But there are plenty of great modern colored photos.
Finally, those who can do both: life of Jobs
Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh5LY4Mz15o&t=282s
As true as it might be in many cases, I've begun to think that there might be something fundamentally groady about basing assumptions of intelligence on appearance. A brief meeting is bad enough, but a single photo? It's poetic to think that they tell us more about a person than they do.
Personally, I don't find it groady anyway; pretty sure a neural network trained on IQs and photographs could find reliable signals of intelligence therein. I can imagine a species that evolved to conceal the appearance of intelligence, but in humans I think it's more something natural selection would try to broadcast.
Yeah maybe, however as a life-long photographer and former freelance DoP I would heavily caution on then using those images to infer a persons intelligence from that picture. Because in my experience the number of false-positives and false-negatives is high.
There are extremely intelligent people who always look like shit on camera, because they constantly move, so you always capture them with their mouth half open, mid blink. And then you have complete hollow-brains who look deep and dashing whenever a camera is around, but god forbid they open their mouth.
So if anybody decided to make machines decide who is intelligent based on pictures (sounds like modern eugenics), the amount of false classifications would be exhorbitant and have real consequences for real people.
And let's not forget that appearances can be altered, so once you use such a system those deemed to be most intelligent will be those who game it best. So judging intelligence directly is probably the more reliable way.
exactly how?
Or I should say, all humans are intelligent baring extreme circumstances (for example signs of genetic defect, potential inbreeding, or FAS may possibly be a sign of lower IQ it's not a certainty of it). Are we trying to say there is some correlation between 'high' IQ and outward appearance, because that is quite the statement, and one that really has no scientific basis that I know about.
It would start judging people by their clothes. Among other factors, none of which would be intelligence.
You will find correlation, but it would not be reliable at all.
A comment on the artistry rather than the subject.
> I've begun to think that there might be something fundamentally groady about basing assumptions of intelligence on appearance
Growing up (American millennial) it was routine to see public service announcements to tell people to not judge others by their appearance. It was the lesson of not just children shows but a frequent trope in popular movies. Such as James Bond entering a fancy resort looking like a homeless man, being treated as such by some staff, only for that staff member to be chastised for not treating him with the upmost respect. "Don't judge a book by its cover". "The ugly duckling".
Have things changed? Is this no longer a social taboo? To at least feign this virtue?
Which I can see a deterioration of the vapid criticism as social media capitalizes on this nature. Not just with people, but we do seem to care more for form over function now.
the human brain is hardwired to assume beauty equals -better- some how
There's a lot of really interesting things to see there besides the sites themselves. The obvious one worldwide is that this is before the mass commercialization of clothing + planned obsolescence of such, which seems to have a very negative outcome.
But one thing not so visible that's really interesting to see is how simultaneously stern everybody looks with no fake smiles or hidden gazes. People were willing to just stare at something or somebody odd. But that sterness is regularly belied by things like a couple of guys in their 40s happily putting on a fake fight in front of the camera, falling on their asses, and just basically playing around like school boys having a great old time - a far rarer site now a days.
FWIW, the fake smiles and hidden gazes, to me the least, were always a North American thing.
In fact, in Switzerland we have its opposite, the infamous "Swiss stare" :-)
https://www.zeit.de/campus/zeit-germany/2023/01/culture-face...
For some reason I don't quite understand, my pinky and ring fingers don't operate well independently of one another. This is an issue when counting on my fingers (or attempting a boy scout salute), so I've started counting 1,2,3 from the thumb, 4 with the thumb down and all four fingers up, and 5, of course, with all digits extended.
(I could start counting at my pinky, but that just makes me look totally nuts)
Edit: If you read the article the comment I replied to posted, it includes thumb first counting as one of the cultural differences people experience when visiting Germany - in addition to the "Germanic Stare" they specifically mention in their comment. Consider actually reading before assuming I'm just typing nonsense - unless responding to titles and comments without reviewing the content they contain is a cultural difference I need a guide to get used to when visiting Hacker News.
So when I count, I start with a closed fist, then open my thumb, followed by my index finger, then middle, then pinky, then ring finger.
Or, at least that’s how it was explained to me as a kid learning to play the double bass. The standard technique is to use those two fingers together to press the string on the upper part of the fingerboard where the most strength is required.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/how-app...
In the US, I had to take photos for driver’s license at least 4 times, for green card 1 time, and for passport 1 time, not in a single one of them I am smiling. Saw the DLs of my friends more than a few times (either at bars or clubs or while crossing the border or when the topic arrived naturally), and the breakdown of smiling vs not smiling is 40/60 at most (with a heavy lean towards not smiling)[0].
I partially agree though about the US being a bit special in the aspect of even just allowing people to smile in ID photos. In the previous country I lived in and where I had to take ID photos, it was explicitly prohibited to smile in those photos, and they would reject applications if someone did.
0. Purely anecdotal, as it could totally be the case that I just accidentally ended up befriending mostly those who don’t smile for ID photos.
However, the camera used at MVD is clearly more sophisticated than it appears, because if you install the Mobile ID app, your photo goes full "Harry Potter mode" and animates in a 3D rotation!
I don't recall any directions about my expression for the US Passport photo at the USPS station. However, they did attempt to reject the photo for strange technical reasons. I could not fathom the rejection because the photo had been entirely handled by the professional USPS clerk and I wasn't involved in generating it. I insisted on submitting exactly the same way a second time around and it was approved. It must've been a procedural glitch of some kind. Or the government knew I shouldn't be traveling to an ill-fated vacation, and was trying to gently dissuade me?
So yeah, when the super friendly waitress comes over and asks the table "how is your day going", they're not forcing a smile for a tip. It helps, but they're most likely naturally outgoing and friendly and genuinely curious.
When you grow up with this environment, moving to Europe is adaptable (have done so), but whenever you go back home it is a breath of fresh air.
When I visited the US the smiles seemed sincere‚ no doubt about it. The interactions also felt strangely shallow, which was of course to be expected and even sensible in the cultural context (why go into depth with someone you barely know and will never see again), but that is the real reason it felt jarring compared to what I was used to, and often made it confusing to make sense of whether the politeness was sincere or not.
This was in California, and I have to add that I was 17 at the time so "making sense of other people" wasn't a highly developed skill yet to begin with.
And if you don't quite fit the look, the camera AI selfie mode can tighten up your face for you.
I really enjoy observing this and other changes in social tone visible through the ages in archaic videos .. One of my favourite idle pasttimes is to watch videos on Youtube of digitized film from a bygone era, especially of cities I've lived in, or visited and with which I am familiar.
For some reason it is just so interesting, for example, to visit the streets of Vienna from 100+ years ago, and see how folks were living back then. So many well-dressed Viennese, looking sternly at the camera, or merely walking in a steady plod along streets I, too, in the modern era, enjoy.
Vienna is particularly interesting because it has a long history with film, and some of them go back to before the widespread adoption of automobiles. It struck me just how easily we overlook the fact that Vienna was built for walking, originally, and all the crazy car life that the city suffers now was grafted on top of routes originally designed to be navigable by foot - or hoof.
Just take a look at Vienna, from 1896:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aPvmD6ktZs
.. to Vienna, 1926:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGbTkQX6R0Q
.. pre-war Vienna (30's):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA9dHEKD-vM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QITjWb29JZ8
.. Vienna, 1939:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w96umMf9r3E
.. post-war Vienna:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2VbXdrFXB8
.. to Vienna, 1964:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0WCigqJ_wU
.. and lastly, Vienna in the 80's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WttS-PP-r4o
Its just so interesting to see how the city has evolved over the century, but also very interesting to see how it hasn't changed much at all, too!
These days I walk many of the streets depicted in these videos, and having binge-watched all the videos I can find on the subject, it has given me a much deeper appreciation of the trials this city has weathered.
(I've got another set of videos for Los Angeles, another city in which I've lived and loved, and it too is very intriguing to see the city evolve over time .. but I'm yet to find a film as old as 1896 for the region, strangely enough..)
Maintaining a natural looking smile for that long is hard.
They still have stern looks in photos back home in Asia. But when they immigrate to America, everyone starts smiling in photos.
My parents had a theory. They noticed that even in real life, Americans smiled more than back home. They think and I agree with them, that back home life is hard for most people and it is hard for people to put a smile on. Sometimes life is too hard for even a fake smile. And even if you have a pretty good life, you do not want to stand out by smiling, especially with a big smile that shows your teeth. People will mock you if you smile too much in photos.
In the US, life is easy, comparatively, people are happier and it is easy to smile. And if someone is unhappy, they still want to fit in, so they, at least, put a fake smile on.
And I think this can extend to older photos too. Back then life was harder and people did what was natural to them.
Europe is comparable to the US in terms of happiness if not better, yet Europeans don't smile as much. Faking a smile is considered weird unless you're a politician in press photos (and those look creepy if you actually look at them closely)
But clearly other people interpreted it differently, so what do I know? I'm just simple programmer.
"[Photography] is a marvelous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds -- and one that can be practiced by any imbecile."
heh
I wonder if these cultural norms around eye contact and facial expressions have roots in deeper societal structures, like the emphasis on individualism vs. collectivism, or even the pace of life in different regions.
What do you think? Could these small, often overlooked gestures reflect much larger cultural attitudes?
If only there was a detailed first-hand account of the diplomatic mission to Europe which details this exact trip that's been widely translated to most European languages and is widely available.
If it does exist, I would like to read it.
Or maybe the author's perception is colored by what we know of this man.
He obviously isn't lacking in self-awareness. He was upfront about his possible bias.
But now the tooling is so good and the competition so fierce that the real question now is not how but what to program.
For that, it's essential to see things through the eye of users, so you can see the value to them.
This post imagines how Nadar saw his subjects, and how his subjects saw things. Not only is it a different time, but in most cases the subjects had a hand in history, we know now.
To me that's the essence of product design: imagining a different world through the eyes of another, and understanding how to make a real difference.
Products mostly focus on the present-market scale, but investments incorporate the full life cycle. The real power of the historical perspective is understanding how it's the latent value in the context that gives a new product its power, and how significant that can be over time, particularly when a technology becomes pervasive.
Here the photograph far outdoes the samurai's sword in its influence, not just for images and history but as a demonstration of the power of recording light for science, medicine, etc.
May this post inspire someone to make the next photograph.
The main issue is that the skills needed to make a product can be different from the skills needed to land a job in an organization. That makes it further muddy what to program.
For that, it's essential to see things through the eye of users, so you can see the value to them."
It's always been that way. e.g. Infamous HN Dropbox post.
fn-mote•8mo ago
Captivated me much more than reading about the AI-enhanced-startup du jour.
3abiton•8mo ago