It looks like a signal to me. Maybe we're misinterpreting, but if so, we have multiple people making the same mistake.

Whether or not the subcultural signals are there or not, the only thing that matters if you want an explanation of the "1"s is whether many people would think that the subcultural signals are there. And I think that we've established that enough people not only think so, but don't understand why you can't see them.

There's nothing there that can prove anything I've mentioned, but there's quite a bit to suggest it. Sure, it's theoretically possible that I could be totally wrong; signals like this give evidence, not hard data. But I'd still bet at long odds that I've got most of it right.

Particularly in this context. We're talking about pictures heading a dating site profile, not random photos dug out of someone's sock drawer; now, people do vary in their ability to control the impression they give, but within that scope people on a dating site are going to have clear goals that they'll tailor their profiles toward. Clothes, setting, body language, and photography all carry information that gets used to attract those they want to attract, and to deter those they don't. And very little about that photo looks accidental to me.

Silly neurotypicals... always overestimating their own mind-reading abilities :/

Yes, proper estimates look like this:

There's some dishonest rating going on here.

As for the signals, I will confirm: you are bad at reading these sorts of signals. (The most obvious one is the sexuality signal, which is determined by her pose leaning forward and the placement of her hand.)

I haven't used OKCupid in a couple of years, but when I did, there were two paths to giving someone a star rating. You could look at their regular profile, usually including several pictures and a couple screens of text, and click a control at the top to rate it; or you could enter a quick matching system that'd show you up to three pictures and an abbreviated version of their profile text. (There were a lot of jokes about how no one reads the text, but I got the impression that most people at least skimmed it.) There was also a "My Best Face" feature that did look at individual pictures, but that used an up/down rating system rather than the star ratings, and context here suggests that we're talking about profiles. Not that any of that matters here, since everything I said in the grandparent depends only on the photos.

If you can't see subcultural signaling in the picture on the right, I don't know what to tell you. She's fairly clearly urban rather than rural, and at least middle-class but probably not upper-; she's communicating a specific type of sexuality; and she's likely into the alternative fashion scene in some way; there are other things she's saying but those are the most obvious ones. You could call it "hipster", but that's less kind and more general than what I have in mind. The picture on the left is far less culturally marked, although I could probably venture a couple of good guesses.

(Not my downvote, by the way.)

People who don't like the subcultural signals she's throwing out.

The OKCupid ratings aren't supposed to be some kind of objective measure of beauty; they're supposed to capture the rater's subjective impression of how much they'd like to get to know the person in the photo. That means they end up depending on a lot of things other than raw physical attractiveness.

A while back, lukeprog wrote on low-variance and high-variance strategies in the dating market. His examples were a guy in business casual and a guy in full goth regalia, but something similar's going on here.

Interesting post!

Christian Rudder from OkTrends (OkCupid's blog) found that the shape of the distribution of male attractiveness ratings varied significantly across female ratees. Did you observe a similar phenomenon?

"Ratings on a 10 point scale are imprecise"

Wrong. If anything, it's TOO precise. Attractiveness is "fuzzy". If you asked me to rank Angelina Jolie on a 5-point scale, I'd give her a 4 without hesitation, but on a ten-point scale, I have no idea what she'd be. 7? 8? On a 5-point scale, 4 means "above average but not top-tier". On a 10-point scale, is there any meaningful difference between a 7 and an 8? It's like trying to decide whether a color is "maroon" or "crimson" when any sane person would just say "dark red".

On the other hand, everyone agrees that Nancy Pelosi is a 0 on any scale :)

The problem with these particular extensions is that they don't sound plausible for this type of AI. In my opinion it would be easier when talking with designers to switch from this example to a slightly more sci-fi example.

The leap is between the obvious "it's 'manipulating' its editors by recognizing simple patterns in their behavior" to "it's manipulating its editors by correctly interpreting the causes underlying their behavior."

Much easier to extend in the other direction first: "Now imagine that it's not an article-writer, but a science officer aboard the commercial spacecraft Nostromo..."

"But dang, that argument my teacher explained to me sure was sound-looking! I must just be lucky - those poor saps with other teachers have it wrong!"

This is actually something I've been wondering about regarding the disproportionate overlap between libertarianism and anthropogenic global warming skepticism. I'd like to think that this disproportionate overlap is because both views stem from a rational and objective assessment of the available data, but at the same time, I can't deny that anthropogenic global warming would throw a monkey wrench into libertarian philosophy if it was real, so being skeptical of it saves us from doing an awful lot of mental gymnastics...