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.

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.

“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”

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

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.

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.

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.

Is that…an AI generated image?

"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…

This is just phrenology with extra steps

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.