Physiognomy is a 19th-century pseudoscience. Why can’t we stop practicing it?(longreads.com)
longreads.com
Physiognomy is a 19th-century pseudoscience. Why can’t we stop practicing it?
https://longreads.com/2018/10/03/the-return-of-the-face/
13 comments
There's research suggesting it's not pseudoscience. E.g. https://www.medicaldaily.com/facial-features-predict-iq-men-..., https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/a-face-for... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/09/1.... Unless those studies are extremely flawed, it seems possible to predict IQ, sexuality and political affiliation to some degree of accuracy from a person's face.
The first study you link to doesn’t look at IQ, it looks at how people assess one another’s IQ, which is not the same.
The study on predicting sexuality wasn’t looking at physiognomy per se, but at photographs of people. One of the criticisms of the study was that instead of predicting sexuality based on facial features it showed differences in how people of different sexualities photograph themselves, eg. using camera angles more associated with how people with a specific gender photograph themselves.
Neither of these studies convince me that physiognomy isn’t just prejudiced guessing.
Edit: grammar.
The study on predicting sexuality wasn’t looking at physiognomy per se, but at photographs of people. One of the criticisms of the study was that instead of predicting sexuality based on facial features it showed differences in how people of different sexualities photograph themselves, eg. using camera angles more associated with how people with a specific gender photograph themselves.
Neither of these studies convince me that physiognomy isn’t just prejudiced guessing.
Edit: grammar.
>The first study you link to doesn’t look at IQ, it looks at how people assess one another’s IQ, which is not the same.
From the article I linked: "Each student in the picture completed a Czech version of the Intelligence Structure Test that uses various types of tools to measure the different types of intelligence. The images were close-ups of the students’ faces, which featured a neutral, non-smiling expression, and did not wear jewelry or cosmetics, Business Insider reported.
The raters took their time rating each photograph for either intelligence or attractiveness. Of the raters, 43 women and 42 men judged photos for intelligence, and 42 women and 33 men judged them for attractiveness using a scale of 1 to 7 (1 being the highest score, 7 being the lowest possible score). The researchers then averaged the intelligence and attractiveness scores each student received.
The findings revealed both men and women were able to accurately evaluate the intelligence of men by just viewing the facial photographs. Men in the photos with a higher IQ were perceived as more intelligent much more than women in the photos who also had higher IQ scores. In both sexes, a narrower face with a thinner chin, and a larger, prolonged nose characterized the predicted stereotype of a higher IQ, while a rather oval and broader face with a massive chin and a smallish nose led to a prediction of low-intelligence."
Note the lines "Each student in the picture completed a Czech version of the Intelligence Structure Test" and " The findings revealed both men and women were able to accurately evaluate the intelligence of men by just viewing the facial photographs." So the study did actually measure peoples' IQs using a standardised IQ test, and compared the results of the tests to peoples' assesment of others' IQ based on their faces, showing a correspondence between the IQ people estimated based on faces and the actual IQ scores.
Here's a study that directly shows a correlation between sexuality and facial anatomy: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270290521_Facial_St...
From the article I linked: "Each student in the picture completed a Czech version of the Intelligence Structure Test that uses various types of tools to measure the different types of intelligence. The images were close-ups of the students’ faces, which featured a neutral, non-smiling expression, and did not wear jewelry or cosmetics, Business Insider reported.
The raters took their time rating each photograph for either intelligence or attractiveness. Of the raters, 43 women and 42 men judged photos for intelligence, and 42 women and 33 men judged them for attractiveness using a scale of 1 to 7 (1 being the highest score, 7 being the lowest possible score). The researchers then averaged the intelligence and attractiveness scores each student received.
The findings revealed both men and women were able to accurately evaluate the intelligence of men by just viewing the facial photographs. Men in the photos with a higher IQ were perceived as more intelligent much more than women in the photos who also had higher IQ scores. In both sexes, a narrower face with a thinner chin, and a larger, prolonged nose characterized the predicted stereotype of a higher IQ, while a rather oval and broader face with a massive chin and a smallish nose led to a prediction of low-intelligence."
Note the lines "Each student in the picture completed a Czech version of the Intelligence Structure Test" and " The findings revealed both men and women were able to accurately evaluate the intelligence of men by just viewing the facial photographs." So the study did actually measure peoples' IQs using a standardised IQ test, and compared the results of the tests to peoples' assesment of others' IQ based on their faces, showing a correspondence between the IQ people estimated based on faces and the actual IQ scores.
Here's a study that directly shows a correlation between sexuality and facial anatomy: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270290521_Facial_St...
I can't read the WP article, but I assume it reports on the Deep Gaydar paper,
from Stanford (https://osf.io/zn79k/).
That paper is severely flawed, first of all in the way they trained their classifier to recognise peoples' sexuality from images of their faces.
What they did is they collected ~35k pictures of gay and straight men and women, all users of a dating site in the US. Half of them were gay and half were straight.
Right off the bat, that breaks the fundamental assumption in machine learning, that of distributional consistency. In short, machine learning works under the assumption that the distribution from which a training sample is drawn is the same as that of unseen data- i.e., of the real world. If the sample distribution is not the same as that of the unseen data, a model cannot be guaranteed to predict anything about unseen data.
But, in the Deep Gaydar paper's sample, the distribution of gay and straight men and women was uniform: 50% straight and 50% gay people, while in the real world the prevalence of homosexual preference is estimated to be around 10%- the Deep Gaydar paper itself cites a 7% prevalence.
So the classifier trained to identify peoples' sexuality from images of their faces, in the paper, is completely incapable of identifying anything about the sexualities of people outside its training sample- which is the majority of people on earth. Which invalidates their claim that it's possible to tell someones' sexuality from an image of their face. At best, what they can claim is that they trained a classifier to identify the sexuality of people in their training sample from images of their faces. But nothing more.
And no, that does not suggest that "physiognomy is not pseudoscience". Quite the contrary- sneaky data manipulation like that is the hallmark of crackpots and charlatans.
That paper is severely flawed, first of all in the way they trained their classifier to recognise peoples' sexuality from images of their faces.
What they did is they collected ~35k pictures of gay and straight men and women, all users of a dating site in the US. Half of them were gay and half were straight.
Right off the bat, that breaks the fundamental assumption in machine learning, that of distributional consistency. In short, machine learning works under the assumption that the distribution from which a training sample is drawn is the same as that of unseen data- i.e., of the real world. If the sample distribution is not the same as that of the unseen data, a model cannot be guaranteed to predict anything about unseen data.
But, in the Deep Gaydar paper's sample, the distribution of gay and straight men and women was uniform: 50% straight and 50% gay people, while in the real world the prevalence of homosexual preference is estimated to be around 10%- the Deep Gaydar paper itself cites a 7% prevalence.
So the classifier trained to identify peoples' sexuality from images of their faces, in the paper, is completely incapable of identifying anything about the sexualities of people outside its training sample- which is the majority of people on earth. Which invalidates their claim that it's possible to tell someones' sexuality from an image of their face. At best, what they can claim is that they trained a classifier to identify the sexuality of people in their training sample from images of their faces. But nothing more.
And no, that does not suggest that "physiognomy is not pseudoscience". Quite the contrary- sneaky data manipulation like that is the hallmark of crackpots and charlatans.
Visual things are very persuasive, regardless of their rationality. Those who want to persuade others will always have a useful tool in the visual – especially faces, the most captivating type of visual image there is.
> Half of the United States looks at the face of Donald Trump and cannot believe that it is supposed to represent them. And half of the United States seems to look at this sallow, unhealthy, and time-ravaged frame, see the panicked flailing of the tiny-fingered hands, and recognize some version of themselves: Out of their depth, failing upward and ever upward on a warm cushion of unearned privilege.
Um, what? That sort of came out of nowhere, and is then left hanging, as if every reader should obviously agree with it.
Um, what? That sort of came out of nowhere, and is then left hanging, as if every reader should obviously agree with it.
If you do not divide people, then they may get together to create a tower and become gods themselves. The media has to divide, but can't come out overtly in the process. They have do it subtly. Little digs like this remind us all that the important thing that matters is literally skin deep.
An interesting fact is that, for a time, phrenology was linked to atheism : both of them stemming from a materialistic point of view.
Why is it unreasonable that some facial chareteristics can be used as heuristics to determine underlying genetic conditions?
I mean it’s pretty clear that people with Down syndrome have a very unique look and this is not the only genetic disorder that has very defined an unique facial charetarisrics.
I mean it’s pretty clear that people with Down syndrome have a very unique look and this is not the only genetic disorder that has very defined an unique facial charetarisrics.
> Physiognomy gave concrete shape to liberalism’s dark secret: the sense that reasoning and discourse are only part of how society and politics function, and that just looking someone in the face can be more revealing than listening to what they say.
Wait, what?
Wait, what?
It just reads as though the author conflated every sense of the word ‘face’ in order to make a thinly veiled jab at liberals.
E.g. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/d...
I'm actually afraid the problem of physiognomy is not it being a pseudosceience but it being a severe threat to privacy and equality and a potential source of false positives (as personality is not a 100% product of a body but many people would argue).