"Previous empirical evidence provides mixed support for the gender typicality of facial features of gay men and women."

A parallel situation arises when we ask a computer or a human to determine which of two people is more likely to be gay. As a human, we receive all sorts of information from the photographs. Rather than trying to decide whether to hit or stand given that you're holding a jack and a four while the dealer is showing a six3, we might see that one person has a baseball cap while the other wears full sideburns. One has an eyebrow piercing, the other a tattoo. Each of these facts shifts our probability estimate of the subjects' sexual orientations, but how much? And how do multiple facts interact? If the subject has a baseball cap but is clean-shaven with glasses, how does that shift our belief about the subject's orientation? Humans are terrible at these sorts of calculations, and moreover the humans in the study are untrained in these probabilities. Yet they are expected to compete against a computer algorithm which can be very good at these calculations, and which has been trained extensively.

We welcome sober and fair academic discussions, instead of name calling, surrounding our paper

We have zero prior evidence of the former claim. By contrast, a recent study has demonstrated the latter. Unfortunately, it appears that unattractive individuals are more likely to be found guilty in jury trials than their more attractive peers. While the Chinese criminal system is structured differently than the US system in which most of these studies were conducted, the judges and occasional jurors in Chinese trials may suffer from similar biases. The algorithm could be learning what sorts of facial features make one convictable, rather than criminal.

Overall, then, the attraction-leniency bias has been shown to operate across decision makers (judges and jurors), types of crime, and trial type (criminal and civil), albeit it is moderated by the seriousness of the crime (Beckham & Spray & Pietz, 2007) and the strength of evidence against the defendant (Erian et al., 1998).2 In view of evidence that jurors are, at least occasionally, influenced by extralegal factors and at times give improper weight to such factors in their decision-making, one might ask whether certain personality types might be more susceptible to extralegal influences of the type described above

Wu and Zhang claim that based on a simple headshot, their programs can distinguish criminal from non-criminal faces with nearly 90% accuracy. Moreover, they argue that their computer algorithms are free from the myriad biases and prejudices that cloud human judgment

Cesare Lombroso studied the anatomy of hundreds of criminals in an effort to develop a scientific theory of criminality. He proposed that criminals were born as such, and that they exhibit both psychological drives and physical features that harken back to what were, in his view, the subhuman beasts of our deep evolutionary past. Lombroso was particularly interested in what could be learned from facial features. In his view, the shape of the jaw, the slope of the forehead, the size of the eyes, and the structure of the ear all contained important clues about a man’s moral composition. None of this turned out to have a sound scientific basis. Lombroso’s theories — many of which wrapped racist ideas of the time in a thin veneer of scientific language — were debunked in the first half of the 20th century and disappeared from the field of criminology which Lombroso helped to found

press outlets [1,2,3] picked up on the story and explored the ethical implications