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Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

This is quite a long paper, and its difficult without spending considerable time on working out what the core argument is beyond the clearly obvious

"We don't like research that claims ML seems able to classify people according to identity groups from photos".

Now, that is obviously a controversial area with huge implications ethically and politically and the clear potential for abuse of such tools. A well-argued check on the strength of such claims would be welcome.

But throwing a load of terms more contemporarily associated with culture-war diatribes like "physiognomy", "phrenology" and "nazi" etc. into what should presumably be a calm scientific analysis is not a persuasive call to invest the time in working out what the actual argument is within the paper.

I think the paper would be more effective if considerably less verbose, with a more balanced tone and a clearer exposition of its core argument.

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throwing a load of terms more contemporarily associated with culture-war diatribes like "physiognomy", "phrenology" and "nazi"

These are pretty regular terms describing well-known and discredited fields and ideologies and I don't see them being "thrown around" in the paper. Maybe the paper is bad or unclear in other ways but this is a strange demand for "balance". It is not culture war to say 'phrenologist' or 'physiognomy' when talking about these actual things.

Science doesn't exist in a vacuum, and I think the historic background is important context. The historic background happens to include nazis.

Could the paper make its point more clearly? Perhaps, but I don't think mentioning nazis (etc.) is a problem.

I agree - however I suspect it's all for naught, and the rebuttal will boil down to "haha GPU go BRRR".

strongly agree. One of the foundational claims, “No inference is theory neutral” is taken as fact based on a single citation from a paper by a philosophy grad student - that doesn’t make it wrong necessarily, but its interesting that none of that author’s many cmu computer science colleagues would co-author the paper.

It is very common to have co-authors solely at other institutions. It does not imply that the first author asked for (or even wanted) co-authors at their own university, muchless that others rejected the opportunity.

> terms more contemporarily associated with culture-war diatribes like "physiognomy", "phrenology" and "nazi"

I challenge that the first two terms are characteristically associated with culture-war diatribes — they are associated with the claimed ability to determine personal characteristics from the shape of one's head or face, which is what this paper is about. As to the third one, it is used only three times in its literal historical meaning to cite the Nazi regime as a well known example of misuse of pseudoscience by the state.

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