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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

There's evidence of inheritability of political orientation, since it is tied to personality traits. Given that, it makes sense that it is possible to predict political orientation through looks alone. After all, looks are also inherited traits.

The article gets into this a little bit. They are able to predict traits like intelligence and honesty by looks alone.

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That reasoning sounds like a logical fallacy:

1. Personality traits are inherited 2. Personality traits influence political views 3. Looks are inherited -> Therefore, looks influence political views (?)

"A is X and does Y" "B is also X, so B does Y as well."

I think the statement is that looks and political views are both observable variables that are dependent the same latent variable (genetics). And that through this link, you may be able to (at least partially) infer one observable variable when given the other.

Personality is only weakly tied to political view according to the above comment... so... ?

I think this is a very dangerous line of study. I can easily see these results getting used to forward racism and other appearance based discrimination.

Truth doesn't really care about your sensibilities. It seems there is actually an art to finding the mind's construction in the face!

What this is really telling us is that we should not be judging others on their political, sexual, ideological, whatever-ical affiliations. A person is a person and we should value them for that and only that. These other qualities may be more or less useful in some sense, but not in the sense that counts - that they are a thinking feeling person who deserves our respect.

> Truth doesn't really care about your sensibilities.

I think the GP was questioning the wisdom of seeking a detail answer on this question; not whether or not the question has an objectively true answer.

Do you think people hundreds of years ago with different common political views - some of which we'd find abhorrent now - had different faces too?

Someone should test this classifier on old images. Maybe it's just identifying fashion, not facial structure.

A lot has changed, including nutrition. I would not be surprised if 17th century skeletons and body builds were observably different from the contemporary ones. In fact, at least height and weight of an average person is fairly different compared to the past.

And those are all non-genetic factors along the lines of other non-controversial things like "how wealthy you are will influence your political views," versus things supporting the "all political views are sacrosanct and can't be judged, because people can't help themselves" direction that 'plutonorm was suggesting.

No, what would change is that you'd get people from hundreds of years ago expressing conservatism or liberalism _for the time_. It's neither fashion nor facial structure, it's more or less intensity of facial scrunch vs. innocence, or wariness vs invitation. This is going to hold true for all humans and indeed for similar enough animals so long as they have the ability for comparable postures and expressions (dogs and cats would have the capacity for posture but I think dogs are more capable of brow expression/mobility, and of course monkeys and apes are close parallels to human expression)

So you could, in a limited sense, tell whether you've got a hippie cat or one who wants the hippies to get off its litterbox :) the latter will give you more side-eye, and more of a narrowed gaze.

I honestly don't see the danger here. This is an incremental addition to an already very large body of research that's existed for a while.

And racism isn't rational. You can't combat racism by suppressing research. If a study came out demonstrating that Alpha Race is smarter than Beta Race, and that Beta Races is smarter than Gamma Race. The racist Betas might use that study to justify their hate for Gammas, but they'd find an entire different reason to hate Alphas.

Traditionally, by saying they have the wrong personalities.

I really hope not. 72% is impressive. But, when you're thinking of making any real world decisions based on it, 72% shouldn't really be considered much better than chance.

You shouldn't make any decisions on it, but it's striking that it works at all. It would be interesting to know why.

I have my suspicions about that, which are that people tend to mimic those they see around them. Which could well extend to how they hold their faces unconsciously. It would be not unlike the way we develop similar accents to those around us, just with different muscles. But that's a hypothesis that would have to be tested.

Sadly, if it holds up, it almost certainly would lead to people making real world decisions.

I think people are already making those real world decisions, with or without being able to automate the process. The real implication here is that political ideology owes more to raw emotional biases than it does to analysis and introspection. It echoes a person's general attitude toward life in the absence of specifics. I would say this is not a revolutionary observation, but it's a confirmation through experimental means.

> Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

- Steve Pinker

This is Hitlers head/nose measuring all over again....

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