Today’s links Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers’ personalities based on their faces: The Gilded Age has entered the chat. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers’ personalities based on their faces (permalink) Theory-free inference is a hell of a drug. For years, Big Data advocates – the larval form of today’s AI weirdos – have insisted that if you have enough data, you can infer causal relationships between complex phenomena without ever having to understand how x causes y, and thus, we can slay the dread “correlation is not causation” beast. This is cousin to Milton Friedman’s famous economic catechism: Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have “assumptions” that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essays_in_Positive_Economics AI turns out to be a great tool for creating plausible statistical correlates of imaginary phenomena. Remember the guy who claimed to have invented Machine Learning Gaydar by analyzing the faces of gay people and comparing them to straight people? Same dude later claimed to have invented an AI that could guess, from your face, whether you were a Republican or…Pluralistic: Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers' personalities based on their faces (17 Feb 2025)