Sullivan on SAT

Killing the SAT Means Hurting Minorities

While I’m thinking of Sullivan, this from his newsletter, regarding a conversation on his podcast:

When you regard debate itself as a form of white supremacy, you tend not to be very good at it.

Psychic AI

FollowTheArgument on Inferring Political Orientation From a Single Picture reviews a recent paper showing algorithms can do this an astonishing 70% of the time, beating humans (55%) and a 100-item personality inventory (66%).

It’s still possible it’s latched onto some irrelevant or fragile feature set, but (a) they cropped close to the face, (b) they controlled for age/sex/race, (c) they cross-validated, and (d) they tested models from facebook on photos from other sites, and verce visa. Given the 2,048 features extracted by the facial image classifier, even regression did as well.

It seems ~60% is easily-named transient features like head-tilt, facial expression, etc. Leaving the rest as-yet-unnamed.

It’s tempting to go to physiognomy, but consider the following things humans do specifically to signal their affiliations:

• Makeup amount and style
• Beard type
• Earrings, other jewelry
• Hair style

What’s fascinating is how poorly humans do. But then, that result might be very different if the subjects were trained cold-readers.

Republicans embracing “class”

FTA also covers Scott Alexander’s Modes Proposal. Good read.

Muse of Seuss

I’ve been musing about all the Seussing. Social media discussions, and reading the spectrum on Flip Side (recommended).

I’m not especially qualified, but it seems to me:

• Liberals are right the board’s decision probably isn’t cancellation. (It depends on motivation, which we’re likely to get wrong.)
• But eBay’s action is cancellation. It’s illiberal, and wrong. It’s also downright silly given what eBay still sells.
• Conservatives make a strong case that most of the alleged offenses really weren’t – see Cathy Young’s take for why anyone thought so. If I Ran the Zoo being a notable exception.