[rkaplan]

Great anecdote from Jeff Dean's twitter [1] about how they thought to try this experiment, given that doctors didn't know such a thing was possible:

"Funny story. We had a new team member joining, and @lhpeng suggested an orientation project for them of "Why don't you just try predicting age and gender from the images?" to get them familiar with our software setup, thinking age might be accurate within a couple of decades,and gender would be no better than chance. They went away and worked on this and came back with results that were much more accurate than expected, leading to more investigation about what else could be predicted."

[1]: https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/965720435290791936

[gwern]

Something to keep in mind the next time someone assures you that 'gaydar' is pseudoscience and totally impossible and any paper must be datamining - everything is correlated. We are routinely surprised what can be extracted from data, and anyone telling you a priori what cannot be done is pushing their politics.