I learned two awful things from this article on pseudo-scientific physiognomy: 1) Cesare Lombroso’s head is preserved in a jar in a museum in Italy, and 2) people are even now trying to identify criminals from photos. Not from their records, oh no, but from the implied fact that they look like criminals.
Lombroso, you may recall, had this terrible idea that you could identify bad people by their looks, by their facial features, bumps on their head, etc. These were familiar notions held by Nazis, who actually published school books to instruct kids on how to recognize Jews (it is often hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal […] How to tell a Jew: the Jewish nose is bent. It looks like the number six…
), and Lombroso’s ideas fed directly into the eugenics movement. People who don’t look exactly like us must be lesser, don’t you know.
Modern neo-Nazis are saying the same things now, like that wretched MRA/MGTOW/PUA/Whatever at Chateau Heartiste:
You CAN judge a book by its cover: ugly people are more crime-prone.
Shitlibs have a look. Shitlords have a look. And you can predict with better than 50/50 chance which 2016 presidential candidate a person supports based on nothing more than their photograph.
Thanks, Cesare, for your contributions to bigotry. It seems kind of appropriate that in death, your head was chopped off and dropped in a bucket of formaldehyde. It’s unseemly, I suppose, but I do hope other body parts suffered similar indignities.
I also learned, unsurprisingly, that some people are trying to make physiognomy seem more scientific by making computers do it. As the article explains it length, but I’ll simply summarize in brief: if you train a neural network to find patterns, it will find them whether they’re actually there or not. As we know from those surreal images produced by Deep Dream, if all a piece of software knows how to do is highlight dogs and eyeballs in an image, it will find dogs and eyeballs everywhere.
You will rightly point out that the real test is if they spot the signal they’re searching for in some images, but not all, and if the software guesses correctly. Apparently, this software was trained on a small number of images, and they aren’t making the data available, so it’s hard to guess exactly what features they’re cueing on; the article speculates that it may be as trivial as whether the innocent faces were smiling and the criminal faces were scowling.
So another thing I learned is that if the Nazis take over and start scanning all our faces for criminal tendencies, you’d better smile like a giddy idiot all the time.
I have learned so much!
Also true when emoji-communicating robots take over. (Doctor Who episode Smile.)
RE: “the Jewish nose is bent. It looks like the number six”
I am not a number; I am a free man!
“Lombroso’s ideas fed directly into the eugenics movement”
Wich took rot in Sweden. We got an Institute of Racial Hygiene before Germany did.
Interestingly, people in Britain opposed the introduction of legislation based on eugenics while people in other countries accepted it as a “modern” policy.
(The author G. K Chesterton was one of those who opposed following in the footsteps of Sweden and Germany)
Sounds like a perfect application for machine learning and facial recognition! Now that facebook and google have everyone’s pictures we ought to be able to tell who are criminals.
I can do better than 50/50 as well, as African-Americans and Latinos went for Hillary and whites went for Trump. Easy Peasy.
It’s not my fault. Crime prone people just happen to tend to look like me.
‘ugly people are more crime-prone’ — no, wait.
Guess I better start packing for the concentration camp. I’m not much a one for fake smiling.
So then, Trumpster is a criminal because he’s always scowling?
First of all ,dog head pasta ,don’t think that will catch on ,barking up the wrong tree ,haha
The guy in the jar looks like Stanley Kubrick ,what next ,reading head bumps ,can’t be bothered to look up the proper name .
In the old days didn’t they used to think there was a link between disability and being ugly .
Some clever people brought us the interweb and a lot of the stuff on it is crap like this ,2 steps forward ,one step back .
The study of head bumps is phrenology.
Years ago I went to a talk about psychological profiling, and some other technologies the police use (including a cool computer program that can predict where a serial criminal probably lives based on where he commits his crimes). The talk included a video about a rapist, interviewing victims and other people who knew him, and saved showing what he looked like until the end. Part of that was to show you how “normal’ the guy looked, although I found it rather amusing since he was the spitting image of a high school friend of mine.
colinday@#10:
The study of head bumps is phrenology
The modality of adjusting those bumps with a silver hammer is phrenotherapy. We offer a special discount for skeptics, inquire within!
Silver hammer adjustment of head bumps — “phrenotherapy”, better known Whack-a-Wealthy — is clearly woo-woo with a limited set of
gullible clientspatients. Silver is soft and fails to deform the skull or brain, albeit it does make a hefty dent in the wallet plus a nice pleasing ker-clink sound.The mildly deranged penguin’s patent-pending chain, Easily Fixed You, “A simple proven treatment to solve your problems”, doesn’t bother with all that flim-flam. Instead, trained drummers — quite rare — beat out a personalized rhythm on your head with Big iron mallets. (Accompanying guitar available for a small extra charge; please enquire about other accompaniment, including to the morgue or hospital of your choice.) Afterwards, you’ll never even recall your previous problem.
Franchises available. No applications considered without attached fee.
The name of this revolutionary paradigm-shifting treatment is not completely settled yet (a common problem when the old order is overthrown): Ironhammerology, Brainzbeatz, and You Must Be Mad have all been suggested.
Marcus Ranum@#12
Phrenology is the alleged study of head bumps.
blf@#13:
“phrenotherapy”, better known Whack-a-Wealthy
“specialize in diseases of the rich” – Tom Lehrer
Marcus Ranum @ 12:
Maxwell Edison, majoring in medicine, beat you to the draw….
“So another thing I learned is that if the Nazis take over and start scanning all our faces for criminal tendencies, you’d better smile like a giddy idiot all the time.”
They’re already doing this. Peggy Noonan wrote a column about this very thing in the aftermath of September 11: She could tell that a person she assumed was Arabic was likely a terrorist because he didn’t smile at her when she passed and she advocated that he be physically assaulted and taken to jail because of it. And if she were wrong, well, she’d apologize and buy him a nice dinner, but he really shouldn’t be upset by it. All he had to do was smile.
People are really doing phrenotherapy?! I thought Sir Pterry made that up in Men at Arms!
If ugly people are more likely to commit crimes, where does that leave all of the ugly motherfuckers in the Trump whitehouse and the conservative media?
Retrophrenology, surely?
https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Retrophrenology
@10 ,thanks for that .
I once had to have an ink blot test , afterwards the quack said i was obsessed with sex ,i replied “Well you can talk ,showing me all those dirty images “
It’s about time for phrenology to make a comeback.
We should leave AIs and neural networks to do the important stuff, like coming up with names for paint colors.
“Person X is a crook, therefore people who look like person X must be crooks.”
EXECRABLE.
Rather like what Carl Sagan pointed out, that once upon a time toothless elderly women resembled witches and so therefore they were, uh, ‘branded’ as witches. The accusers were often comprised of toothless elderly ‘men-in-charge’ who were able to hide their witch-like shortcomings behind a mass of facial hair.
Today people are oh so much more sophisticated than they were centuries ago. They can check out criminal mug shots in order to see what ‘criminals look like’.
EXECRABLE.
anchor@25, Apropos of nothing much, Issac Asimov made a similar observation about once-rare elderly women and the canonical image of a female witch.
#14 – “phrenology is an alleged study” of inconsequential head bumps…
Physiognomy is an alleged study of inconsequential features and attributes specifically associating ethnic traits to negative behaviors, the means by which assholes pretend to distinguish the ‘pure’ (themselves) from the chaff (anybody who doesn’t look like them).
EXECRABLE.
Nazis were (and ARE) good at flinging that shit.
White southern supremacists good at flinging that shit.
Misogynists are good at good at flinging that shit.
Haters and bullies – pathetically obsessed weakling cowards who can’t handle living and breathing in the same space as anybody they judge to be inferior to themselves, who have a grinding need to RATE their identity by establishing their preconceived superiority and preeminence by selectively comparisons to anybody unlike themselves…well, gee, one might start to see how they gravitate toward each other for mutual support, the poor bastards.
This is all obvious to the regulars here. I’m just reiterating the basics to help some hard cases in my relatively tiny personal sphere of acquaintances (including younger folk in serious danger of getting trapped in the great mire of hatred) who stand a decent chance of reasoning themselves out of the madness that is constantly pushed at them.
It isn’t ALWAYS an academic issue.
blf – oh yeah! — you’re right! For some reason I thought of Sagan first. That’s funny, because I personally heard Sagan cite ASIMOV about that.
blf – oh yeah! — you’re right! For some reason I thought of Sagan first. That’s funny, because I personally heard Sagan cite ASIMOV about that..
oops – sorry for the double post
Excuse the many typos in#27, please
Try Stella Kubler or Stella Goldschlag: 100% jew, proto Marily Monroe and 100% piece of shit.