This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
All of that being typed, I'm aware that the 'If' in my initial response is doing the same amount of heavy lifting as the 'Some might argue' in the article. Barring the revelation of some truly extraordinary evidence, I don't accept the premise.
The gamification of hiring is largely a result of businesses de-institutionalizing Human Resources. If you were hired on at a company like Exxon or IBM in the 1980s, there was an enormous professionalized team dedicated to sourcing prospective hires, vetting them, and negotiating their employment.
Now, we've automated so much of the process and gutted so much of the actual professionalized vetting and onboarding that its a total crap shoot as to whom you're getting. Applicants aren't trying to impress a recruiter, they're just aiming to win the keyword search lottery. Businesses aren't looking to cultivate talent long term, just fill contract positions at below-contractor rates.
So we get an influx of pseudo-science to substitute for what had been a real sociological science of hiring. People promising quick and easy answers to complex and difficult questions, on the premise that they can accelerate the churn of staff without driving up cost of doing business.
Gotcha. This is replacing one nonsense black box with a different one, then. That makes a depressing kind of sense. No evidence needed, either!
A primary application of "AI" is providing blackboxes that enable the extremely privileged to wield arbitrary control with impunity.
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.
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?
"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...
Like every corporate entity, they're trying to redefine what those words mean. See, it's not "insufficient knowledge" if they're using an AI powered facial recognition program to get an objective prediction, right? Right?
People see me in cargo pants, polo shirt, a smartphone in my shirt pocket, and sometimes tech stuff in my (cargo) pants pockets and they assume that I am good at computers. I have an IT background and have been on the Internet since March of 1993 so they are correct. I call it the tech support uniform. However, people could dress similarly to try to fool people.
People will find ways, maybe makeup and prosthetics or AI modifications, to try to fool this system. Maybe they will learn to fake emotions. This system is a tool, not a solution.
Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
TLDR as soon as you have a system like this people will game it...
I think their stupid angle is "it's not unfair because what if this time it really worked though!"
I think their angle is "its not unfair because the computer says it!". automated bias. offloading liability to an AI.
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.
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.
I remember when stuff like this was used to show how dystopian china is.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 their poorly conducted study be propagated ad eternum without a modicum of relevant peer review.
edit: After a few more minutes, it's an unreliable psychopath detector.
Race theory 2.0 AI edition just dropped.
Not April fool's or the onion? What the fuck?
The Economist has a tendency to put out articles seemingly designed to make conservatives bust nuts through their trousers at mach 4
Is Lucifer's Poison Ivy destroying the fabric of civilization as we know it?
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).
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.
It predicts people with business school degrees getting six, seven, and eight figure salaries to blow smoke up the asses of the investor pool.
This reminds me of a fraud risk classification model I once heard about, which ended up being an excellent income-by-postal-code classifier.
The dark art of sociology is recognizing how poverty impacts human behaviors and then calibrating your business to profit off it.
"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"
Woaw, we skipped right from diversity hiring to phrenology hiring without wasting a single beat. Boy has the modern world become efreceint.
Last time did not end well for about 6 million people...
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.
one can also get the full paper directly from yale here without needing to solve a google captcha:
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.
i admittedly did not read the entire 61 pages but i read enough to answer this:
spoiler
they don't
Lmao they source the photos from LinkedIn profiles. I’m sure that didn’t bias their training at all. Yes sir there’s no chance this thing is selecting for anything but facial features.
Edit: double lmao they’re all MBAs
Edit2: they didn't even train the AI!! this paper is them just feeding linkedin photos into a third-party black-box API and then nodding thoughtfully at the results. i cant tell you how stupid the AI is because I can't find any information about it or even the API mentioned in the paper.
Wow. When I saw the article I figured it would be bad, but that’s even worse than I expected lol
What is it with these idiots trying to re-brand racism and reinvent phrenology every few decades? Are they stupid enough to believe they’re the first to think of shit like this, or are they hoping we’re dumb enough to fall for it this time around?
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."
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.
"okay, okay, hear me out: what if nazi methods, but for getting a job. we could even tattoo their number on their arms. it's only consequent, we already devide by skin colour"
WTF
Everyone is kind of focusing on the hiring part, which is incredibly nazi already, but they're saying for lending too. Fucking yikes.
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
This is for skin tone and gender, not the insides.
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... 🧐
What if being a nazi was meritocratic? How about no?
It's been the bedrock of American business since at least the 1960s.
Our country is flush with very wealthy fascists, many of whom obtained the position thanks to their ancestors crawling across the ratlines and embedding themselves in the nascent tech sector.
Plastic surgery would become more popular. $10k work done to my nose to double my salary? Yes please.
Plastic surgery would become more popular.
One of the paper's authors had the same thought:
“Suppose this type of technology gets used in labor market screening, or maybe dating markets,” Shue muses. “Going forward, you could imagine a reaction in which people then start modifying their pictures to look a certain way. Or they could modify their actual faces through cosmetic procedures.”
She also bizarrely says that:
"we are very much not advocating that this technology be used by firms as part of their hiring process."
and yet, for some reason:
The next step for Shue and her colleagues is to explore whether certain personality types are drawn to specific industries or whether those personality types are more likely to succeed within given industries.
Measles, theocratic government, phrenology: everything old is new again.
