Wow. If a black box analysis of arbitrary facial characteristics is more meritocratic than the status quo, that speaks volumes about the nightmare hellscape shitshow of policy, procedure and discretion that resides behind the current set of 'metrics' being used.

"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...

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.

Cool. Literal Nazi shit, but now with AI 😵‍💫

The study claims that they analyzed participants' labor market outcomes, that being earnings and propensity to move jobs, "among other things."

Fun fact, did you know white men tend to get paid more than black men for the same job, with the same experience and education?

Following that logic, if we took a dataset of both black and white men, then used their labor market outcomes to judge which one would be a good fit over another, white men would have higher earnings and be recommended for a job more than black people.

Black workers are also more likely to switch jobs, one of the reasons likely being because you tend to experience higher salary growth when moving jobs every 2-3 years than when you stay with a given company, which is necessary if you're already being paid lower wages than your white counterparts.

By this study's methodology, that person could be deemed "unreliable" because they often switch jobs, and would then not be considered.

Essentially, this is a black box that gets to excuse management saying "fuck all black people, we only want to hire whites" while sounding all smart and fancy.

Not April fool's or the onion? What the fuck?

Does it predict people that allegedly finished university not knowing the difference between correlation and causality?

This reminds me of a fraud risk classification model I once heard about, which ended up being an excellent income-by-postal-code classifier.

This is just phrenology with extra steps

But what if bias was not the reason? What if your face gave genuinely useful clues about your probable performance?

I hate this so much, because spouting statistics is the number one go-to of idiot racists and other bigots trying to justify their prejudices. The whole fucking point is that judging someone's value someone based on physical attributes outside their control, is fucking evil, and increasing the accuracy of your algorithm only makes it all the more insidious.

The Economist has never been shy to post some questionable kneejerk shit in the past, but this is approaching a low even for them. Not only do they give the concept credibility, but they're even going out of their way to dishonestly paint it as some sort of progressive boon for the poor.

Woaw, we skipped right from diversity hiring to phrenology hiring without wasting a single beat. Boy has the modern world become efreceint.

I looked for the original article, abstract:

Human capital—encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits—is critical for labor market success, yet the personality component remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence and comprehensive LinkedIn data, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel" Photo Big 5" predicts school rank, compensation, job seniority, industry choice, job transitions, and career advancement. Using administrative records from top-tier MBA programs, we find that the Photo Big 5 exhibits only modest correlations with cognitive measures like GPA and standardized test scores, yet offers comparable incremental predictive power for labor outcomes. Unlike traditional survey-based personality measures, the Photo Big 5 is readily accessible and potentially less susceptible to manipulation, making it suitable for wide adoption in academic research and hiring processes. However, its use in labor market screening raises ethical concerns regarding statistical discrimination and individual autonomy.

The PDF is downloadable here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=2eia4X4AAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=2eia4X4AAAAJ%3A_FxGoFyzp5QC

I don't have the time nor the expertise to read everything to understand how they take into account the bias that good looking white men with educated parents are way more likely to succeed at life.

Boeing CEO: "We're always innovating, and sometimes we need to boldly embrace the wisdom of the past if it can be re-examined in light of current technology. From now on, our airplane navigation systems will be based on the Flat Earth model. This makes navigation so much more computationally efficient, guys."

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.

Last time did not end well for about 6 million people...

This is so absurd it almost feels like it isn't real. But indeed, the article appears when I look it up

Race theory 2.0 AI edition just dropped.

It's completely normal for fascists to promote pseudo-science. Always had been.

Indeed their publication is named after one of the worst pseudo-sciences.

Actually, what if slavery wasn’t such a bad idea after all? Lmao they never stop trying to resurrect class warfare and gatekeeping.

I thought phrenology was still a science at the time of the German Reich, only made defunct later. Now I have my doubts.

Social darwinism was disproven in the 1900s and supply-side economics died in the 19th century so it's not like pseudoscience does not spring up like weeds when rich people want to sponsor it.

Everyone is kind of focusing on the hiring part, which is incredibly nazi already, but they're saying for lending too. Fucking yikes.

I remember when stuff like this was used to show how dystopian china is.

Why stop there? Why just banks and hiring firms? why not allow access to Law Enforcement and use the phrenology robot to screen for pre crime?

How long before they start measuring skulls at job interviews

What if being a nazi was meritocratic? How about no?

"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"

Plastic surgery would become more popular. $10k work done to my nose to double my salary? Yes please.

this should be grounds for a prison sentence. open support for Nazism shouldn't be covered by free speech laws.

Yeah, nothing says "this person will repay their loans" like looking at their face and nothing fucking else.

I love how you can just call it capetalismo in portuguese, capeta = devil

Dystopian neutrality in article.

without discriminating on grounds of protected characteristics

AI classification is trained based on supervised (the right answers are predetermined) learning. MechaHitler for the fascist nationalism's sake, will rate Obama's face as a poor employee, and Trump's as the bestest employee.

Open training data sets would be subject to 1. zero competitive advantage to a model, 2. massive complaints about any specific training data.

For some jobs, psycopaths AND loyalty are desirable traits, even though they can be opposite traits. Honesty, integrity, intelligence can be desirable traits, or obstacles to desperate loyalty. My point is that if there are many traits determined by faces, much more training data is needed to detect them, and then human hiring decision based on 10 or 30 traits matching to a (impossibly unique) position, where there direct manager only cares about loyalty, without being too talented, but higher level managers might prefer a candidate with potential to replace their direct manager, but all of them care about race or pregnancy risk, and then post training based on some "illegal characteristics".

A Gattaca situation where, everyone has easy time getting great job, and moving to a greater job, OR being shut out of all jobs, creates a self contradicting prediction on "loyalty/desperation" controlability traits. If job duties are changed to include blow job services, then surely those agreeable make a better employee, despite any facial ticks responding to suggestion.

Human silent "illegal discrimination" is not eliminated/changed, but the new capability, you can use a computer to do the interviewing, and waste more interviewees' time at no human cost to employer is why this will be a success. A warehousing company recently looked at facial expressions to determine attention to safety, and this leads to "The AI punishments to your life will continue until you smile more." Elysium's automated parole incident interviews is a good overview of the dystopia.

Me and my hammer would be happy to offer our retrophrenological services to any executives looking to improve their performance and personality (painkillers not included).

Wait a minute, this sounds suspiciously familiar... I think I heard about the psudoscience of a government measuring the size of people's heads to try to find out their ethnicity... somewhere in Rwanda... 🧐

Measles, theocratic government, phrenology: everything old is new again.

I'm not sure we're going to make it y'all.

Bringing back racism and good vibes under "scientific principle."

"If he's black, get him out of here"

Whatever it takes to keep hiring mediocre white men, I guess.