Re:Computer personality judgments more accurate than those m...
by sova on Sunday March 18, 2018 @09:14PM
(#16615528)
Haha, this headline is not a little bit misleading, it borders on the absurd! One might as well do a study on how "Computers are better at enjoying food than humans" but it is interesting, to use machine learning to see what we can gather purely from social media footprints versus what people see through one anothers' eyes. It makes sense, their abstract, when it says that the computer aided analysis is "more accurate" only insofar as many people will simply rely on their echo chamber for value assessments, and will therefore miss out on a key ~pseudo-objective viewpoint grounded in a more global image, which is what the computers can account for, and what your close friends cannot.
They say their models are more accurate, but more accurate with what data? It turns out models are better than humans at predicting how people rate themselves on a personality model. So humans are rating their opinion, vs algorithms that are predicting what people would say about themselves.
So I wouldn't take those numbers at face value.
The external validity comparisons are more compelling, but still, its telling that self-reported data is better at predicting self-reported events.
It's entirely possible that computer based models are better at knowing us than humans, particularly since algorithms can pay far closer attention to us, but there's plenty of literature showing that we have the capacity for self-deception, so I'm not sure how good a ground truth you can have here.