Based on the methods, seems a stretch to say this isnt correlation alone
I don’t care which way the causation goes or whether it comes from the name choice and preferences of the parents (yea, bad title), what surprised me is that ML can predict a name based on a face at all, there should be no correlation in first place.
I disagree. Age biases the statistical likelihood of a name. Features that hint in any ethnic direction. Also some visible features might bias towards urban vs rural upbringing which also would also lean names in another direction.
Oh yea, baby name trends, ethnicity, I don’t know how heterogeneous the datasets they are using are when they mention the strength of the correlation, I was imagining it would distinguish a John from a Peter, but there could be a much lower correlation in that subset.
Yeah, just the wording of the title is a huge red flag.
I’m curious if “faces” are really just faces or shoulders up where hairstyles and clothes give clues.
Like, an a adult that goes by Bob, Bobby, or Robert looks different. And people would subconsciously account for age and what names were popular.
A lot of shit goes on behind the scenes and sometimes the conscious brain doesn’t know and makes up it’s own reason for why it decided something.
I’m gonna need a lot of concurring studies to accept this.
Also, did you know the shape of your skull can determine if you’re a criminal? /s
And now we know his name! Arrest him!
Link to the study, because the fuckers never do: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405334121
Here’s what I was looking for:
In all studies, we made certain that the participants and the people in the images were from the same nationality, since cultural familiarity is critical for the face–name matching effect to occur.
Additionally, this survey was conducted by Israelis, and since it says it was translated into English in the paper, I assume it was conducted in Hebrew. They say “socioeconomic cues such as age and ethnicity are experimentally controlled”, but I don’t see that they explain how. My suspicion is that the results are affected by non-facial cues like clothing, hairstyle, facial hair, and indeed age. For example, if I showed you a picture of an old woman and asked if her name was Doris, Helen, Megan, or Kayley, which do you think it is? If I showed you a picture of a guy with short dark hair, possibly graying, beard stubble, and a collared denim shirt, is his name Edgar, Clarence, Emil, or James?
Further, since they did some kind of control over the prompts, I have to assume they presented faces and names the respondents would be familiar with, meaning this does not necessarily hold outside of Israel and Israelis (and I assume mostly people ethnically Israeli Jewish). This reinforces my belief that their methodology is flawed, and while people might look like their names, their faces themselves do not change to fit, rather there’s a correlation with other factors like age (i.e. name popularity over time), grooming style, and so on.
Even then, it gives just a little credence to those people who like to tell you that “You look like a Judy.”
Thanks for looking up the article, the headline is most likely wrong.
They say that they didn’t have pictures with religious affectations, and that they cropped pictures to show little hair.
But, in the example pictures, the vast majority of the woman’s hair is visible.
Maybe that’s what they were referring to?
Study Finds Faces Evolve to Match Names Over Time
“Nonsense,” posted catloaf@lemm.ee, with a bit of a defensive edge.
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