Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

First of all if you didn't read the whole paper, this picture is really interesting and a good summary: https://i.imgur.com/zs8RWIz.png

As for the debate over whether this research is ethical, consider this. If someone actually uses this to discriminate against homosexuals, they must accept that the thing actually works. Which means that homosexuality is determined by biological features beyond anyone's control, which would contradict their own ideology.

And that is the most interesting part of this work, not whether this tool is very accurate or not. This pretty solidly proves that physical features correlate well with sexual orientation, which is strong evidence for the biological theory of sexual orientation. Which has always been one of the biggest arguments for gay rights, that it's not a choice and can't be changed.

On the usefulness of this test to actually classify gay people:

They claim 91% accuracy on a balanced dataset. E.g. where there the ratio of gays to straights is 50:50. To get a ratio of correct:incorrect of 91:9 on such a dataset, their test must increase or decrease the odds a person is gay by 10.

Now in the general population, the ratio of gays to straights is about 16 to 984 (1.6%). So if their test gives someone a positive reading, that increases the odds to 162 to 984, or 14%. So you can't use this test to accurately guess someone's sexual orientation. Simply because gay people are so rare that even a few percent of straight people misclassified will overwhelm the number of actual gay people.

But still that's a lot more accurate than human guessing or the base rate, and it's scientifically interesting that this is even possible. It's a proof of concept that higher accuracy may be possible with better methods and more data.

Another article claims this:

>when asked to pick out the ten faces it was most confident about, nine of the chosen were in fact gay. If the goal is to pick a small number of people who are very likely to be gay out of a large group, the system appears able to do so.

The test gives varying degrees of confidence, it gives much higher confidence to some people than others. There are some individuals that it can tell are definitely gay or straight. But for most it is more uncertain.

Also note that the estimates for the percentage of gay people vary a lot. Which could make the true accuracy as high as 42%. Also some people believe sexuality is more of a spectrum than a binary straight/gay. If so the straight people it misclassifies might lean more on the gay/bisexual spectrum than normal and the errors wouldn't seem so unreasonable.

Lastly all these "phrenology" references are silly. If you have methodological problem with this research I'd love to hear it. But I see people discarding the research simply because they don't like the conclusions. For this study and other facial correlations based research.

This isn't new at all, there's tons of scientific research about digit ratios and all kinds of correlations they have with different things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio). Why wouldn't we expect even better correlations from all facial features?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: