[new_guy]

> The reanimation of the pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology at scale through computer vision and machine learning is a matter of urgent concern.

When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality, criminal proclivity etc through facial features then what exactly is 'pseudoscience' about it?

Sure it can and will be abused but that doesn't mean to ignore it or label it as 'pseudo' simply because it hurts your fee-fees.

[polm23]

> When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality

Oh you mean the thing where it still "works" with faces blurred out because it's not picking up face shape?

https://www.theregister.com/2019/03/05/ai_gaydar/

> criminal proclivity

You mean the smile detector?

https://www.callingbullshit.org/case_studies/case_study_crim...

This stuff is bullshit and it can't work. The idea that it could work is magical thinking with no basis in reality.

[plutonorm]

Of course it could work. How do you know there is no signal there? Whether it does or not is an open question in my mind.

[roenxi]

Because it would be the equivalent of a natural built-in evil bit and an extremely bizarre thing - for the same reason that the evil bit is unlikely to be used.

Any system that claims to work on that sort of input is almost certainly picking up socio-economic status of different races, or something similar, with no causal predictive power.

[plutonorm]

You are saying that there is no genetic component to personality? That's dumb. Are you saying there is no genetic component to facial features? Also dumb. Are you saying that there is no crossover whatsoever between the genetics that govern facial features and personality? Also dumb. There will be crossover above 0, it would extraordinary if there were 0 crossover. So there is likely some small correlation between facial features or skull shape and personality. How big is the effect, I don't know. The problem here is that you are judging the value of a person based upon their personality, not that their personality might be bound up in some way with their genetic makeup.

[roenxi]

You've missed an angle - the causal link between genetics and personality is completely overwhelmed by the non-causal correlation between genetics and social status.

These models aren't going to pick up the correlation between facial structure and personality, they are going to pick up which families are high status and which are low, then provide the same pseudoscientific justifications for discriminating that people have been deploying since the dawn of pseudoscience.

Basically, these models are going to mislead people into thinking that a non-causal correlation is causal.

[plutonorm]

Causality is a nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume

[emteycz]

Facial (a)symmetry is an important factor in neurological/psychiatric diagnosis.

[oogabooga123]

> Any system that claims to work on that sort of input is almost certainly picking up socio-economic status of different races, or something similar, with no causal predictive power.

I wonder which will have more predictive power, the version where you let the AI do it’s thing or the version where you intervene to correct for things that are almost certainly wrong according to you.

[sailingparrot]

An AI doesn't do "it's thing", it learns with the bias the researcher encoded in the model, and most importantly in this case, with the massive bias of the datasets.

Correcting is just steering a bias from one way to another.

[oogabooga123]

Bias is relative to a null hypothesis, you are just begging the question. Predictive power is the final arbiter

[polm23]

I also can't disprove the existence of unicorns, but I can cite a preponderance of the evidence.

Why is the shape of your face different than the lumps on your head? Even if you find a correlation in the data why would there be a causative relation? If I'm innocent one day but steal a loaf of bread do you expect the shape of my face to change? The idea makes no sense.

[Uberphallus]

No, it won't change, but certain facial metrics may indicate proclivity.

This is statistics, so an n = 1 doesn't really help your argument.

I agree though, that physiognomic "accuracy" based on self-assessments is of little value, like most self-assessments, and not very different from tarot readings or online IQ or MBTI tests.

Now when there are external assessments, these types of correlations are to be handled carefully in social sciences, because they can be self-fulfilling prophecies (people don't trust you because you look untrustworthy, so you end up behaving the way that gets you treated that way anyway) or straight up spurious, so the independent variable(s), if any, can be extremely non-evident: nutrition, environmental, cultural... This is, again, not unlike intelligence tests.

The best hard data we have is on a less delicate subject: aggression in hockey, where certain facial features correlate with quantifiable aggressive behaviors [0].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2570531/

[bsenftner]

> How do you know there is no signal there?

Because the shapes of portions of our bodies do not betray our moral character. It is nonsense, and debating this issue is so tiresome. I've worked in facial recognition for quite some time, and thank gawd nobody where I've worked had over-reaching opinions of our software's capabilities. For example, the "emotion recognition AI" fraudulently being marketed - we howled in laughter when those frauds appeared. However, while interviewing at other FR/ML companies, I meet a horror of over-reaching attitudes. I guess someone can work in trained algorithms and yet carry a head full of conspiracy-theory quality logical connections. That must be the case, because physical shape cannot dictate moral character, and debating the issue is Kafkaesque.

[plutonorm]

Why not?

[version_five]

Two separate things: first, you're correct, there are lots of attributes that can be accurately inferred from appearance (for varying accuracies). I don't see a point in pretending otherwise.

Second, unless demonstrated otherwise, most determinations you could make, e.g. wealth, are not causal, they are effectively a computerized stereotype that looks for some common features the majority of each class share. To me this means facial features are not a suitable basis for a decision anywhere you wouldn't feel comfortable stereotyping.

Put another way, you can easily propose rules that are correct on average but horribly unfair to those that don't conform to the rule. This is true for ML as it is for any other rules. The only ML specific thing here is maybe the basis for the predictions gets obscured to some as something deeper than it is.

[mdp2021]

Research, also of correlations (as a starting point), is to some of us "in general definitely a good thing". But.

Your use of 'accurately' probably does not consider actual sensible practices in the assessment of data, where you assess the occurrances of false positives and false negatives in more revealing considerations. One of the first online articles found through a quick search seems to be very good already as an introduction: https://towardsdatascience.com/accuracy-precision-recall-or-... (Koo Ping Shung, Accuracy, Precision, Recall or F1?, 2018).

Politically, there is a problem in fairly dealing with the matter of inclinations, especially considering that guilt is after actions, not inclinations, or considering that it amounts to "prejudice".

The use of 'pseudoscience' in the article was more political than theoretical - imprecise but left to the reader's margins of "getting the idea". It meant that "we have been there and the actual scientific results were poor (e.g. we could not predict local brain function under that bulge that may have meant inclination i)".

Science is much more complex than the simple correlation you seem to be supposing. Science is about understanding phenomena with objective grounds and methods (understanding is then corroborated with predictions, but predictions are not understanding). In your example you are limiting the matter to observations: they are the first step in science, not the last. (A statement like 'people with quality q tend towards inclination i' would be an observation, not a law.)

[arketyp]

You make a good point of distinguishing between a scientific model and a predictive oracle. I think the political use of pseudoscience isn't helpful though. There could be a lot of understanding to be gained from these systems.

[mdp2021]

> I think the political use of pseudoscience isn't helpful though. There could be a lot of understanding to be gained from these systems.

If you meant, using the label of 'pseudoscience' to undermine research (in the broadest terms), or to promote blind faiths (e.g. scientism) or "arbitrary requirements for social membership", of course it is deterior (though the economic/financial matter is more complex). But in the specific context, the attribution of pseudoscience is (though often with little care and an improper naïvety) to be a substantially legitimate warning of "do not encourage shallow beliefs amounting to prejudices".

Many of us believe that similar research may reveal interesting correlations which may then trigger good insights. But there has been a trend (especially in cultures that have shown very little appreciation of subtlety as an ideal) that seem to encourage a return to the archaic ignorant use of stereotypes. Apply that to law enforcement, and - sorry, just inventing a sufficiently acceptable example, after today's article about "Irish Baileys" - the idea subtly or less subtly emerges to arrest sober Irishmen just because.

[HPsquared]

Perhaps there should be more of a hard boundary between science and politics (like the separation between church and state).

[sailingparrot]

It is pseudo because it does none of the things you said with none of the accuracy you propose.

What it does well, is tell you whether the specific picture of a person you feed it looks roughly similar to other pictures of other people that belong to a certain category.

All of it's predictive power comes from the fact that the datasets they are trained on are completely imbalanced and that society has inherent biases, so it just picks up on that and magnify it.

I can guarantee you that a picture of a white male CEO in a suit and a picture of a black young adult in everyday clothing will score extremely differently on the model no matter what their personal criminal proclivity is.

Human (cops) do the same thing: they are used to a certain population being more at risk of criminal activities and thus they will control anyone from that population much more (e.g. stop and frisk in NYC).

This is illegal in most places. We are doing the same thing all over again, except now, we can do that through a blackblox brand "AI" on it, call it science and legalize it again.

[Werewolf255]

Yeah, that -might- be true, but what if people just lie to the computer? Also, love the idea that computers figured out the knack in reading head bumps the humans just couldn't crack.

[sailingparrot]

> love the idea that computers figured out the knack in reading head bumps the humans just couldn't crack

So, natural selection has evolved a criminal gene and a linked head bumps gene, but hasn't given us human the ability to detect that? That sure would have been useful. Nature "knew" and patiently waited hundred of thousands of year, keeping that useless gene alive, that eventually computer vision would appear and finally allow us to detect it?

Yes, that sounds plausible. Let's push to prod.

[mojomark]

> When a computer can accurately predict (90%~) sexuality, criminal proclivity etc through facial features then what exactly is 'pseudoscience' about it?

90% is fairly poor regression model success rate. If you're in the 10% of those falsely accused of being a future murderous pedofile based solely on your facial bone structure, then imprisoned or institutionalized for that, I'd think your conclusions on this topic may change.

Remember the Blackstone ratio (1).

Also, physiognomy was a key attribute of Nazi eugenics goals (2) - that's the rabbit hole this work leads down.

It's not about protecting feelings, it's about remembering history and learning from mistakes to protect liberty.

Lastly, regarding the goal to predict a person's "sexuality' by any method, I would posit that the motives are most likely strongly against vice for liberty for all. What else would that information be used for, other than to oppress?

1.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

2.) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275738773_About_Fac...