FYI, it’s not a paper, it’s a blog post from well connected and presumably highly educated people benefiting from the institutional prestige to see their poorly conducted study be propagated ad eternum without a modicum of relevant peer review.
edit: After a few more minutes, it’s an unreliable psychopath detector.
Racial profiling keeps getting reinvented.
Fuck that.
They then used data on these individuals’ labour-market outcomes to see whether the Photo Big Five had any predictive power. The answer, they conclude, is yes: facial analysis has useful things to say about a person’s post-mba earnings and propensity to move jobs, among other things.
Correlation vs causation. More attractive people will be defaulted to better negotiating positions. People with richer backgrounds will probably look healthier. People from high stress environments will show signs of stress through skin wrinkles and resting muscles.
This is going to do nothing but enforce systemic biases, but in a kafkaesque Gattica way.
And then of course you have the garden of forking paths.
These models have zero restraint on their features, so we have an extremely large feature space, and we train the model to pick features predictive of the outcome. Even the process of training, evaluating, then selecting the best model at this scale ends up being essentially P hacking.
"Imagine appearing for a job interview and, without saying a single word, being told that you are not getting the role because your face didn’t fit. You would assume discrimination, and might even contemplate litigation. But what if bias was not the reason?
Uh… guys…
Discrimination: the act, practice, or an instance of unfairly treating a person or group differently from other people or groups on a class or categorical basis
Prejudice: an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge
Bias: to give a settled and often prejudiced outlook to
Judging someone’s ability without knowing them, based solely on their appearance, is, like, kinda the definition of bias, discrimination, and prejudice. I think their stupid angle is “it’s not unfair because what if this time it really worked though!” 😅
I know this is the point, but there’s no way this could possibly end up with anything other than a lazily written, comically clichéd, Sci Fi future where there’s an underclass of like “class gammas” who have gamma face, and then the betas that blah blah. Whereas the alphas are the most perfect ughhhhh. It’s not even a huge leap; it’s fucking inevitable. That’s the outcome of this.
I should watch Gattaca again…
Like every corporate entity, they’re trying to redefine what those words mean. See, it’s not “insufficient knowledge” if they’re using an AI powered facial recognition program to get an objective prediction, right? Right?
People see me in cargo pants, polo shirt, a smartphone in my shirt pocket, and sometimes tech stuff in my (cargo) pants pockets and they assume that I am good at computers. I have an IT background and have been on the Internet since March of 1993 so they are correct. I call it the tech support uniform. However, people could dress similarly to try to fool people.
People will find ways, maybe makeup and prosthetics or AI modifications, to try to fool this system. Maybe they will learn to fake emotions. This system is a tool, not a solution.
This fascist wave is really bringing out all the cockroaches in our society. It’s a good thing you can’t erase anything on the internet, as this type of evidence will probably be useful in the future.
You’d better get in on a crypto grift, Kelly Shue of the Yale School of Management. I suspect you’ll have a hard time finding work within the next 1-3 years.
They absolutely can erase things on the internet, are you archiving this for when the other archives die? Are you gonna be able to share it when the time comes? And will anyone care?
Woaw, we skipped right from diversity hiring to phrenology hiring without wasting a single beat. Boy has the modern world become efreceint.
At least high variance means the possibility of an opposite swing (this is cope)
Not April fool’s or the onion? What the fuck?
The Economist has a tendency to put out articles seemingly designed to make conservatives bust nuts through their trousers at mach 4
Is Lucifer’s Poison Ivy destroying the fabric of civilization as we know it?
Last time did not end well for about 6 million people…
“Some might argue that the authors of this article have their head so far up their own ass that they haven’t seen daylight in years”
“okay, okay, hear me out: what if nazi methods, but for getting a job. we could even tattoo their number on their arms. it’s only consequent, we already devide by skin colour”
WTF
Plastic surgery would become more popular. $10k work done to my nose to double my salary? Yes please.
Plastic surgery would become more popular.
One of the paper’s authors had the same thought:
“Suppose this type of technology gets used in labor market screening, or maybe dating markets,” Shue muses. “Going forward, you could imagine a reaction in which people then start modifying their pictures to look a certain way. Or they could modify their actual faces through cosmetic procedures.”
She also bizarrely says that:
“we are very much not advocating that this technology be used by firms as part of their hiring process.”
and yet, for some reason:
The next step for Shue and her colleagues is to explore whether certain personality types are drawn to specific industries or whether those personality types are more likely to succeed within given industries.
Also another way to get everyone to scan their face. Tie their employment to it.
Bro has the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter
Is that…an AI generated image?
The Economist is generally a pretty good news source, but I thought this article was subpar.
Irrespective of whether this facial evaluation algorithm works or not, as things stand today, it is pointless to discuss its use in the context of meritocracy. A regime founded upon the rejection of personal responsibility, corruption and criminality makes such discussions irrelevant (algorithm or no algorithm).
At the risk of sounding like an accelerationist, I can’t get rid of the feeling that the regime members are really busy doing their best to make a new metaphorical rope.
![The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/14f5a0b4-82b6-498d-a689-36c2824dd296.png){kind=link}