
Why Stanford Researchers Tried to Create a ‘Gaydar’ Machine - JumpCrisscross
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/science/stanford-sexual-orientation-study.html
======
jackpirate
The "average face pictures" make it clear that the average weight of the
straight people is higher than the average weight of the gay people. My guess
is that they actually built a fat detector. It certainly wouldn't surprise me
to find that gay people are on average much less fat than straight people. A
quick search through the actual papers shows that they made no effort to
control for the effects of weight.

~~~
danieltillett
Especially when facial lipoatrophy is a well known side-effect of anti-HIV
drugs [0].

0\. [https://www.poz.com/basics/hiv-basics/changes-face-body-
lipo...](https://www.poz.com/basics/hiv-basics/changes-face-body-
lipodystrophy-wasting)

Edit. I never complain about downvoting (who cares it is just HN), but what
exactly are people downvoting?

It is a well known side-effect of the older anti-HIV drugs to lose fat from
the face (it tends to be deposited around the belly and organs). Even if you
controlled for overall weight, then you would still need to control for facial
fat separately.

~~~
Arcsech
My guess is that people are downvoting due to the assumption/stereotype that
HIV is associated with homosexuality. While it's true that HIV is more
prevalent among men who have sex with men in the US[0], some still think of
HIV as "the gay disease", which it is definitely not, and the stereotype
contributes to stigmatization of homosexuality.

That may not be what you intended, but it's one way of reading your comment
that can come across negatively.

[0]: [https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-
trends/stat...](https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-
trends/statistics)

~~~
danieltillett
Thanks for answering.

Unfortunately in the population studied (white americans) HIV is far more
prevalent in men who have sex with men (>70% of all new infections) than in
heterosexual men and women. If your two populations vary significantly in any
factor you need to control for it or make sure you rule out that it is
significant - this is science 101.

Having read the paper and authors notes, it appears that facial fat
differences are unlike to be the signal being detected.

~~~
m_mueller
You only need to control for it if the total number of infections is a
significant percentage (probably somewhere around 1-5% depending on
significance level) of each group population - otherwise you'd have to control
for anything and everything and statistical field studies would be completely
impossible to allow for any conclusions (while as it is it's just _really_
hard).

~~~
danieltillett
This is true, but you should at least make an effort to rule this out. The
really hard thing in science is not fooling yourself by overlooking something
important.

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devindotcom
Consider reading the paper itself and the authors' notes before throwing
various objections around - they address many of them.

Paper: [https://osf.io/zn79k/](https://osf.io/zn79k/)

Notes:
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/11oGZ1Ke3wK9E3BtOFfGfUQuu...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/11oGZ1Ke3wK9E3BtOFfGfUQuuaSMR8AO2WfWH3aVke6U/edit#)

~~~
stevenwoo
Read it and here's what I would like to know. When they used human gaydar
(which they carefully said this was not...) to create the statistics to
compare against the AI sexual orientation detector, what was the best human
gaydar and the worst human gaydar (were there any humans actually better than
the algorithm)? Why didn't they increase the number of faces available to the
human gaydar or did they do that and it didn't make a difference? Also, if
they are letting the machine learning algorithm learn, shouldn't they have
done it in a way that let the humans learn for a comparison?

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tyingq
_" So to call attention to the privacy risks, he decided to show that it was
possible to use facial recognition analysis to detect something intimate"_

I'm curious if this is backpedaling, or if he did clearly call this out before
starting. Not that backpedaling in the face of death threats is that
terrible...

~~~
freshhawk
It's in the paper, it's literally in the abstract: "our findings expose a
threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women"

~~~
tyingq
Hmm. Makes this quote kind of interesting...

 _Advocacy groups like Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign denounced the study
as “junk science” that “threatens the safety and privacy of LGBTQ and non-
LGBTQ people alike.”_

~~~
travmatt
It’s really only ‘interesting’ to the extent one finds its hard to believe
that people would harm another on the basis of their supposed sexual
orientation. Otherwise it just sounds like humans finding more pretexts to
harm each other, which sounds like a pretty common occurrence.

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Tycho
Soon to come: visual paternity/maternity tests. Visual pregnancy tests. Lie
detector smart phone apps. Bar conversation isolation and transcription.

Blackmailers will have a field day.

~~~
tyingq
I'm more worried about health insurance companies, potential employers, loan
officers, and so forth. I'm sure there's lots of ML being produced to "reduce
risk".

~~~
Bromskloss
"Insurance in the limit of perfect information" – that would be the title of
my talk if I were ever invited to give one at an insurance company as part of
a hiring process or something. I think it's a cute game theoretic problem.

See, if an insurer, in the extreme case, can make a perfect prediction of
whether the presumptive customer will get the disease (or whatever the
insurance is about), then it would offer insurance to the ones who won't need
it and not offer insurance (or offer it at a price that is too high to be
useful) to the ones who do need it. The customer who is offered insurance will
thereby learn that he doesn't need it, and will decline the offer!

Is this the end of insurance? Insurance is of value to both sides. Is it
really reasonable that we can't extract this value if one side can predict the
future?

I think the rational solution might be for the insurance company to introduce
some randomness when making their offers, so that the customer can't for sure
know, by looking at the offer, whether he will be sick or not. I haven't
calculated more precisely what the optimal strategy of the insurer would be.
It would presumably depend on the utility functions of both parties.

~~~
waterhouse
If it's perfectly predictable, but takes effort, then insurance companies
would be replaced by (or pivot to) companies that sell the service of telling
you your predictions. (If the prediction takes no effort—open source software,
very little computation—then this cost will approach zero, and the more tech-
savvy would do it themselves. Maybe OS vendors would bundle it as a
convenience.) Then each person knows in advance what medical costs they'll
have to pay—or choose to not bother with—and can plan accordingly.

Realistically, I think that having perfect information about one person and
about biology and stuff still doesn't give you enough information to predict
whether they'll get various diseases. If there is any validity at all to
"exposure to X causes cancer", then no amount of information about one person
will help you predict whether they'll get exposed to X. Or whether they'll
trip, fall, and break a bone. And, really, I expect that the perfect state of
knowledge of human biology would merely allow you to deduce "person X has x%
chance of developing disease D during the next ten years; person Y has y%
chance". So there would still be a role for insurance companies for the risk-
averse.

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malkia
Gaydar is a gaida performer, and gaida means bagpipe in Bulgarian (other
languages?)

My family name on mother's side was Gaydarovi (-ovi)

Just a fun fact!

~~~
pandaman
Or a prime minister of Russia
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yegor_Gaidar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yegor_Gaidar)
. However, it's pronounced [GUY-DAHR] in Russian,is it different in Bulgarian?
There are few people actually named Gaydar though:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heydar_Aliyev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heydar_Aliyev)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geydar_Dzhemal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geydar_Dzhemal)

------
Bromskloss
> “Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual
> orientation from facial images”

I don't think the comparison to humans is the interesting thing here. The
thing of interest is what can be said at all, by human or by computer, by
looking at a picture.

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TheAdamAndChe
This is a fascinating article. It's amazing what kind of data you can get from
something as simple as a photograph.

I don't really understand the outrage, however. Some in the article claim that
it's "racism" and hurts Dr. Kosinski's career, but the fact that he made a
program that predicts who is gay and who is straight with odds much better
than a coin flip is crazy! If they find out what the differences are between
heterosexual and homosexual pictures, they may discover something that was
never noticed before, whether it's a physiological trait or a difference in
the photo taken due to behavioral differences.

We really are living in the future.

edit: To those downvoting me, could you please explain why? I don't think I
said anything particularly controversial.

~~~
xupybd
I suspect you're getting down voted because people see a reason to be outraged
at this and you've said you don't understand the outrage.

I'd like to ask someone to articulate the reasons for this outrage. I don't
really understand, wasn't this created to show the dangers of facial
recognition systems, didn't they have to pick something edgy to get that point
across?

~~~
jolux
Firstly, the researchers seem to have a cracker jack box understanding of the
fields they're claiming to upend, what with claiming PHT is widely accepted.
Secondly, it's not clear to me that they controlled for enough variables and
only doing it on white people is strange. It could really be that gay people
use better photos, who knows.

They're claiming to be able to detect gay people but it seems like the system
has to be coaxed very carefully into doing that and seems very limited. They
built a purposefully inflammatory tech demo that seems to do more to betray
their distance from the topic they're studying than it does bolster their
reputation. At least from my perspective.

~~~
Bromskloss
> Secondly, it's not clear to me that they controlled for enough variables and
> only doing it on white people is strange. It could really be that gay people
> use better photos, who knows.

Are these two sentences meant to be related to each other, or am I misreading
your comment?

~~~
jolux
No that's a bit confusing. They were meant to be totally unrelated.

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blackguardx
That chair looks extremely uncomfortable. As a former grad student, I would
hope that Stanford provides enough resources to ensure its students and staff
members don't get RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury).

~~~
Bromskloss
It also looks much better than a typical office chair.

------
goldenkey
Of course dating photos are going to give away dating data..the aggregate gay
photo doesnt have much facial hair. Most likely reasoning here is that gay men
shave for dating photos much more often than straight men do. This isn't
groundbreaking or racist..its just a trivial finding. All they did was build a
facial hair detector.

