apart from each other.

I'd say it's an ignorant thing to say in the way you say it. Like you said in this post, you just don't know the features to look out for when you're not familiar with them

No, software people never do anything this controversial. They were just observing that they know of a universal law of nature as described in a recent Quillete article, and/or have second-hand knowledge of a particular quirk of a specific software that is definitely not just the reflection of its creators' myopic world-view.

Do you have a reference for this?

You might be right in terms of hair or eye color (not too many gingers outside Europe), but Africa has a vast amount of genetic diversity, so I'd naively guess that variance along other feature dimensions would be correspondingly higher too.

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