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Comment by tooltower | Hacker News Reader

Why do people still think they can judge a person's character by a single photograph?

This is an age-old dogma rooted in genetic superiority crap that really needs to die. Even a simple Google search shows a staggering number of these pop-psychology articles being actively peddled to the masses. Oh, if a person's nose is a bit crooked in the wrong direction, watch out!

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I would assume that’s precisely the point of this silly game — to demonstrate directly that you can’t accurately judge someone by their appearance. But maybe I misinterpret?

You're quite right. It's absolutely mocking that idea --however lightly in an entertaining way --which is better than the 'we know better lecture' alternative.

Sure, I can see that. It just triggered me a little bit that I was being encouraged to judge people so readily. Plus, the comments here didn't seem to make that connection. They mostly saw it as a particularly "hard" challenge, rather than an exposition of our own biases.

I'd assume many people here interpreted it as a test of general knowledge rather than a test of ability to divine someone's homicidal tendencies from their mugshot.

Hi, I made the quiz and tried to design it to make judging by appearance work as poorly as possible, so the initial daft premise then becomes something a little bit more interesting as you get some wrong. But I think it's reasonable to be wary of the issue, particularly with endless problems emerging nowadays with facial recognition tech.

Thanks for the response. I do appreciate the intent. As you can see, though, some of us don't are more prone to missing the intent. It's even demonstrated by one of the responses to my comment here.

Maybe make that end goal a bit more explicit towards the end? Or maybe it's okay as is, since it did generate a conversation and thus served its purpose.

Out of curiousity, how much work (e.g. in days or weeks) does it take for you to make something like this?

Perhaps the game was intended to demonstrate you can't judge a person so easily?

> Why do people still think they can judge a person's character by a single photograph?

They don't. That's the point. This was a test of recognizing people, not photo-personalities. You don't need to take things so pedantically.

Uhh, it's not perfect, but you can definitely judge a lot about a person by looking at them, from their body language. Video would be better, and of course in person would be better again, but it's not like there's no information there. It's not skull measuring to interpret body language, and some of that body language can come off in a still photo. In particular, I think I can get a pretty good read on how empathic a person is pretty quickly based on body language.

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