The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"

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• devolution@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Bringing back racism and good vibes under “scientific principle.”

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• ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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

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• pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  “If he’s black, get him out of here”

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• humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    A classification problem is correlation vs causation. Sunspots and mini skirts have been correlated with stock market returns to some degree, but it tends to be a tenuous connection not guaranteed to hold up over time, or to actually have any meaningful relevance whatsoever. It’s easy to oversell models.

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• Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  youtube.com/watch?v=FVvg1CKBE20

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• ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  That image reminds me a meme from “Scientific diagrams that look like shitposts”. It was titled something like “Mask of Damascus(?)/Triagones(?) - Acquire it (from a prisoner(?)) with a scimitar!”

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• pyre@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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• BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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• skisnow@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    But what if bias was not the reason? What if your face gave genuinely useful clues about your probable performance we just agreed to redefine “bias” as something else, despite this fitting the definition of the word perfectly, just so I can claim this isn’t biased?

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• blubfisch@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Cool. Literal Nazi shit, still powered by IBM.

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  • Krauerking@lemy.lol ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah but it’s cool cause some rich white guy taught the computer to be racist for him, so you can’t complain.

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  • BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Basically the slogan for the 2020s

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• buttnugget@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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• AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Image

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• wilfim@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • 0x0@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s very nazi Germany real actually.

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    • 6nk06@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I always pity the Germans who don’t deserve this but keep this shame since the war, and it’s worse since nazis became an international club.

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• basiclemmon98@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Ooh yay, more ways for employer’s AI to autoreject people! How fun!

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• leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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).

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• uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s the thing with science communication. It barely exists.

    There is a bogus theory. Nobody tries replicating it for decades because there’s no fame in replication. Then someone finally does and disproves the theory. If the author is lucky, it gets published on the last pages of some low-level journal, because there’s even less fame in failed replication. But the general public doesn’t read journals. They don’t even read science journalism. They might read a short note in a daily newspaper that was twisted into unrecognizability by an underpaid, overworked journalist who didn’t understand a word in the article they read in some pop science magazine.

    Science doesn’t reach the general public, and if it does against all odds, it’s so twisted and corrupted that it frequently says the opposite of what the original paper said.

    People do their general education in school, and once they leave they stop learning general topics.

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• Deathray5@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I think Lenin (for all his problems), had a good criticism of the economist though I can’t find a great source for it

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  • Postimo@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires, is pursuing a very instructive line in relation to the war.

    www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/…/01c.htm

    For all his problems??

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• Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  “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”

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• knatschus@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • cypherpunks@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I haven’t heard of academics and/or media from China advocating for applications of phrenology/physiognomy or other related racist pseudosciences. Have you?

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  • AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Haven’t you heard? Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race.

    Trump’s current Science Advisor gave an interview back in ~2019 where he kept insisting the U.S. was at a disadvantage to China bc we didn’t have access to the level of surveillance data China had (which it turns out we fucking created and sold to them). He also used this point to argue against any regulations for facial recognition tech because again, it would put us at a disadvantage.

    But don’t worry, because the goal is to have an authoritarian surveillance state with “baked in American values,” so we won’t have to worry about ending up like China did with the surveillance tools we fucking sold them.

    I’m not sure what values he’s claiming will be somehow baked into it (because again, we created it and sold it to China). My mind conjures up scenario of automatic weapons and a speaker playing a screeching bald eagle, but maybe we’ll get some star spangled banner thrown in there too.

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• iAvicenna@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Is that…an AI generated image?

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• entwine@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • 3abas@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They absolutely can erase things on the internet, are you archiving this for when the other archives die? Are you gonna be able to share it when the time comes? And will anyone care?

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    • valek879@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I have some spare storage! What I want to do with it is either archive very important information, documents and/or scientific papers. I don’t mind of it’s the same shit others have, just want to be part of retaining information. I’m trans and last time fascists were in power we lost 100 years of progress towards being able to exist openly so I’m pretty eager to archive information.

      Either this or it’d be cool to be part of a decentralized database that is searchable and and readable.

      I could probably find somewhere between 1-10 TB to donate to the cause in perpetuity. But I don’t know how to do this myself, what to save, or if there are groups already doing this type of thing.

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• verdi@feddit.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  FYI, it’s not a paper, it’s a blog post from well connected and presumably highly educated people benefiting from the institutional prestige to see tjmheir poorly conducted study be propagated ad eternum without a modicum of relevant peer review.

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  • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It’s petty reliable, it detected the authors to be psychos

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• AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • shawn1122@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The goal here is to go back to a world where such racial hieraechies are accepted but without human accountability. This way you are subjugated arbitrarily but hey the computer said so, so what can we do about it?

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• _cnt0@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Race theory 2.0 AI edition just dropped.

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• KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Bro has the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter

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• panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Racial profiling keeps getting reinvented.

  Fuck that.

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  • Jason2357@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I cant imagine a model being trained like this /not/ end up encoding a bunch of features that correlate with race. It will find the white people, then reward its self as the group does statistically better.

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    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Even a genuinely perfect model would immediately skew to bias; the moment some statistical fluke gets incorporated into the training data that becomes self re-enforcing and it’ll create and then re-enforce that bias in a feedback loop.

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  • ssladam@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Exactly. It’s like saying that since every president has been over 6’ tall we should only allow tall people to run for president.

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  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The problem here is education.

    And I’m not just talking about “average joes” who don’t know the first thing about statistics. It is mind-boggling how many people with advanced degrees do not understand the difference between correlation and causation, and will argue until they’re blue in the face that it doesn’t affect results.

    AI is not helping. Modern machine learning is basically a correlation engine with no concept of causation. The idea of using it to predict the future is dead on arrival. The idea of using it in any prescriptive role in social sciences is grotesque; it will never be more than a violation of human dignity.

    Billions upon billions of dollars are being invested in putting lipstick on that pig. At this point it is more lipstick than pig.

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• DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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… 🧐

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  • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There was also a German fella that got up to similar hijinks awhile back.

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• neidu3@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This is just phrenology with extra steps

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  • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    They barely even added extra steps.

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• Tattorack@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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  • zartemie@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    At least high variance means the possibility of an opposite swing (this is cope)

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• stickly@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Image

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  • DudeImMacGyver@kbin.earth ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well, that sounds insane.

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