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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Being swayed by superficial cues is not irrational if they correlate to the underlying qualities you are trying to judge. And, of course, prior information should change the way you view new information. I don't see how it can do more harm than good if you can do better than chance. Neither would I be so confident that I can do better than millions of years of evolution, especially by reading resumes.

We can guess what particular traits make people seem less trustworthy. For example, supposedly men with wider faces are more likely to act immorally (deceive, cheat). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21733897

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> Being swayed by superficial cues is not irrational if they correlate to the underlying qualities you are trying to judge.

I'd be pretty careful about this line of argument. What we think of as a clue to underlying qualities is cultural... for example, one of the biggest superficial differences in people is the color of their skin. What underlying qualities does skin color clue us in to?

In the US and Europe, we have a long history of trying to find the ties between visible and non-visible qualities. Phrenology, eugenics, Blacks as having "inferior intelligence", the belief that women are prone to hysteria - all were attempts to find that link.

The history of seeking correlations between visible and invisible qualities has been largely successful. For instance, it's fairly well known that border collies can be successfully trained to herd sheep, but wolves cannot.

Experiments have provided significant evidence that these behavioral traits are genetic: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/dogs-b...

Further, in the US and Europe, we also have a long history of trying to find substances which kill infections. These failed until we found penicillin. Citing a few false claims (not all the ones you've cited are even known to be false) and using this as evidence that all such claims must be false is a logical fallacy.

Do you have any studies about humans? Because I'm not aware of many that are clear-cut (of course, there's environment-gene interplay, but that is way more murky than anything talked about in the article or in the OP's comment).

I'm not saying that those claims were false and therefore all such claims are false. I'm saying that in the West we've spent a lot of time trying to prove that non-white men are inferior in different ways. Arguments like "unconscious bias comes from evolution" ignore that long history of non-white-male qualities being judged inferior.

There are quite a few studies about humans, fruit flies also make an appearance (since you can rapidly breed them). All in all, there is quite a bit of evidence that genetics can influence animal behavior both across and within species.

Based on my reading, I'm quite confident in my belief that genetics explain at least 25% of behavioral differences. I haven't been convinced that it explains 50-90% (as some folks claim). I've appended below a dump of papers which I've either read or are in my queue.

Most results in this space find that white (particularly if you exclude Ashkenazi Jews) people are not the superior race, at least in popular metrics like intelligence, criminality, drug use and divorce. Those westerners trying to "prove that non-white men are inferior" probably should have realized that isn't how evidence works: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ii/conservation_of_expected_evidence...

http://ussc.edu.au/ussc/assets/media/docs/publications/44_Ha...

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v47/n7/full/ng.3285.html

https://infotomb.com/g99o4.pdf

https://infotomb.com/sy7jn.pdf

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/57897#files-area

https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/38881/HECER...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1758921

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/neu.10160/pdf

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/45_Hatemi_...

http://unamusementpark.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/boucha...

http://www.matthewckeller.com/16.Hatemi.et.al.2010.Nuc.fam.a...

https://infotomb.com/evkop.pdf

https://infotomb.com/cwnp1.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2923822/#!po=50....

Interesting - I'll check these out.

But again, I'm not arguing that genetics don't have any impact on behavior - I'm arguing that getting from someone else's experience of appearance to genetics to the 20% of behavior that's affected is a pretty long jump to make.

See my link to a college math study (in a separate comment thread); you can improve predictions of math skill significantly above random (50% -> 55%) chance simply based on appearance.

I was totally shocked when I saw this, but there is at least some evidence that appearance predicts more than I would otherwise expect.

>What underlying qualities does skin color clue us in to?

Depends on the context. Also, I bet that's the topic of at least several dissertations in the last few decades.

> What underlying qualities does skin color clue us in to

What underlying qualities does height clue us in to? Are you sure that, even though traits regularly correlate with other traits, skin color is the one trait that has no correlation with absolutely anything else? I don't find that very likely, personally.

Er... my point was that most superficial qualities don't have a 1-to-1 mapping on internal qualities. Height is another great example.

The GP isn't talking about 1-to-1 mapping, they're talking about correlation, though.

>What underlying qualities does height clue us in to?

Possibly more than you think.

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1820836,0...

That's my point.

The question is what relevant correlations there are. You won't do well to hire a taller programmer just because taller people are healthier.

See also adverse section paradox.

Sure, but there's a widespread way to reliably detect correlations. Besides, my point is more that we shouldn't plug our ears and go "racism lalala" whenever the reasonable, scientific fact that, like everything else, race may be correlated with some traits pops up.

It's been shown in at least one experiment that superficial appearances are correlated with underlying qualities. Specifically, simply by looking at two people one can choose the one better at math 55% of the time!

https://mega.co.nz/#!6UxzVLIA!BVUOujU76VnhZM45QE4N2oFz0yLRTf...

The title and abstract of the study (discussing gender stereotypes) more or less ignores the truly interesting bits of this study. Gender stereotypes reduce profits by 0.1% but discrimination by appearance increases profits by 11.4%!

Obviously actual math tests are better than appearance.

I'd rather not install an app to read that, but presumably they are measuring who is better educated in math. I would expect the correlation to be mostly explained by different ethnic groups in the location the study was conducted having different access to education, cultural values, and expectations placed on them.

It would go a long way toward distinguishing between those two possibilities if a computer judged the faces - find the eigenface(s) of different mathematical ability levels and see if there's a lot of correlation between those and ethnicity, or if features alone are the predictor.

Even if it is features alone though, I would expect a major involvement of education and self-fulfilling expectations: take a starting state where there is no correlation between facial features and math aptitude. Everyone would have their own beliefs about what faces are good at math (humans always see patterns). Some of those beliefs would happen to be similar, so people with certain features would be steered more toward math. As time passes, the bias becomes more legitimate and more self-perpetuating. The end result is a socially-imposed link between particular visible traits and ability in math.

You don't need to install an app, if you do the right pattern of clicks you can download it. But here is an ungated preprint (wasn't available when I first downloaded the paper): http://www.ereuben.net/research/StereotypesWomensCareer.pdf

They could indeed be observing that "asians are good at math" stereotypes are a useful predictor, the study doesn't really give enough info to determine that one way or the other.

"This gene causes this $complex_behavior" is practically modern phrenology. These types of studies are questionable and controversial. Not to mention unethical behaviors are often cultural constructs that in one culture is fine (being gay in the US) and another considered unethical (being gay in Russia.)

Not too long ago many scientists, including HN's beloved Nikola Tesla, were loudly advocating for further and deeper eugenics laws because "obviously" the negro or the Jew was a sub-human. We're still seeing some of this today with "genetics" replacing "characteristics."

>"As sex differences in facial structure, generally, are at least partially due to increased testosterone concentrations in boys, testosterone likely plays a role in determining facial WHR, specifically, as well."

This is more academia-led "War on Boys." This kid has extra testosterone? He must be a rapist or a murderer. Shame the "rational scientific" crowd never seems to show skepticism at truly questionable research because it was published somewhere, so it must be true!

I think you're taking down a strawman amalgam of misconceptions that few people, if any, actually believe all at once.

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