Congratulations to Ben & Abi!

One of the major reasons I’m out here on the West coast is for the wedding of my nephew, Ben, to Abi (here with her mother).

Wedding accomplished!

Now I get to tell a story. Many years ago, when I would walk home from school back in junior high and high school, I would sometimes walk with a girl who lived a few blocks from me. My little sister Lisa (Ben’s mother), who was then around 5 to 7 years old, would sit on the front step of our house, and when she would see us, she would sing out, “Paa-aul’s got a girrrl frieeend!” and then run inside giggling. Her magic chant apparently was effective since I later married that girl and am still happily married these many years later.

So I’ll return the enchantment, since Lisa is no longer around to do it for him. “Be-een’s got a girrrl frieeend!”

Now he’ll have many decades of happiness. Guaranteed.

Something in our culture is creating a lot of naive biological determinists

Here we go again. The Guardian has a profile of a guy who claims to be able to tell your sexual orientation from a photograph. It’s all bullshit, reminiscent of that Faception nonsense.

But his audience would also have been intrigued by his work on the use of AI to detect psychological traits. Weeks after his trip to Moscow, Kosinski published a controversial paper in which he showed how face-analysing algorithms could distinguish between photographs of gay and straight people. As well as sexuality, he believes this technology could be used to detect emotions, IQ and even a predisposition to commit certain crimes. Kosinski has also used algorithms to distinguish between the faces of Republicans and Democrats, in an unpublished experiment he says was successful – although he admits the results can change “depending on whether I include beards or not”.

He’s a psychologist. Everyone who has taken a psychology course must have heard of Clever Hans, the counting horse. You would say a number to Clever Hans, and he would pound his hoof on the ground the right number of times. He must know how to count! But no, it turns out that Clever Hans just knew to watch his owner, who was the one who could count, and who would change his posture or signal his relief when the horse reached the desired number. The whole point of that story was a lesson in interpreting your observations: you may think the subject is doing one thing, but he or she is actually doing something entirely different.

For a wonderfully thorough take down of Kosinski, read this article which exposes the flaws in his work. Kosinski claims he’s detecting a biological difference, that physiognomy and genes are somehow connected to psychology and behavior, so you can scan one and get an accurate assessment of the other. But he’s really pulling a Clever Hans, making a faulty association between the variables he wants to link, and ignoring a host of other variables where the real connection is being made. And those other variables are all culture, not biology.

In summary, we have shown how the obvious differences between lesbian or gay and straight faces in selfies relate to grooming, presentation, and lifestyle — that is, differences in culture, not in facial structure. These differences include:

  • Makeup
  • Eyeshadow
  • Facial hair
  • Glasses
  • Selfie angle
  • Amount of sun exposure.

We’ve demonstrated that just a handful of yes/no questions about these variables can do nearly as good a job at guessing orientation as supposedly sophisticated facial recognition AI. Further, the current generation of facial recognition remains sensitive to head pose and facial expression. Therefore — at least at this point — it’s hard to credit the notion that this AI is in some way superhuman at “outing” us based on subtle but unalterable details of our facial structure.

The Guardian article also points out another weird bias in Kosinski’s work.

This is where Kosinski’s work strays into biological determinism. While he does not deny the influence of social and environmental factors on our personalities, he plays them down. At times, what he says seems eerily reminiscent of Lombroso, who was critical of the idea that criminals had “free will”: they should be pitied rather than punished, the Italian argued, because – like monkeys, cats and cuckoos – they were “programmed to do harm”.

“I don’t believe in guilt, because I don’t believe in free will,” Kosinski tells me, explaining that a person’s thoughts and behaviour “are fully biological, because they originate in the biological computer that you have in your head”. On another occasion he tells me, “If you basically accept that we’re just computers, then computers are not guilty of crime. Computers can malfunction. But then you shouldn’t blame them for it.” The professor adds: “Very much like: you don’t, generally, blame dogs for misbehaving.”

I don’t believe in free will either, but for completely different reasons: I see it as a malformed question built on a foundation of dualism, a delusion that “you” are something independent of the physical, biological “you”. But I don’t flop down into the lazy thinking of biological determinism; that “I” am a construct of a meat computer does not imply that I am robotically fixed and incapable of change and growth, or cannot make decisions based on rational forethought or emotional desire. The real “I” is the whole, inseparable from glands and experience and calculation.

Likewise, biological determinism is bunk. Who we are is not simply a product of built-in genetic factors — genes respond to environment. It’s all one inseparable gemisch, and anyone who tries to argue that genes drive behavior is a fool. It’s always genes entangled in history and environment.

That was a bar so low I thought they couldn’t possibly limbo under it

Some right-wingers are making a low-budget anti-choice movie titled Roe v. Wade, which features the usual looney-tunes suspects, like Milo Yiannopoulos and Tomi Lahren and Jon Voight and Corbin Bernsen, and if you follow the link you’ll find lots of clues that this is going to be a flaming shitshow. But one simple point is a truly damning indictment.

Conservative actors Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Sorbo were initially cast as Supreme Court justices but left upon receiving the script. “That’s where it started as far as not sending out full scripts to actors, because they backed out and then it was a mad rush to find people to be the Supreme Court justices, and when they got on set they had no idea what they were doing. They didn’t get their lines until they got on set. They were kept in the dark,” according to a crew member.

The script is so bad that Kevin Sorbo and Stephen Baldwin refused a pay day? Holy crap. I’ve seen some of their previous movies, and I have a hard time imagining a movie that’s even worse.

Be worse for greater justice!

I’m immediately put on my guard when someone starts using the old zero-sum argument against acknowledging someone’s rights: “Giving them the same rights I have means my rights are diminished!” This is not a good argument. Granting someone else rights does not shrink the pool of possible rights we can allow. But this is exactly the argument Sarah Ditum makes, and she even says it right in the title: Trans rights should not come at the cost of women’s fragile gains.

With a lead like that, you might expect that she’d then give lots of substantial examples of “unavoidable conflicts between women’s rights and the current trans-activist agenda”, because otherwise, I’m not going to believe it. But here’s her case: “born women” have had to acknowledge the existence of trans women.

In June Cancer Research UK, a charity, tweeted: “Cervical screening (or the smear test) is relevant for everyone aged 25-64 with a cervix.” The odd phrasing—“everyone with a cervix” rather than “women”—was not accidental. The charity explained that it had deliberately chosen to use what it described as “inclusive language”. Similarly, the campaign Bloody Good Period, which donates tampons and sanitary towels to asylum-seekers, uses the word “menstruators” rather than “women”. And Green Party Women, an internal campaign group of the British Green Party, confirmed last year that its preferred designation for the constituency it represented was not, in fact, “women” but “non-men”.

OK, but if you’re a trans man with a cervix, shouldn’t you get cervical screening? And aren’t there plenty of women who do not menstruate for one reason or another, not just because they might be a trans woman but because they’re menopausal or taking pills? This is a rather odd complaint.

Ah, but you see, the problem is that these trends for accurate language are applied unequally. So clearly the trans activists are only targeting women’s causes for change.

It is notable that Cancer Research UK did not test its “inclusive” approach with a male-specific cancer. Its campaign messages about prostate and testicular cancer address “men”, rather than “everyone with a prostate” or “everyone with testicles”. (Addressing “people with a cervix” is, of course, only inclusive of people who know they have a cervix. Many women do not have that detailed knowledge of their internal anatomy. And those who speak English as a second language may well not know the word.) While organisations in the women’s sector have revised their language to avoid the word “women”, male-specific charities such as CALM (the Campaign against Living Miserably, a movement against male suicide) continue to refer uncomplicatedly to “men”. Women’s groups are aggressively picketed for being exclusionary; men’s clubs are left unmolested.

All right, that’s a good argument. She’s right that this asymmetry is a problem. It seems to me, though, that the problem is that trans activism hasn’t gone far enough — that we should be objecting to prostate and testicular screening campaigns that only address “men”, rather than “people with testicles and/or prostates”, and that we should aspire to greater inclusivity. It is particularly ironic that CALM doesn’t seem to recognize that discrimination against trans men and trans women increases their suicide rate. So shouldn’t Ditum be concerned about this habit of “uncomplicatedly” referring to “men” and “women”?

But no. She’s instead arguing that we should return to the lack of complicatedness of just ignoring the existence of trans individuals. It’s really weird. Her entire essay should be read as an argument for the importance of using inclusive language for all, and that society has fallen short in many instances, but her conclusion is that we should fall even shorter, to make things fair.

I don’t get it. Be worse for greater justice! It’s not a very appealing slogan.

Faception is phrenology for the 21st century!

What? You never heard of Faception? It’s amazing!

Faception is first-to-technology and first-to-market with proprietary computer vision and machine learning technology for profiling people and revealing their personality based only on their facial image.

Faception can analyze faces from video streams (recorded and live), cameras, or online/offline databases, encode the faces in proprietary image descriptors and match an individual with various personality traits and types with a high level of accuracy. We develop proprietary classifiers, each describing a certain personality type or trait such as an Extrovert, a person with High IQ, Professional Poker Player or a Terrorist. Ultimately, we can score facial images on a set of classifiers and provide our clients with a better understanding of their customers, the people in front of them or in front of their cameras.

In short, they claim to be able to take a picture of you, and in a fraction of a second, in the absence of any other information, be able to determine your personality. It’s done with computers, so you know you can trust it.

But, you know, we have these meat computers in our heads that have been trained through millions of years of evolution and throughout our development to be extraordinarily sensitive to faces. We can respond to an eyebrow that lifts a fraction of a millimeter, a lip that curls just so, a pupil that dilates by a hairs-width. We are really, really good at reading emotion and incredibly subtle social cues from facial expressions. There are autistic individuals who have more difficulty than most at picking up on those cues, but I suspect they’re far, far better at it than any computer program.

But even with this amazing sensitivity, do you really think you could look at a snapshot and accurately judge whether someone is a poker player or a terrorist? Don’t you suspect you’d get very different perspectives on the person’s personality if the snapshot were taken at a party, vs. taken at a funeral? Have you ever discovered that your first impression of someone, on the basis of their appearance, proves to be totally wrong once you get to know them better? Just on the face of it, this is an absurd claim they are making.

We haven’t even gotten to the actual “science” that they claim supports their thesis.

The face can be used to predict a person’s personality and behavior.

This claim relies on a combination of two known research observations

​

OK. They’ve got two justifications. Here’s the first. The second isn’t going to get any better.

1. According to Social and Life Science research personalities are affected by genes.​

In fact genes play a greater role in determining key personality traits like social skills and learning ability than the way we are brought up by our parents, researchers claimed.

Researchers from Edinburgh University studied more than 800 sets of identical and non-identical twins to learn whether genetics or upbringing has a greater effect on how successful people are in life. Writing in the Journal of Personality, the researchers found that identical twins were twice as likely as non-identical twins to share the same personality traits, suggesting that their DNA was having the greatest impact.

There’s an obvious problem with this argument: identical twins don’t have identical personalities. I’ve known a few identical twins, and it’s true that it may be hard to tell them apart visually, but try talking to them. They’re different people. Shocking, I know. Also, I think every twin has heard the joking question about which one is the evil twin, which the good twin (and is tired of it). How does software that only examines the most superficial aspects of a person fail to recognize this fundamental issue?

And, oh Jesu, they bring up that nonsense about measure the relative roles of genetics or upbringing. It doesn’t work that way! Both are interdependent. Genes will be expressed differently depending on the environment. Anyone who brings up nature/nurture as if they are competing hypotheses should be kicked to the curb and ignored.

But now watch the magnificent flying leap they have to make to argue that personality and facial features are linked.

2. Our face is a reflection of our DNA​

Researchers have identified five of the genes that shape a person’s face. Researchers previously knew that genetics played a large role in determining face shape, since identical twins share DNA. However, little was known about exactly which genes are involved. Three genes were thought to have roles in the arrangement of facial features, and the new research confirmed their involvement.

There are more than 3 or 5 genes involved in face development. Facial structure, like all complex traits, is almost certainly omnigenic. In point of fact, though, claiming that only a small number of genes affect face shape effectively contradicts their own argument, because that implies that these genes could do their job in morphology while another, completely different set of genes work to generate personality. Do these guys even understand what they’re talking about?

Working on mice, researchers have identified thousands of small regions of DNA that influence the way facial features develop. The researchers said that although the work was carried out on animals, the human face was likely to develop in the same way. In fact, It’s already possible to make some inferences about the appearance of crime suspects from their DNA alone.

Let it be stipulated that genes play a role in morphology, and that individuals who are genetically identical will develop very similar facial features. This is not a point of contention. The question is whether there is a correlation between physiognomy and personality. Do people with the same shape of nose have similar political stances, for instance? Is there a connection between bushy eyebrows and charitable giving? Is ear shape linked to gambling skill? These are the questions they need to answer.

They claim on their “classifers” page that this is the face of a pedophile, for instance. I think that looks like about half the white dudebros who work in tech. Are you comfortable with that suggestion? Because I’m not.

It does make me wonder if they’ve run their own photos through the machine, and whether the software has been optimized to weed out all the non-flattering descriptors. I wouldn’t be surprised if the first pass of the alpha version classified everyone as “asshole”, and they worked assiduously so it would instead classify them as “genius”.

But where is the evidence that face and personality are linked in a predictable way? Here we go.

And indeed, researchers were able to demonstrate that “Internal facial features are signals of personality and health. While these type of affirmations are quite recent, in Chinese history, there have been people that have studied the “mapping of the face” for thousands of years.

Also, the epigenetics phenomena has recently demonstrated, in academia researches and March 31th 2017 Science magazine.

Vague reference, no specific citation.

Vague reference to Chinese tradition.

Handwavy mention of epigenetics buzzword.

This is bad stuff. It’s just more hocus-pocus, like astrology or phrenology or iridology or tea-leaf reading or Myers-Briggs tests or any of a thousand gimmicks that have been used to make false claims throughout history. This Faception boondoggle is going to be no more effective at detecting terrorists than it would be at ferretting out witches.

Worse, it just genetic determinism coupled to racism as an excuse. Cesare Lombroso lives! It does make one wonder if his pickled head doesn’t actually dictate racist pseudoscience to bad writers and software authors.

For those of a morbid turn of mind

I’ve been seeing examples of those old bills of mortality going around — the lists of causes of death, week by week, in 17th century London. I thought you should know you can go straight to the source and find all the death statistics you could dream of. It’s shocking how often infectious disease is slaughtering people — plague, fever, tiffick (tuberculosis), cholera, spotted fever, smallpox, the French pox, etc. — and you wouldn’t want to be an infant, they were dropping like flies.

What’s interesting, too, is what isn’t killing them. Cancer is rare. You can find an occasional murder (or rather, “murther”), but it isn’t common. Gun deaths are noted with details (“Shot with a pistol at Saviours Southwark”) and are less frequent than executions. Everything else was killing them first. Apparently, if you really hated someone back then, it was a greater revenge to sit back and wait for them to die a miserable death from worms or a bloody flux.

There are definitely some advantages to living in the 21st century.