Comment by h2zizzle
18 hours ago
>The painter naturally visited Nadar’s studio fo a portrait; it captures an artist of fierce intelligence:
As true as it might be in many cases, I've begun to think that there might be something fundamentally groady about basing assumptions of intelligence on appearance. A brief meeting is bad enough, but a single photo? It's poetic to think that they tell us more about a person than they do.
I find this odd to hear. Not because I think we should base our opinions on someone's appearance but because I thought it was a common belief that we shouldn't. Or rather that you would be committing a faux pas by making such a statement publicly. That people at least wanted to paint the image of themselves as upholding this virtue, despite it being clear that society operated under such biases.
Growing up (American millennial) it was routine to see public service announcements to tell people to not judge others by their appearance. It was the lesson of not just children shows but a frequent trope in popular movies. Such as James Bond entering a fancy resort looking like a homeless man, being treated as such by some staff, only for that staff member to be chastised for not treating him with the upmost respect. "Don't judge a book by its cover". "The ugly duckling".
Have things changed? Is this no longer a social taboo? To at least feign this virtue?
I think people are taught not to look down on others based on appearance, but not to avoid looking up at them.
This is a fair enough distinction. Though I still think there is more contextual nuances at play. Shallow Hal seems to fit both cases. To be vapid or shallow. We certainly don't just critique those for exclusively caring about other's appearances but also those that only care about their own.
Which I can see a deterioration of the vapid criticism as social media capitalizes on this nature. Not just with people, but we do seem to care more for form over function now.
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I’d say it’s not that the man is intelligent and you can tell just from a photo. It’s instead saying that the photograph is framed in such a way as to make the subject look intelligent.
A comment on the artistry rather than the subject.
A non-groady interpretation might be that we know Manet was intelligent, and the portrait captured that well; you might not be able to judge food by its photograph, but a photo that makes it look delicious when it actually is delicious has managed to capture the deliciousness.
Personally, I don't find it groady anyway; pretty sure a neural network trained on IQs and photographs could find reliable signals of intelligence therein. I can imagine a species that evolved to conceal the appearance of intelligence, but in humans I think it's more something natural selection would try to broadcast.
> pretty sure a neural network trained on IQs and photographs could find reliable signals of intelligence therein.
exactly how?
Or I should say, all humans are intelligent baring extreme circumstances (for example signs of genetic defect, potential inbreeding, or FAS may possibly be a sign of lower IQ it's not a certainty of it). Are we trying to say there is some correlation between 'high' IQ and outward appearance, because that is quite the statement, and one that really has no scientific basis that I know about.
It's honestly a pretty good case study of the limitations of the approach, because you can imagine all sorts of spurious correlations you might pick up from a photograph (limit case: subject is holding their framed mathematics doctoral degree) that could result in a classifier good enough to give you a betting edge, but good for little else. Broadly, you'd expect a trained photo classifier to pick up a bunch of SES signals.
> pretty sure a neural network trained on IQs and photographs could find reliable signals of intelligence therein
It would start judging people by their clothes. Among other factors, none of which would be intelligence.
You will find correlation, but it would not be reliable at all.
> pretty sure a neural network trained on IQs and photographs could find reliable signals of intelligence therein
Yeah maybe, however as a life-long photographer and former freelance DoP I would heavily caution on then using those images to infer a persons intelligence from that picture. Because in my experience the number of false-positives and false-negatives is high.
There are extremely intelligent people who always look like shit on camera, because they constantly move, so you always capture them with their mouth half open, mid blink. And then you have complete hollow-brains who look deep and dashing whenever a camera is around, but god forbid they open their mouth.
So if anybody decided to make machines decide who is intelligent based on pictures (sounds like modern eugenics), the amount of false classifications would be exhorbitant and have real consequences for real people.
And let's not forget that appearances can be altered, so once you use such a system those deemed to be most intelligent will be those who game it best. So judging intelligence directly is probably the more reliable way.
If I trained a neural network and it learned that stethoscopes are strongly correlated with IQ, have I learned anything useful?
In case anyone in Australia is wondering, grody/groady is basically a less versatile version of ‘grotty’, which has the added benefit of being used as a noun (ie. ‘what a grot!’).
While this prediction isn't very precise I'm sure it must be better than random. A mistake would be to still rely on the visual appearance when stronger data becomes available
If you know how to smolder you're eyes, you're fiercely intelligent. If you don't, you might as well be chopping off hands in the Congo.