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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32248 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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I'm a bit out of the loop. Are warrants required in the US, or is there absolutely no oversight?

Where this gets very interesting is when the database gets dense enough and DNA testing gets good enough to identify anyone, even people whose not at all in the database. "The state of Pennsylvania is looking for a male suspect age 20-25, height 5'10" to 6', with blue eyes, blond hair, sharp nose, and small ears, in the Amish community."

Also, give the population 10 years to acclimatize to this, and people will start asking why we don't do DNA testing for nonviolent crimes.

"The state of Pennsylvania is looking for a male suspect age 20-25, height 5'10" to 6', with blue eyes, blond hair, sharp nose, and small ears, in the Amish community."

Ah, that's Aaron Stoltzfus, son of Aaron Stoltzfus. Are you looking for a particular young Aaron Stolzfus, though?

You may enjoy this story. Photo is at the bottom

https://beta.ctvnews.ca/local/edmonton/2022/10/4/1_6095328.amp.html

People on twitter were not happy lol

this was a hilarious story. the cops gassing this technology up when all it really tells you is "it was a black guy", which they already knew from the suspect description by the victim, was hilarious. the outraged reaction was interesting, though - would they have been as mad if the police just said 'it was a black guy'? perhaps it's just how generic that face looks.

But it doesn't look generic. In fact, it looks a bit like one of my former students, but not at all like the vast majority of my (African American) students. That image provides vastly more information than does "it was a black guy."

My very strong prior is that the added information is fictitious. If I use DNA to isolate the region of the world you were born in, and then I grab 100,000 passport photos from that region and average them out into a composite face, the result is not actually going to be a likeness of you, beyond basic stuff like race. Assuming this is roughly what the cops did, the picture they put out is probably significantly less useful than a simple description of "black male, such and such a height..."

And yet, after teaching at a heavily Asian-American school for many years, I could fairly reliability distinguish among people from China, Vietnam, and Korea (that's an easy one). And I am certainly able to distinguish people from East Africa from people from West Africa. So maybe your prior is not as strong as you think it is.

I am not claiming that chinese do not look different from vietnamese or koreans. I am claiming that chinese men do not look similar enough to each other that an average of all chinese male faces gives more accurate data about a particular male chinese face than the text string "chinese male". the picture contains more detail, but that detail is not accurate to the actual face in question, and may in fact be notably inaccurate. In short, my prior is that members of a race do not, in fact, all look alike.

But my point is not that a picture of a generic Chinese male gives more information than the text string "Chinese male." My point is that a picture of a generic Chinese male gives more information than the text string, "Asian male." Because that is the analogy to the initial claim, which was that the picture, which is a generic picture of a guy whose DNA indicates ancestry from a specific part of Africa, is no better than the text string, "a black guy." That is what OP said: "all it really tells you is 'it was a black guy.'"

That makes more sense, but I'm still skeptical. Does the added specificity of an ethnic average face move people closer to a specific subject's face, or further away? I would expect the latter, but am open to the idea that I'm wrong. I think if I was on the run for a crime, I'd rather the cops be circulating a picture of the average Caucasian mutt than a generic description, because I would expect the generic description to prime people to suspect me more than an averaged picture.

Mostly, it sounds like a pretty good PhD for someone who wants to test the theory...

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hmm. possibly true? I'd like to see a demonstration of effectiveness before I put any faith in it. Police have been caught using pseudoscientific statistical approximations in place of a positive ID before.

The image does, but I didn't really see anything in the story indicating that the technology could reliably determine specific facial features, just that the composite was a "scientific approximation", whatever that means. I'd like to see them run the DNA of people whom we already have photographs for before I determine whether this is actually useful.

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