Have you met one of your unrelated identical twins?

None of these people look anything like me at all! Clearly, I need to upload a picture of myself when I was younger, I’m sure that’ll net me a more realistic result!

/s

Turns out scientists like money just as much as anyone else.

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I went to undergrad with a guy who looked a lot like me. We weren’t in the same program or classes, so I occasionally saw him in the dining commons or riding around campus, but we looked enough alike that people regularly stopped me to have a conversation with him (much to my confusion and theirs until they realized their mistake).

My friend messed with him one halloween when we were waiting for a movie (and he and his friends were there). Everyone was in costume, and I was wearing a mask. My friend went over and had him guess what I was dressed up as. The answer was “you”, at which point I took off the mask. Very brief confusion, then he realized I must be the guy who people confused him for (and vice versa). Lots of fun.

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I mean they’re based in Dublin, so the worst excesses should be constrained by the GDPR. Presumably you only give them the right to use your photo to match you and your info to contact you.

Not that I would sign up to that regardless.

I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one who thought to myself, “Submit my face voluntarily to a facial recognition database? Uh, hell no.”

Sure, I’m no doubt involuntarily in any number of facial recognition databases, but why make things even worse?

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I wanted to upload this:

But then I saw that it requires sign up…

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And now I’m gonna tell you something
That I’ve never told anyone else before
There’s a man who looks like me
And talks like me and acts like me
But that’s where the similarities end

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back in the '90s the place I worked got some promotional materiel from one of those technical skill building firms, programming or network architecture, something like that. One of the photos was a large clear image of someone who looked just like me, it was uncanny. Some coworkers would not accept it wasn’t me, thought I was “moonlighting” , but I knew I didn’t have that jacket :slight_smile: . Never met him, though. Another guy looked so much like me his wife ( this was at a party ) sat both of us down side by side and just swung her head side to side for about five minutes, mouth agape. Bizarre …

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I saw a twin when I was visiting Leeds, we both had unfashionably long hair and even weirder, the same ugly purple pants, we stopped and stared at each other - like looking in a mirror - and then turned and walked away without saying hi. I really wish I’d been braver.

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Hmm sounds like Stephen Hawkings’ “Chronology Protection Conjecture” in action. You did the right, indeed, the only possible thing. :wink:

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Seems like a good place to put this:

(watched recently while exploring Villeneuve’s earlier works and was tripped out by how much the character(s) resembled a co-worker, physically and in expressive mannerisms, quite an odd flick)

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I saw mine on an MBTA bus. Same hairline, same body shape, even the same mustache. Turns out he was Spanish though and I’m African-American. We actually lived not to far apart at the time at least judging by where he got on the bus. It’s a strange world.

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I’ve seen one of my doppelgangers, he’s a musician and I saw him when I walked into a gig where he was the support act. Not only did he look like me, he had similar mannerisms and expressions. I tried to stay out of his eyeline, because I figured it was pretty weird for me, and I didn’t want to put him off his singing. In the bar a little later I had people coming up to me to congratulate me on the performance.
Just the other day as well, a friend texted to say they’d just seen me walk past, which prompted some confusion because I had walked that way, but several hours earlier. So there’s someone (probably not the musician, I think he lives in Brighton) near me, who walks like me, and has a similar jacket and hat.

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Chad Smith is 6 years older than Will Ferrel FWIW.

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Oh, hahah, I literally got them confused from that clip above. Thanks for the correction. I think my point is still valid though. :grimacing:

So, I know there have been lots of studies on human facial recognition and things like that. I’d love to know if anyone has quantified the dimensionality and resolution for when people count others as nearly identical. Overlap that with population-level trait distributions, and…

Heh, that’s pretty funny. Yes, I think it will be interesting to see how similar they look in 10-15 years.

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When I went to University, I met and was friends with my doppelganger - we looked almost the same, right down to hairstyle and glasses, and were even taking the same degree, and were born less than a week apart.

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used to have a friend who looked like 80’s Sting. Travelled with him a bit; walking through any airport that one might plausibly find the original in was a head turning event. I used to tell him, “Call me Andy”, because no one knew what Andy Summers looked like :slight_smile:

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