[lazyguy2]

Wow. What a horrorshow.

Humans operating lie detecting machines with personal interviews has yet to rise above the standard of 'Mostly used to bullshit and intimidate suspects', but these clowns think they can use facial recognition to detect lying?

What a huge scam. I don't know what conman dreamt this up, but to convince multiple governments to go along with it he has to be good.

Maybe it's time to resurrect the Canadian Fruit machine project and get some idiot in the EU government to finance it. Except instead of detecting 'gayness' it detects 'Terrorist thoughts'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t...

[jstummbillig]

I am so confused. There seems to be a blatantly obvious method to find out how well this machine works, no anecdotes or trust required: You get a decent amount of test subjects to dry run it in a controlled environment.

Has this not been done? If not, why? Or am I wrong in believing it's that simple?

[mcherm]

> Has this not been done?

No, this has not been done.

> If not, why?

Because it would fail.

> Or am I wrong in believing it's that simple?

Nope... it's that simple.

But let's be honest here: we SHOULD use this approach for ALL of these kinds of assessment, yet we don't. Even in the US, we use things like fingerprint matching, handwriting analysis, drug testing laboratories, DNA analysis, dog sniffs for drugs and so forth in legal cases yet we don't perform independent blinded tests of the accuracy of these tools.

[mattrp]

It’s driven by two things - by the public perception that all bad guys fly coach (a la 911) and by governments seeking to expand the number of biometric means to enforce compliance of all sorts of things unrelated to travel. The irony is that many people who oppose a physical border wall on humanitarian grounds don’t seem to see the perils of virtual walls...such as when a visited country decides to share back my fingerprints it collected at the border with my home country despite legal protections against collecting my fingerprints when I’m inside/entering the home country OR any number of other applications that have nothing to do with border protection or everyday travel... unlike a physical barrier that can do nothing but it’s intended purpose. Sorry don’t mean to make this about borders but I’m trying to make a point that sometimes we use tech we end up creating entire new classes of problems worse than Ones we were trying to avoid... maybe the Amish have it right in this regard?

[sli]

Don't forget hair analysis.

And out of all of those, the only one that actually works is DNA analysis and even that fails from time to time due to how easily samples can be contaminated.

[ergothus]

My understanding is that DNA is basically unique, but the patterns use for conventional DNA analysis are not. While they may be statistically close enough to unique to trust over the whole population, there have been different issues when you start scoping things to different racial groups or areas with smaller gene pools (not dangerously small, just smaller).

Because actually sequencing and comparing someones entire DNA would be prohibitively expensive if done for every case, they just look for a set of markers and assume that a large enough collection is close enough without accounting for distribution patterns of those markers AMONG THE SAMPLE POPULATION. (e.g. you don't have to look hard in small towns or in populations of the same heritage to notice a lot of physical characteristics that are quite common in that sub-population while being pretty distinct in the human population at large, the same is true for these markers.) . Since crimes often involve suspects from the same location and/or racial profile, a rule that is pretty reliable for the earth is not so reliable for this town/community/group of suspects.

So the science is a problem even before you get to human error. The odds of a false match take hits of multiple orders of magnitude.

Note: I'm not qualified to speak on the topic, but I've followed the topic with interest at a layman level for a while - be glad to hear from someone who IS qualified to speak on it to shed more light on why I'm right/wrong.

[bsder]

> My understanding is that DNA is basically unique

It is, in a lab environment with lots of source material.

If you are taking small samples of DNA from terribly dirty places and then amplifying the hell out of it, you get massive amounts of contamination.

Rape kits are "mostly" reliable under most circumstances, but have some problematic edge cases. Swabs from crime scenes, on the other hand, are generally garbage.

[coldtea]

>My understanding is that DNA is basically unique, but the patterns use for conventional DNA analysis are not.

Even if they were, unless it's something like blood DNA after an attacker gets hurt, liquids from a rape, etc. it's trivial:

1) for the culprit to take another's DNA and place it on a crime scene

2) for an innocent to leave DNA at what would later be a crime scene

3) for police (or anyone with access) to add someone's DNA at a crime scene [1]

And the worst thing is, the DNA match then is considered "irrefutable" evidence...

[1] If you (3) is far-fetched, you haven't been following 100 years of police tampering to frame people, even in the USA, and much more in places like Latin America, etc. Just two recent examples:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/melissasegura/detective...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/baltimore-cop-drug-video-indi...

[Godel_unicode]

Where did you get the idea that print matching is untested...?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093498/

https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2004/07/nist-study-sho...

https://www.pnas.org/content/108/19/7733.short

[fsh]

The point is that the particular techniques used in court cases are often not verified by any scientific testing. The last sentence of the PNAS paper abstract is: "Examiners frequently differed on whether fingerprints were suitable for reaching a conclusion."

[caseysoftware]

"Examiners frequently differed on whether fingerprints were suitable for reaching a conclusion."

is one of those weasel phrases which - while an accurate statement - means absolutely nothing because first "differing" in an opinion means almost nothing and the word "conclusion" is not defined.

Many people assert the Earth is flat and have detailed explanations on why that is the case, yet they "differ" in opinion too.

If fingerprints stood alone as a single point of evidence for guilty/innocent, I might agree. But it's used primarily as a "we have person A who matches close enough, let's go talk to him" that's useful. Or alternatively, if a fingerprint is one (of many) pieces of evidence that goes into making the case, that's useful. Only the worst cop shows say "the computer matched this guy! It must be him!"

* I was with the FBI on fingerprint analysis and saw the data, processes, etc and how a fingerprint is only a data point (aka clue) within the larger case.. and sometimes it's not enough depending on how many points you match.

[function_seven]

To the extent they work at all, lie detectors only do so if the person telling the lie has a real reason to lie. Skin in the game, high stakes, and real harm if their deception is uncovered.

Having a controlled environment to test this is really hard. You can't just have someone say, "My mother is 35" when their mother is really 53. That's a silly lie, and can be told with the same level of calmness as the truth.

So how do you design an experiment with "real" liars (telling non-trivial lies), while knowing which participants are lying or not?

[cwkoss]

You let participants know that they'll receive money for every lie they "get away with" making them feel loss-aversion.

This has been used in psychological studies, but it's effectiveness is proportional to cost of doing the study, so it is expensive to get large datasets.

[WalterBright]

Lying to get away with $10 is a lot different from lying to get away with murder.

[Reelin]

If the machine could catch people lying for $10 (or $50, or ...) in a double blind study, that would set a quantifiable lower bound for its effectiveness.

[rasz]

1 How do you know. 2 Not for a psychopath.

[chaorace]

I have to disagree. A psychopath will value their freedom more than $10 and will be inclined to react differently.

[floatboth]

False positives are more concerning here than false negatives. It should be obvious to everyone that way way more people are "not calm" for reasons other than lying!

[function_seven]

Yeah. My "to the extent..." preamble represents my feeling on polygraphs and lie detectors in general.

The entire situation of being strapped into a machine and asked invasive questions is going to be nervous-making. And depending on which questions are asked, and how they're asked, the examiner can easily contaminate the exam and extract a false positive.

[sib]

That's an interesting point of view. If some hypothetical "bad guys" are trying to set off a series of tactical nuclear weapons, false negatives are actually pretty bad.

(Yes, I actually am a small-l libertarian and have a strong aversion to overbearing and stupidly-designed government programs, which this one certainly seems to be.)

[XorNot]

I mean if you have access to tactical nukes though, why are you even bothering to get on a plane in Europe?

[mos_basik]

Maybe you could induce something similar by providing the liar with strong incentives / stress. Something like this:

>We're going to hook you up to a state-of-the-art polygraph. We know you've heard that polygraphs are snake oil, but we think we've made a breakthrough on this one, which is why we're running this test. Answer truthfully to all questions except the five on this shortlist. For any of listed questions, you may choose to lie. If you tell one undetected lie, you get $5. For each additional undetected lie, your payoff is multiplied by 1.9. If any of your lies is detected, you get no money and you get shocked. The intensity of the shock has a similar exponential relationship with the number of lies you told.

If shocking volunteers doesn't get past the ethics committee, then maybe you start off the volunteers with a baseline payout of $50 or so and allow the payoff to both grow and decrease exponentially. The goal being that on that fifth lie, they're really on the edge, knowing that they could either make a lot of money or get {shocked,nothing}.

[itronitron]

how about this -> we are going to tell you how to defeat the polygraph, which is easy because it is actually mostly BS, and we will pay you $100K if you successfully deceive the polygraph when the examiner asks you if you have been told how to defeat the test.

Then tell the polygrapher that everyone will lie on that question so they should flag all responses as lies. Then everyone's results can be evaluated by another polygrapher to determine who was lying 'well', with no payout needed.

[jbob2000]

The purpose of these machines isn’t to actually work as intended. These machines are here for plausible deniability: “we pulled you aside because the machine said so, not because you’re Muslim”.

[droithomme]

Or the computer said he was lying about not being a terrorist, so we went to arrest him but he was not cooperative and violently resisted, which of course is what a terrorist would do, and thus we had no choice but to shoot and kill him. In self defense of course and to protect the public. This is OK because the computer determined he was a terrorist and computers don't make mistakes.

[Iv]

Questions asked by the EU parliament:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-005624...

Answer:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2018-005624...

Apparently it has been tested, has been shown to have statistically significant result. As of November 2018 it was not used nor planned to be used on enforcing any border control, but was tested at three borders in real conditions.

Even a good system would have false positives. In itself, that does not invalidate the whole system, even if I think the whole premise of this project is very shaky.

[roenxi]

Being statistically significant is nowhere near a high enough bar for this sort of quackery. Statistical significance is gameable, doesn't carry information about type I and II errors and frankly just means there is at least 1 common case that the machine gets right.

People shouldn't be given or denied opportunity because a magic machine likes them. This machine will be like a human - it will develop a bizarre set of biases and one of them will happen to be correlated with reality. It could be producing about as much evidence as someone guessing that Arabs are Muslim - grossly stupid, statistically significant results.

[Iv]

Honestly at 4.5m that's a marginal project that is unlikely to be used anywhere seriously. And the EU answers makes it clear it will never take decisions alone.

You know, there has been a bit weird push by brexit promoters for "frictionless" borders relying on magic tech. I suspect the funding of this could come from there.

Expect it to not go anywhere once the brexit mess is over

[Analemma_]

> Has this not been done? If not, why?

I'm no libertarian, but I will concede that this is a perfect example of libertarian griping about government spending: it's not getting done because no one has any incentive for it to get done.

Does the manufacturer have any incentive to honestly test the machine? Hell no, then no one would buy it.

Does the government have any incentive to honestly test the machine? No, because airport/customs security is security theater and their goal is convincing voters that "something is being done". (Voters might have an incentive to honestly test the machine, but it's more-or-less impossible for this preference to affect policy, unless huge numbers of people become single-issue voters about security device testing. Which isn't likely.)

Do the operators have any incentive to honestly test the machine? No, because if a terrorist slips through the machine and then blows up a plane, none of the blame comes back to the individual officer who ran the test.

Without any incentive for the machine to work, it's no surprise that it doesn't.

[nyolfen]

the point isn't detecting lies, the point is pressure to confess during interrogations. what matters is whether the person being interrogated thinks it works -- or even if they don't, to make lying more stressful.

[harry8]

Where are you finding terrorist who think they are getting away with concealing it?

[ceejayoz]

Reminds me of this device: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651

Tens of millions of dollars worth of dowsing rods.

[romwell]

>Wow. What a horrorshow.

You viddy, it was a very, very horrorshow machine, for it made all those vecks ittying across the border go bezoomny trying to figure out what litso to make to keep the machine like happy.

It was, oh my brothers, on purpose, as to make these vecks to not want to try do that again. The bratchnies at the top must have loved it. [1]

[1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:A_Clockwork_Orange

[petre]

A waste of EU taxpayer money, that's for sure.

[ipsa]

The fruit machine was reincarnated for pedosexuals: a device attached to their genitals measures if they get sexual arousal from pictures of children. Those that do are not deemed ready for rehabilitation.

Where most people yell scam or digital phrenology, I have a somewhat contrarian view: These systems do work. It is possible to tell, better than random guessing, if someone is gay or has a violent disposition, with just a single picture. Prisons for violent crimes see way more inmates that are bald, bearded, acned, square-jawed (signs of high testosterone). Replicated studies have shown that the profile pictures of gay men are significantly different from straight men, from subtle effects, such as more attention to grooming, to more physically noticable, like shape of the jaw being more rounded.

I have no reason to disbelief that an automated system could check for tell-tale signs that someone is hiding something: needing a lot of time to answer basic questions, using their lead hand to cover their chin, looking not in the direction commonly associated with recall, but that of imagination, trembling voice, anxious eye twitches, etcetera.

This is what flawed human border guards are already doing. Isreal has the most advanced airport security and trains European and American border guards to detect suspicious behavior. The TSA has over 3000 behavior detection agents. These are people with their own political and religious beliefs, prejudices, and variance -- and they can't be audited rigorously. We just never heard the accuracy, so we can't say if lie detectors can beat this (or can help as a human tool). But I bet they can.

I was dissapointed that the actual video chat with the journalist and the digital border guard was not included in the investigative article. They argue that the system be interpretable, but give no full transparency themselves. I'd trust that she did not tell any lies, but I don't trust that they did not try to game/fool the system, as to have an actual article to write about. Anyway, using just one test subject is majorly flawed, and comes close to not understanding that science can't provide 100% accurate predictions, just probabilities. I feel it is a reasoning flaw to discard any automated system, by honing in on a single mistake.

[gowld]

Why would you wait until someone is no longer a pedophile before deeming them ready for rehailitation?

Sure, one could grant that gay people on average are slightly more feministic, and criminals on average are more testosteronistic (as are athletes and law enforcement officers).

How do you define "work"? How is this information usable, even slighly, in a security context, overcome the completely predictable shitshow that it will create in practice?

You say "telltale", but that's not supported by the evidence.

> Israel has the most advanced airport security

Because they have highly trained officers interrogating people and searching packages, not running AI dowsing rods.

[ipsa]

Rehabilitation in society: most people do not want convicted pedosexuals who show no signs of betterment to be around children, just like most people do not want murderers released when they say to the prison doctor that they still have an urge to kill.

Work, as in serve as a double-check for a human border agent. If someone failed to correctly (as deemed by a reasonably accurate system) answer all 16 questions, I do not want to fly with that person, before a border guard has had a second look. This is how fraud detection often works: An automated system gives a high score, and possible explanations for this score, and then a human analyst can make a more informed decision.

Here are some telltale signs that someone is lying: https://parade.com/57236/viannguyen/former-cia-officers-shar... & https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-tell-someones-lying-b...

Model-performance based accuracy (both human and artificial neural networks) supports the evidence for efficiency.

> Because they have highly trained officers interrogating people and searching packages, not running AI dowsing rods.

These highly trained officers also sit behind a video camera to observe passengers. Do you think detecting suspicious behavior from video is AGI-complete? BTW: Isreal invests a lot into large scale face detection at its borders, has plenty of intelligent hardware devices aiding its security, uses statistics to skip a pat-down of a 5-year old Isreali boy, they track cars the moment they enter the parking lot and track the time there -- and cross-reference if this car has been near the border or power plants, they may (not sure) do social media analysis, like the US is doing now, the Isreali army unit Intelligence Corps 8200 is actively supporting airport security, the Isreali border patrol focuses all their attention on passengers, and not their luggage (why search their luggage after they've been cleared by a behavior check?), they use TraceGuard to swab clothes for substances, they have a similar Suspect Detection System called VR-1000 which automatically checks for signs of lies, such as profuse body sweat and eye movements, BellSecure ties up all sources of information on the web and in databases to get a better no-fly list, they track their own border agents with automated systems to spot opportunities for learning and malbehavior, WeCU also automatically checks facial clues, they have automated weapon scan systems, Vigilant's surveillance systems are deployed in Israel and the US and act as a digital border guard and motion/gait recognizer.

What may sound like an AI dowsing rod to you, could actually help combat airline terrorism.

> WeCU Technologies (as in "we see you") is a technology company based in Israel that is developing a "mind reading" technology for the purpose of detecting terrorists at airports. The company's products evaluate reactions to specific images for indications that someone is a potential threat.

> The technology involves projecting an image that only a terrorist would be likely to recognize onto a screen. The idea is that people always react when they see a familiar image in an unexpected location. For example, if a person unexpectedly saw an image of their own mother on the screen, their face and body would react. For the terrorist detection, the people passing by the screen would be monitored partly by humans, but mostly by hidden cameras or sensors that are capable of detecting slight increases in body temperature and heart rate. Other detection devices, which are more sensitive and currently under development, could be added later.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Here are some telltale signs that someone is lying: https://parade.com/57236/viannguyen/former-cia-officers-shar.... & https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-tell-someones-lying-b....

That is all bunkum as evidenced by the sources quoted (business insider?).

Just to hand-pick an example I find particularly egregious - that touching one's face is a sign of lying. This guy would disagree:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlmNqwEhGIk

(Zizek ticking)

[ipsa]

No the sources are from CIA and FBI agents trained in interrogation and spotting lies (and wanting to sell their books, like researchers want their research read). One of the agents used these signs to know that Timothy McVeigh was lying. They also give a counter to your hand-pick: Observe the person when they are not lying/natural environment, note any ticks, and discount these when interrogating.

Place your lead hand thumb on your cheek and two fingers on your chin and imagine you are talking to someone standing one meter from you. Do you feel sincere?

There is plenty of research that show that lie detection is not all bunkum, and that techniques such as cognitive overloading help catch lies and lower defenses (which need focus and don't come naturally to most people).

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Place your lead hand thumb on your cheek and two fingers on your chin and imagine you are talking to someone standing one meter from you. Do you feel sincere?

I really can't think of anything I could do that could make me feel insincere when I was being sincere. This sounds a bit like the discredited claims about power-posing, or smiling to feel better etc.

I'm sorry but I really think you're letting yourself be taken in by some extraordinarily shoddy science and by the pseudo-scientific claims of people who are either engaging in magickal thinking and really believe they can "tell when you're lying" or just charlatans trying to take advantage of the naivete of others.

[bauerd]

Please do provide sources for all these claims

[ipsa]

Measuring sexual arousal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_plethysmograph & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_for_Paedophiles

Testosterone effects on face structure and violent crime: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/019188... & https://www.healthline.com/health/low-testosterone/effects-o...

On deep nets having better gaydars than average human: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspa0000098 & https://www.pnas.org/content/112/4/1036.full

On AVATAR (the US version of the digital border guard: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/15/lie-detectors-with-artificia... & https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321...

On Isreal airport security and training EU and American border agents: https://www.aerotime.aero/aerotime.team/19886-detecting-anom... & https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-israeli-airport-secu_b_4...

On 100% accuracy being impossible: https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atm... & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem

[YeGoblynQueenne]

You're citing the Stanford gaydar paper, a pseudo-scientific attempt to cash in on the hype about neural nets. It was widely condemned for its ethical and technical deficiencies at the time.

e.g.:

https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/02/20/op...

Edit: to clarify, I'm also interested in why you think all you say in your comment is true. The sources you cite either do not support your claims, or are disreputable like the deep gaydar paper [edit: or they are irrelevant like the sources about the training of border agents].

For example, I quote from the Wikipedia article on the plethysmograph:

>> 1998 large-scale meta-analytic review of the scientific reports demonstrated that phallometric response to stimuli depicting children, though only 32% accurate, had the highest accuracy among methods of identifying which sexual offenders will go on to commit new sexual crimes.

32% accuracy means those tests are incapable of detecting whatever they're looking for. Even if other tests are worse. My dowsing rod is better than my crystal ball at finding water, but that doesn't make it accurate.

[dependenttypes]

> The sources you cite either do not support your claims, or are disreputable like the deep gaydar paper

"Measuring sexual arousal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_plethysmograph & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_for_Paedophiles" certainly seems to support the first claim: "The fruit machine was reincarnated for pedosexuals: a device attached to their genitals measures if they get sexual arousal from pictures of children. Those that do are not deemed ready for rehabilitation."

[YeGoblynQueenne]

But the parent maintains that "these systems do work" when the wikipedia page says the opposite is true.

[ipsa]

There has been no peer-reviewed paper calling in question the gaydar paper. There has been a master student who tried to replicate the study with his own crawled dataset, and got better than human guessing, but slightly below the paper accuracy. News outlets ran with that to say that the study was flawed. Another was by a Googler who claimed that the neural net solely looked at eye shadow or glasses, but he also got better than random and human guessing on his own sanitized dataset, and, one could argue that eye shadow and glasses are fair game when classifying from a face picture, as they are included in the picture, and these pictures were also shown to the human evaluators (even ground).

The next web article is by a journalist with a history degree, not an ML scientist. But based solely on the merit of his arguments, he also agrees with the results of the paper:

> there’s nothing wrong with the paper and all the science (that can actually be reviewed) obviously checks out.

and seems to take more issue with the ethical considerations, binary sexuality, and builds his point around: humans have no functioning gaydar at all, so it is insignificant that a neural net could beat a coin flip. His point is weak, as he gives no evidence for humans lacking a gaydar, and the paper (which was not wrong as claimed) includes human assessments which are higher than random guessing.

I think my contrarian view is true from mere pragmatism: Israel has the best airport security in the world, and uses these Suspect Detection Systems extensively, seemingly constantly improving and making enough profit for new players to enter the market. AKA the people that actually do this for a living keep innovating on it, and I find that rather unlikely if all of this is tea leaf reading.

I think, in general, that the HN crowd overreacts when it comes to controversial tech, and that a simplistic "this does not work, and is a sham, and fraud to take research money" is an uninformed weak claim. It takes a lot of chutzpah to denounce the many months work of legit scientists as obviously flawed from behind your keyboard when one probably has not even read the full paper. The authors, by picking such a controversial topic, are partly to blame for this pushback and popular media reporting, but that does not make it right.

I will not defend the use of plethysmograph and eye tracking studies to measure a sexual response. Just claim that it is better than random guessing, it allows for better treatment when measurements are out of line with self-reports, and that it is still in use and very similar to the Fruit Machine. The Fruit Machine is already back.

> My dowsing rod is better than my crystal ball at finding water,

This I do not get what you refer too (I know you as a ML knowledgable person from your other comments, so I am afraid to assume things, but if your crystal ball is random, and your dowsing rod is better than random, you are succesfully doing predictive modeling, no, not a sham? [1]). These systems do not need extremely high accuracy, if they do not auto-deny a person, and it is changing the goal posts a bit to demand accuracy when better than random guessing has been demonstrated (which is questioned by the majority of the commenters here).

> or they are irrelevant like the sources about the training of border agents

User kindly requested sources for all of my claims. I claimed this and sourced it. My point was that we already have human Suspect Detection Systems in place, so either those must go (you have a fundamental problem with SDS's) or they can't be automated (because you don't trust AI research or believe these systems need common sense problem solved first). I could then offer counter-arguments to both.

For the question about the eye direction, look at the sourcing for telltale signs of lies I posted in reply to another commenter. It depends on if you are left- or right handed.

[1] > A concept class is learnable (or strongly learnable) if, given access to a source of examples of the unknown concept, the learner with high probability is able to output an hypothesis that is correct on all but an arbitrarily small fraction of the instances. The concept class is weakly learnable if the learner can produce an hypothesis that performs only slightly better than random guessing. In this paper, it is shown that these two notions of learnability are equivalent. - The Strength of Weak Learnability

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Regarding the gaydar paper, yes, I have read the full paper (if memory serves, I read two versions, a pre-print and the published paper). At the time, I wanted to publish a rebuttal, perhaps a letter in a journal or something, but in the end I didn't think I'd be adding much to the debate and the paper had been widely discredited already anyway.

My objection with the methodology in the paper was that the authors had assembled a dataset where the distribution of gay men and women was 50% of the population, i.e. there were as many gay women as straight and as many gay men as straight in the data. This was for one of their datasets, the one were everyone had a picture. There were two more where the distribution was less even but still nothing like what it's usually estimated to be. This despite the fact that the paper itself cited a result that gay men and women are around 7% of the population.

The reason for this discrepancy was clearly to improve the results by reducing the number of false negatives which are expected when there are many more negative than positive examples in binary classification.

This from the point of view of machine learning. There were other flaws that others pointed out, e.g. the choice of metric (I don't remember what it was now, I can look it up if you like), the premising of the paper on prenatal hormone theory that is another piece of bunkum without any evidence to back it etc.

And of course there were the ethical considerations.

Sorry but I don't have the courage to reply to the rest of your comment. You write way too much.

[jyounker]

> On deep nets having better gaydars than average human: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspa0000098

Didn't that recognition system boil down to being an eyeglass and eyeshadow detector?

[ipsa]

No. (and I feel there is no justification for downvoting requested sources).

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> looking not in the direction commonly associated with recall

Which direction is that?