What is your basis for saying that (1) is pseudoscience? A mere photo can be used guess political preferences fairly well. Why not personality?
> (countable) An adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge of the facts.
> (countable) Any preconceived opinion or feeling, whether positive or negative.
What would then be the argument that we shouldn't use this information to, say, set insurance premiums, when we already happily accept the use of other prejudicial information such as age and gender to do so?
False premise, I do not happily accept this. I begrudgingly accept it, only because I don't think I have the power to change it. But by speaking out against the automation of prejudice in other domains before those systems have become mainstream, I hope I might make a difference.
I think the cost of car insurance should be a function of your past driving history and the price of your car (if the insurance policy covers damage to your car.) Pulling race, gender, sex or age into the equation might make insurance companies more profitable, but I do not like it.
In the (theoretical, unrealistic) limit of perfect competition, supposing that the profit margin is the same in both cases, wouldn’t the average purchaser of car insurance would be better off if these things were taken into account than if they weren’t?
Ok, maybe you don’t think averages are the thing to care about.
Uh,
Ok so if you draw the demand curves (not straight lines) for car insurance for both types of people (those born with and without street racing symbols on their irises) And we consider the cases where the insurance companies can set a price that depends on the type, uhh, Well,
Hm, ok yeah I guess those with racing-eyes get a worse deal in the case that they can be discriminated against. (Here I am using “discriminated against” in what is meant to be a way that doesn’t make a value judgment)
But, the point of insurance is not to produce equal outcomes between people. The point of insurance is to reduce the variance in outcomes for each person with as small as possible a worsening of the average outcome for that person. If what you are doing is trying to make outcomes equal between groups, what you are doing is no longer just insurance, but a subsidy.
Is it really more efficient to have the prices be required to be the same regardless of racing-eyes, than it would be to just directly tax those with non-racing-eyes to subsidize those with non-racing-eyes?
Maybe. I haven’t done the math.
Profit margins would actually be bigger in the case of more profiling. Absent profiling, insurers open themselves up to much more negative selection (e.g. old people being more likely to purchase cheap health insurance that's subsidised by the young), which has the effect of increasing premiums for the customer, decreasing margins for the insurer and chasing away the customers that are the least likely to need to make a claim.
Really? Could you provide me with a link? It seems counter-intuitive. I look pretty much like my barber, but he's right-wing tradcon and I'm oldskool left-wing.
It’s fairly straightforward to guess someone’s age, gender, race and maybe some cultural markers from a photograph.
Those demographic factors are correlated with people’s political views: old white men tend to be Republican, folks with rainbow hair tend to skew liberal, etc.
On a group level, this seems to let your predict political views, but there’s no mechanism that lets it work for an individual.
They controlled for race, gender, etc.
And human guessing was just 55 percent accurate versus 72 percent for the ML model.
"The highest predictive power was afforded by head orientation (58%), followed by emotional expression (57%). Liberals tended to face the camera more directly, were more likely to express surprise, and less likely to express disgust. "
The system isn't telling you anything about the person themselves; it's picking up on artifacts about how different subcultures present themselves in a public profile.
Also, some dimensions of personality are correlated with political belief, so even if these features weren't useful beyond predicting political belief (which itself is an unsubstantiated/speculative claim), there should still be some transitive predictive utility there.