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Comment by SamBam | Hacker News Reader

Obviously it's looking at something. I feel like everyone is jumping to assuming the authors are implying it's somehow in the person's facial structure, but it doesn't say that.

If it's looking at the quality of the photo, or the trim of the beard, that's still interesting. Among other things, it means that you know analyses like this might start cropping up everywhere you submit your photo (job application cover letter?), and also that humans might be doing this innately with photos and not even realizing it.

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Humans might try, but the same study says they're not good at it with only 55 percent accuracy.

Unfortunately people dont have to be good at something to advocate it or force it on others. Just look at all the 'detoxes, random diets, cultural remedies like trying to cure plague with wisky, bloodletting etc.

Our deductive powers havent improved much, they just moved to areas of our lives that are more nebulous. Fundamentally bloodletting and 'looks like a hippie, and hippies shouldn't work for a bank" are about on the same footing

question would be if a trained human is better than a machine. AlphaGo was deemed stronger than humans only once it beat the best Go player.

The 55% accuracy is a from a cite about a different study with a different set of photos and a different question.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232255935_Accuracy_...

Oh, that's really important. It's the only important comparison - I don't believe 72% means anything on its own. The study either needs to try the exact same methodology on humans, or to find a metastudy that consistently shows humans perform well below that on these tests.

To be fair to the authors, the information isn't hidden. It's prominent in the introduction, just not in the abstract.

Why does this need to be better than humans to be interesting?

It's still extremely interesting to me that a program can determine with over 70% accuracy a person's political orientation from a cropped photo, without taking age sex or race into consideration.

Among other things, it means it can do that to 10 million photos, which you'd have to pay a lot of humans to do if you wanted it done otherwise.

Because comparing against a "competent human" is enough of a control group to be sure that it's finding interesting signal in the data and not just exploiting something trivial like race or political clothing.

It doesn't need to be better than humans to be interesting. Coming pretty close would do. But if you told me humans score 90% on the same pictures, I'd believe there's something unrepresentative about the sample pictures, because I don't expect humans to have that accuracy.

There are a lot of other cues. Oversimplifying, here in Argentina you can have a few clues from facial hair in men:

Beard like Che Guevara -> Left

Moustache like Saddam Hussein -> Right

There are exemptions, and most people shave all facial hair, so it's more complicated, but there are many easy clues in the face. Are the easy clues enough to explain a ~70% or they did something really interesting?

Yet Alberto, the current leftwing president has a moustache like Saddam Hussein.

This must be how god feels.

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