My takeaway is both programmers and serial killers look like regular people (and have some unflattering photos). The bias that you can tell killers apart by what they look like is created by the media, who probably choose sinister-looking photos when reporting on murderers.
I remember a conversation with an i.r.c. user who claimed he “imagined” users to have a certain hair color based on little more information than their i.r.c. nickname. Until I pointed out to them that surely that cannot be accurate at all, especially given that he imagined two different hair colors of the same user under a different nickname on different networks, he also did not even quæstion the accuracy of this and simply silently assumed it to be accurate.
It was really quite weird. He proffered an entire description of what he thought I would look like based on very little information which, needless to say, was mostly objectively quite false.
The user with different nicknames went even further and at one point seemed to expect me to be able to correctly assume what so-called “race” he categorized himself as, without having seen so much as a picture. Given that this same user had prior expressed surprise about my so-called “race” when seeing a picture, thus having assumed it wrongly prior, this was especially odd.
I find that, ironically, a great deal of advice given to people on how to “be safe” is very counter-effective, for it inspires within them the mistaken confidence that they can easily recognize who is dangerous, and are thus more likely to drop their guard when such recognition yields a false negative.
I also recently saw a comment on a forum along the lines of “If Hollywood started to consistently cast beautiful people as murderers, murder would become more socially acceptable.”; — it wouldn't surprise me.
Well that's the issue, if we give people rules for people to follow when assessing the danger of a situation or someone's behaviour, then they are at a danger to anyone who can hack those rules and not set off the red flags. We have to teach people intuition, and to deeply question people's motives and what they have to gain versus what the person has to lose.
I got 8/10 which says otherwise. I voted serial killer for both women just because of how unlikely it is for a female to invent a programming language. If it wasn't for that I would be basically 90% correct.
This means statistically that there likely is a difference.
I can't put my finger on what it was though, I just knew. Basically anybody who looked insane must be an inventor of a programming language and anyone who looked normal must've not invented a language and therefore must be a killer.
I assume you were trying to describe how you did well using statistics and demographics, but your wording comes off sexist. It hits my ear as bragging about the disparity in the field, and I have to consciously try to change my initial interpretation to allow for something different.
I also got an 8/10, but I had at least one woman in my set who was a language developer (one of the Cobol designers) and I got that right too. I went with the intensity in the eyes. By my method, I most certainly would have marked Steve Jobs as a serial killer, so it's not perfect, although in his biography he said he learned his trademark expression from a guy he knew who later started a cult.
I said something akin to men are unlikely to be nurses, so I didn't choose men.
I think the ideological rhetoric of feminism has infected the viewpoints of normal people so much so that one needs to tiptoe around something that is obviously true. This may be good from a social standpoint as it opens up equality of opportunity but it is bad for science. The movement has silenced people who point out inevitable differences in observation. Women are different then men and giving them equal opportunities will yield unequal outcomes based simply off of actual biological differences in behavior and physical stature. Such censorship is bad for science.
I stated an observation between sexes that is completely obvious and avoided even entertaining the reasoning behind why such observations are true because I don't know why they're true. Yet it still hit your ideological nerve, no doubt due in big part to the tenets spread by ideological feminists. I support equality but not equality to the point where it denies reality.
I'm sorry I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I shouldn't take the bait but, hey, you played a GAME that was structured such that you'd have a 50/50 shot of being right. Rather than assume that the balance of demographics in the photos were waited towards that game's premise, 50/50 split, you used your own biased heuristic and happened to get a good score. You happened to get a set of 10 that included no female language developers. I had a mixed set. 8 coin flips out of 10 of heads is not special. I had a heuristic too and I'm probably equally wrong about it meaning something. I'm being honest with myself, though.
This is basically your way of saying that my viewpoint is sexist. I have not acted in such a manner, and please cite evidence as to where I am acting that way if you believe otherwise. Basically all I'm saying is that people should stop turning every freaking conversation about real demographic differences into an ideological witch hunt. It's completely off topic and nobody is thinking about such things yet there always has to be some social justice warrior pointing out some "infraction" whoops did I say women are physically weaker than men even though it's generally the truth? My bad for being a heathen sexist.
>Rather than assume that the balance of demographics in the photos were waited towards that game's premise, 50/50 split.
I assumed the balance was not weighted towards sex. I assumed he picked random set of people where the sex and race were random and only whether or not they were language developers/serial killers was the heuristic. It was a mistaken assumption because if the picks were truly random, it is highly unlikely for women to appear in the question set at all (assuming women are unlikely to be serial killers as stated by some people in this thread). Obviously, because two women appeared in the question set, the heuristic is biased for other attributes as the test maker deliberately made sure the question set included two women.
Frankly, the test actually masks reality as we know it. Programmers, Language creators and serial killers are highly, highly unlikely to be women.
I'll confess I possibly misread your initial post. Were you saying your score would have been higher if you hadn't picked serial killer for both women?
Camille Paglia (feminist academic, professor) has written and lectured about why that is. She has a famous line: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."
People need to balance there weaknesses with strengths. Just because one demographic is weak at something doesn't mean they're strong in another.
While intuitively I agree that what Camile Pagila says makes sense, there is no definitive evidence that was causes men to more likely be serial killers is what causes men to more likely be geniuses. Scientifically we still need to entertain the possibility that women aren't geniuses because of biology and this has nothing to do with the fact that they're unlikely to be serial killers. It might be true it might not be true, don't let ideology or pride in your own race/sex blind you from the truth.
Case in point, white people are more likely to be serial killers than other races. You may automatically think a racial centered biological origin of serial killer behavior is absurd but again this is the irrational need for "balance" and equality that is throwing you off. There is no scientific evidence either way, it could be Caucasian in origin it could not be.
Behaviorally we should be ideologically neutral for different demographics, but for observations of reality and discussing truth we should be scientifically neutral.
> Case in point, white people are more likely to be serial killers than other races
According to Wikipedia, that is false. There are more serial killers that are white in the US, but based on percentages of the U.S. population, whites are not more likely than other races to be serial killers.
I found that qualities of the photo played a strong role in my 8/10 score. I can't say exactly which qualities helped make that determination, aside from one case which looked like a police photo.
Oddly enough, I thought that both women were programming language creators for similar reasons to yours. This is because they were older women. (Well, a new photo of an old woman and an old photo of a young woman.) While my impressions may be off, it seems like women played a much stronger role in computer programming before the 1980's than in the 80's and 90's.
It's pretty well documented that there's been a general decline of women in computer science over the past two or three decades. There are various theories.
The probability to get 8/10 choosing randomly with equal probability is 4.4%. This has 241 points now, so if we assume that the number of people that took the test and has an account to write a comment is similar to the amount of people that upvoted, we get 10.6 with 8/10. I prefer to round it to 10, because there are too many approximations.
So it's not unexpected to get a few person that got 8/10, even if it were a topic anyone knows nothing about.
(With a similar calculation we get 2.5 persons with 9/10 and .2 with 10/10.)
(From other posts informal statistics, there are like x100 visits for each upvote, but I guess more of them don't have an account or don't want to make a comment.)
I count 6 people with 8/10. So there are approximately 4 shy ones.
Anyway, one said that can recognize Guido. If you know one, you only have to get 7 out of 9, that has a probability of 7%. As expected, knowing one answer make the test easier.
The numbers are off. You can't have votes be your basis in how many people took the test ( I didn't vote for example) and you can't have the amount of 8/10 comments be a metric for the sole count of people who scored that much. The numerical game can't be played here because the information is too cloudy.
That being said, anecdotally a good number of people got 8/10, 9/10 and 10/10 which anecdotally makes it likely to be statistically significant. Hard to say quantitatively but we can make a qualitative prediction here.
I think that everyone that upvoted played the game. So I think that at least 241 persons played the game. (The actual number of players is probably way higher.)
If you assume that players have no knowledge, With 241 the expected to number of persons with 8/10 in 10, and with 10/10 is 0.2. (The actual number of players is probably way higher, so these expected values are way higher, but we must not count lurkers.)
Last time I counted, I found 6 comments that say 8/10, so even if only 241 persons played and none of them have any insight, it would be underreported. This is not unexpected, not everyone is posting the result.
Last time I counted, I found 3 comments that say 10/10, that's much more than the expected value if only 241 persons played and none of them have any insight. So that's slightly interesting. (Did a lot of people get 10/10 and didn't upvote? The people that say 10/10 is lying or cheating? Do they recognize a few of the photos and were lucky in the others? Do they have a sixth sense to recognize serial killers?...)
You were just lucky. There is at least one woman who developed a programming language on the list this quiz is using. I got Jean E. Semmet and she did invent the FORMAC programming language.
With a sample of one, it is hard to make any meaningful inferences ;) But intuitively, I do tend to agree with your point. Perhaps PL creators look a touch more... extravagant?
Let's take it to the extreme. Lets say the test had 100 questions.
If out of all the people who took the test, one person got a score of 100/100 out of 10 million people who took the test it means that there are meaningful differences, it's just that most people can't identify those differences.
> The iMac was a huge success for Apple, revitalizing the company and influencing competitors' product designs. It played a role in abandoning legacy technologies like the floppy disk, serial ports, and Apple Desktop Bus in favor of Universal Serial Bus. The product line was updated throughout 1998 until 2001 with new technology and colors, eventually being replaced by the iMac G4 and eMac.
> ...
> A later hardware update created a sleeker design. This second-generation iMac featured a slot-loading optical drive, FireWire, "fanless" operation (through free convection cooling), a slightly updated shape, and the option of AirPort wireless networking. Apple continued to sell this line of iMacs until March 2003, mainly to customers who wanted the ability to run the older Mac OS 9 operating system. USB and FireWire support, and support for dial-up, Ethernet, and wireless networking (via 802.11b and Bluetooth) soon became standard across Apple's entire product line. The addition of high-speed FireWire corrected the deficiencies of the earlier iMacs.
FireWire is serial, too. It seems that, over larger distances, parallel only is faster up to a certain clock frequency (or if you want to go to extreme
lengths to ensure each wire in a parallel channel has the same transmission delay, as Cray did (https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/comments/11vku2/each_of_t...)
Right. There was a period in maybe the 2000s? when a number of the formerly parallel interconnect technologies were being replaced by serial ones because the frequencies had gotten high enough that clock skew was becoming a big problem.
Even just applying filters or some more recent, casual killer photos would be helpful. For some, the "photo scanned from newspaper" look was identifiable.
The internet needs more stuff like this. I got 7/10 but I couldn't resist calling Guido a killer after the way he murdered Perl slowly for like a decade.
I hope Perl 7 helps Perl make a comeback. Given Larry Wall's Christian background, it would be appropriate for his language to be crucified and then be resurrected later.
I thought to make a comment about an excess of meticulousness, but then I remembered Larry Wall and thought about Perl, so I suppose that doesn't really
fly.
This reminds me of Cringley's theory that there are two main types of programmer, hippies and nerds. Hippies do big picture stuff and are good at UI/UX etc. but their low level code is sometimes untidy, nerds are great at fine detail and micro-optimization but can lose sight of the overall goal.
They say it takes one to know one. The question is if that refers to language inventors or murderers. I got 8/10 right, so I guess I had better come up with a programming language pretty soon. ;-)
I've got 10/10. I've chosen to select people that I was instinctively afraid of as serial killers. It would be interesting to try this experiment on a larger dataset.
In terms of UX and a11y, please add a <form> for the Next button, so that we can do next without having to click (pressing enter, or even allow right key). Same for the Language creator / Serial killer buttons, use a <form>
8/10
I had the advantage of recognizing Sussman, Sammet and Guido. I don't think they look like killers. But I also didn't think that about Dorothea Puente and John Christie who I mistook for planguage designers :-)
I look around and see all these 8/10+'s around here and I have to wonder if a lot of it comes down to having seen pictures of these people before. My own score is DNF, because I'd managed to get one right most of the way through and stopped. That I would have had a better score choosing by coin flip is interesting.
Why do people still think they can judge a person's character by a single photograph?
This is an age-old dogma rooted in genetic superiority crap that really needs to die. Even a simple Google search shows a staggering number of these pop-psychology articles being actively peddled to the masses. Oh, if a person's nose is a bit crooked in the wrong direction, watch out!
I would assume that’s precisely the point of this silly game — to demonstrate directly that you can’t accurately judge someone by their appearance. But maybe I misinterpret?
Sure, I can see that. It just triggered me a little bit that I was being encouraged to judge people so readily. Plus, the comments here didn't seem to make that connection. They mostly saw it as a particularly "hard" challenge, rather than an exposition of our own biases.
I'd assume many people here interpreted it as a test of general knowledge rather than a test of ability to divine someone's homicidal tendencies from their mugshot.
You're quite right. It's absolutely mocking that idea --however lightly in an entertaining way --which is better than the 'we know better lecture' alternative.
Hi, I made the quiz and tried to design it to make judging by appearance work as poorly as possible, so the initial daft premise then becomes something a little bit more interesting as you get some wrong.
But I think it's reasonable to be wary of the issue, particularly with endless problems emerging nowadays with facial recognition tech.
Thanks for the response. I do appreciate the intent. As you can see, though, some of us don't are more prone to missing the intent. It's even demonstrated by one of the responses to my comment here.
Maybe make that end goal a bit more explicit towards the end? Or maybe it's okay as is, since it did generate a conversation and thus served its purpose.
Out of curiousity, how much work (e.g. in days or weeks) does it take for you to make something like this?
Uhh, it's not perfect, but you can definitely judge a lot about a person by looking at them, from their body language. Video would be better, and of course in person would be better again, but it's not like there's no information there. It's not skull measuring to interpret body language, and some of that body language can come off in a still photo. In particular, I think I can get a pretty good read on how empathic a person is pretty quickly based on body language.
No. I'm not trying to make a disgusting joke. A site that has you judge whether a person is a serial killer or a programming language creator is in poor taste when one of the top programming language creators' obituaries (with his photo) is on the front page. Too soon.
