> But researchers should not be surprised it they are confronted with obvious parallels to phrenology. This literally is phrenology
Phrenology was classified a pseudoscience not because it could lead to socially bad outcomes but because it didn't work; it had no statistical/empirical grounding. If it turns out deep learning really can reliably predict things about people's personality from their faces, that doesn't make it a pseudoscience.
Agreed, but I think the parallel with phrenology should be undestood more along the lines of "providing a justification for unfair decisions".
I remember a case where Amazon used a resume filtering bot that systematically rejected female candidates, because of bias in the training data. So we might go from "you can't be free because your skull is too small" to "you can't get the job because the computer says so".
> Agreed, but I think the parallel with phrenology should be undestood more along the lines of "providing a justification for unfair decisions".
I think we cannot discount the degree to which ideology played a part BOTH in the promotion AND rejection of phrenology. And when the racist ideologies eventually became taboo, anti racist ideology won.
If we consider the actual science, it was probably highly tainted by a desire to show that certain human lineages were superior to others.
But there DOES appear to be a correlation between brain volume and IQ. When controlling for "race", this correlation is typically reported at 0.3-0.4, meaning brain volume accounts for 9-16% of the variance.
However, if we reject "race" as a social construct, and include people of all "races" in our analysis, the correlation goes up to about 0.6, or 36% of the variance [1].
> If it turns out deep learning really can reliably predict things about people's personality from their faces, that doesn't make it a pseudoscience.
What makes it pseudoscience is that it's not theory-driven. These are statistical models that recapitulate distributions in their training data. It's Brian-Wansink-style p-hacking [1] at a massive scale.
To add to your point - you definitely can make predictions about aspects of someone’s personality by looking at their face with the expectation that you’ll do better than chance.
The paper calls out inferring political leanings as an example of pseudoscience. Give me an American’s age, gender, and race (which I can roughly identify by looking) and I’ll tell you, better than chance, whether they’re a trump supporter.
Phrenology was classified a pseudoscience not because it could lead to socially bad outcomes but because it didn't work; it had no statistical/empirical grounding. If it turns out deep learning really can reliably predict things about people's personality from their faces, that doesn't make it a pseudoscience.