All Look Same?
alllooksame.com84 points by mirawelner 15 hours ago
84 points by mirawelner 15 hours ago
Am asian myself, got 6/18 too.
CJK people actually do look very similar anyway, which is not surprising as there are a lot of shared genetics.
The way people tell them apart is going to be mostly based on current popular fashion, which is quite difficult to do with these bust shots and what I'm guessing are older pictures
Ditto (albeit Eurasian)
The problem is I put like 70% as Chinese, because I guarantee there's a Chinese person in the world who looks exactly like the portrait. China is so mixed that it's a total wildcard.
lots of contact with asian people here, definitely all look different, watch japanese and korean dramas on the regular so should be able to tell at least those. 6/18, funniest thing was to me though thinking "oh you're definitely japanese" and being spot on twice. The biggest shortcoming on this quiz: not telling you the correct answer, or the site giving guidance/examples of their data set.
This website is just the author's personal judgment exercise.
Yeah, none of these were obvious to me. China is an especially massive country and none of these people would look out of place in parts of China (I've seen every one of these facial types in China speaking native Mandarin). Most of the "signal" is gonna be from fashion, and/or the biases of the test-maker in what they choose to represent and how closely those faces match stereotypes.
>are older pictures
I am pretty sure it's 20+ years old. Just based on when I remember taking it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20021206055155/http://alllooksam...
Sep 14, 2001 it was taken out of beta.
I remember taking it as a freshman in college and getting well above random chance. 60–70% correct? A year later I took it with my sophomore roommate, from China. Again, 2/3-ish correct. He scored about random chance from what I recall.
I've always thought you could tell. Not 100% of the time; there's plenty of genetic mixing, Japanese people and Koreans share somewhat recent genetic history, Korea and China border each other, China is a ton of different ethnicities, etc. But certainly better than random chance if you've been around enough East Asians in your life.
I agree with a descendant above who said fashion is really useful. That's super true. I used to joke at uni that an East Asian wearing pastels was invariably Korean (this is very much NOT the case in SK these days). Japanese have had very distinct youth fashions for twenty years, as I lived there and witnessed them, and nowadays I can be across the playground with my kids and see a woman and immediately know by what she's wearing that she's from Japan.
China, being enormous, is a mixed bag.
That being said, there's facial structure stuff. It's kind of hard to put into words. It's a vibe you get. There's a university (Penn State or something?) that has a professor who puts his huge survey sociology class online. He talks about this, that early and constant exposure to some group(s) makes you better, for the rest of your life, and recognizing them. Has to do with attractiveness, too.
He brings white girls up to pick which Asian guy is the most attractive, and you can tell they really struggle to articulate it. But he brings Asian girls up and say exactly which one and explain why from his clothes, his facial features, etc.
It really is like if you aren't around (in this case) Asian people growing up, you have a kind of facial blindness where they alldolooksame.
I'm white and got 7/18 and it said "You can't tell the difference" but I think it's because some of them I had no idea. There were a few where I was really sure and I turned out to be right.
I think it's the same with white people. There are some who look unique to their country and I can tell with high confidence but for others, I have no idea; they just look like a generic white person.
For example, I think these public figures look/looked very stereotypical for their country:
German: Otto Von Bismarck
English/Scottish: Hugh Grant, David Bowie, Winston Churchill, Maggie Smith
French: Napoleon, Jacque Chirac, Alain Delon, Gerard Depardieu, Francoise Hardy
American: Clint Eastwood, Abraham Lincoln, JFK
Swedish: Agnetha Faltskog
Twenty five years ago, I lived in San Francisco. This website was "talk of the town" for a quick minute. The real trick is looking at people's hair styles. In my experience, fashion indicates one's ethnicity/nationality much more than face shape alone. Think about a blond Italian from northern Italy, vs a blond German from southern Germany. They will have wildly different fashion styles (clothes and hair). The same for a Londoner and a Parisian.
I got a bit more than average correct, but they all looked like New Yorkers from the early 2000s to me if I'm honest. Maybe it's because I'm watching Castle right now, or it is indeed because fashion and stylistic choices tell a lot more about when and where someone is from.
I got 12/18 on faces as an American-born Caucasian living in Japan for over 10 years. Since the subjects were photographed in New York City (and from the other comments, at least a decade ago), cues from fashion and makeup only helped me get about 4 of them, another 6 had pretty strong ethnic features. Of the remaining 8, it was a bit of a tossup and I did worse than guessing, getting only 2 correct.
13/18 on food. Even with a lot of the same general types of food, the presentation and specific ingredients made a lot of them somewhat simple. I got tripped up on a few, though, where I overthought it ("a Japanese X is usually not like this") or ones where it was really a tossup for me between Chinese and Korean since I'm less familiar with those foods.
11/18 :)
What’s really wild to me is having spent time in both Mexico and Thailand, I have seen some people in Mexico that could have a twin in Thailand. That was really unexpected.
This is a really interesting comment. Sometimes when I see photos of native people from South America (especially anything Amazonian), they do look a bit South East Asian to me. Do you think those people that you saw in Mexico were mixed (or fully) native (not European by descent)?
My Vietnamese friend and I once went to a Philippine food festival. Most of the Filipino people there tried to talk to my friend in Tagalog. He’d talk back to them in Vietnamese. Granted, he doesn’t look Vietnamese to me, either. He looks like an islander.
I have an Indian friend who often gets mistaken for Hispanic in the Southern US.
I'm from NZ (mostly european but part Maori heritage) and have had people talk to me in foreign languages, ask me in the supermarket if I'm from Spain (weird), give me random discounts etc.
I also get "you look/feel so familiar" a lot.
Happy to know I'd fit in in a number of places haha
I got 6/18 for the faces ("Obviously, very bad.") I thought I would get at least 50%. Interestingly, of the ones I felt very sure about, I did much better (got about 4 out of those 6).
I'm not sure it's bad at all. China has around 1.5 billion people and officially recognizes 55 ethnicities.
Some of them look more like non Chinese people than like I he Chinese ethnicities.
> officially recognizes 55 ethnicities
9/18 and I lived in China & Japan for 10 years altogether. It's a tough test! There were only a couple that were obvious.
Obviously, random chance... It's a bit ignorant/racist to expect people from different countries to look distinctly different (fashion notwithstanding), when genetics are so overlapping
The about page at https://alllooksame.com/about/ seems to indicate that the author who is of Japanese descent is not able to differentiate between them himself and made this website to test the assumption
In any case, I thought the "you all look the same" racist trope is that east asian people look similar to one another individually? is there an actual expectation of being able to tell the actual ethnicity/countries apart?
> is there an actual expectation of being able to tell the actual ethnicity/countries apart?
Facial structure, there are some obvious ones in ALS. But generally speaking, it's fashion that gives it away. I can spot a (relatively recent) Japanese immigrant from a hundred feet away by her clothes. It's a bit like if you see someone in Europe with a baseball cap, you can be almost certain they're American. Sandals with socks? German. Etc.
My recollection is that this website says that a 50% score is bad when the expected value of random chance of picking the correct option among 3 is 1/3. A 50% average score means there is some signal there. If it was impossible to guess, the average score should be 33%
Is this still around? I think this site was from 20 years ago.
Domain created 2001-07-18
12 years ago from last submission (2 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446493
2026 minus 2014 is 12 years
Thanks! I'm sure that's what gnabgib meant so I have taken the liberty of correcting the typo.
13/18 Maybe growing up in NZ and hanging out a bit with people from different cultures helps.
I'm Asian, grew up in Vietnam, got 8/18. Without the specific hair styles, I can see all of them being Vietnamese
It's almost like bordering other countries sometimes leads to cross pollination... /s
It's too slow. It takes at least five seconds to load the next picture after you answer. You should probably just preload all the pictures client-side. I wasn't able to get through it.
Right? I was thinking how come it takes such a simple site to load. Then I saw the footer, it's 25 years old.
Being on the Hacker News front page probably has something to do with that.
It's a 25-year old website and most people were on slow dial-up connection. No one would've stuck around for 17 images to be pre-loaded.
That's not what preload is for. You don't wait for the extra images on the first page. You start loading them after the page is complete, so that the next page loads faster.
So people waited for 20 seconds to load each page?
Yes. The tolerance for slow-loading pages has shrunk dramatically since the early days of the web. Admittedly, 20 seconds was pushing it and people tried to reduce image sizes and such things to make it faster. But I recall in the late 90s, when I was selling CMS software to IBM, they had a rule that all pages needed to load within 3 seconds, and that was considered fast in those days.
From older version of the site:
https://archive.ph/http://alllooksame.com/
>this is what happens generally when you fight against anything out of anger. It’s not that you have no justification for fighting; the real problem is that your efforts only make the situation worse, not just for others, but for yourself also.
Problem is that it's hard to recognise that something is worth our moral efforts without feeling angry at the same time. Stoicism is constant work.
I got 3/18. I'm not sure what to think of that. I live in a city full of Asian people, international students, tourists etc etc. One of my best friends in high school was Korean. One of my closest friends at uni was Japanese. One of my close friends now is Chinese.
Is it good or bad? I don't know.
I am a Chinese person living in Japan, I got 3/18 too.
I'm a white American from the middle of nowhere who grew up with Taiwanese friends and went to uni in Japan and got 12. I think when I took this test two decades ago, I got 12-13 but that was a long time ago.
6. It turns out they do all look the same, to me.
The architectural version is interesting to me. There's really a world of difference, but you need to know some history and some of the "cultural vibes" particular to each country to understand.
Very uncultured and untraveled caucasian here. I got 10/18, surprising myself. Probably plenty of luck, but at least 5 or 6 I was quite confident about. Not sure how.
You forgot to add North East Indians to this list
Why would you think a site trying to compare Chinese, Japanese and Koreans has forgotten about India of all places? They must've also completely forgotten Mongolia, all nations of SE Asia and Russia's Far East exist.
It looks site is down.
Little houses, on the hillside...
I played this quite a few years ago and felt pretty certain that they deliberately chose photos that were atypical of each ethnicity. That said, there kind of is no typical Chinese look since it's such a huge country. Those in the north are taller and have similarities to Koreans, those in the south will have more similarities to Vietnamese.
Admitting this kind of conflicts with the One China Policy and the implicit Han Supremacist attitude prevalent in CCP politics but China is ethnically diverse compared to Korea and Japan simply due to its geographic scale. There might be a certain Han "look" but I'd expect "Chinese" to be much more difficult to pin down even if you ignore the absurdity of trying to pin down "pure" ethnicities across an entire continent.
Delineating Korean and Japanese "looks" already seems a fool's errand if you consider that archeological evidence demonstrates close cultural and trade relationships (or alternatively: astronomically unlikely astonishing examples of parallel developments) between the two regions dating back at least to the Neolithic period - and that the current "native" population seems to only date back no farther than that period despite archeological evidence of prior populations.
Of course this all also exists in the context of Chinese history which largely hinges on what exactly you want to call "China" historically as for most of its written history there really wasn't a single unified entity.
We tend to project backwards a notion of nationhood that in the West largely only came about in the 19th century. In Europe, as a German, I find my own country to be such an obvious example to this as people from all nooks of the political spectrum will find ways to try and shoehorn the modern federal republic into an unbroken chain of history starting with the "Germanic" tribes valiantly resisting Roman rule.
In my country's specific case, the origin myth is completely nonsensical if you look at the actual historic record. The shared identity of the various tribes settling the region only existed from the outside perspective of Rome which simply referred to all foreign territories as being settled "barbarians" (because that's what the foreign languages sounded like to Romans - to put that in perspective, imagine we unironically called Asians "chingchongs").
The first entity with the word "German" in its name was the Holy Roman Empire but the words "of Germany" were only added centuries later and for the longest time the mythological warrior Hermann who "repelled" the Roman invaders by "uniting the tribes" was seen as a villain because - true to its name - the Holy Roman Empire saw itself as the successor to the Roman Empire. It literally included parts of Italy after all and was preceded by the Carolingian Empire (covering much of the same territory but more of modern France). And of course more recently we've learned that the tribes were actually more divided than unified following the conflict with Rome and that the role of Hermann may have been heavily overstated due to the fact that he was a Roman soldier and thus provided a good basis for a grandiose narrative.
You could point at the Kingdom of Germany as a historical root of German identity but there was no shared cultural identity during that period and certainly no awareness of it among its population. The common folk for most of the middle ages would have most likely only been aware of their local ruler or clergy with a faint awareness of the overarching power structures but migration through trade not withstanding separations were often as strong between neighboring villages as between modern countries.
The closest thing we get to an idea of a "German national identity" is following the conquest by Napoleon and the rise of an aristocratic/mercantile republic monarchy which provided the democratic roots for the modern republic - but even in WW1 "German" culture was heavily defined by Prussia (which covered most of German territory). Historically therefore it seems less like German nationalism was the politicalization of a shared ethnic, cultural and political identity but rather provided a framework to fabricate such an identity in its absence. Even if you ignore the absurdity of claiming a unified "German" cultural identity, the now popular notion of there being such a thing as a "German" ethnic identity flies in the face of there still being distinct native but "non-German" ethnic populations in parts of Germany despite centuries of Germanization and assimilation (notably Danish Germans in the North and Sorbs in the East).
Much like trying to draw the line where you "enter the atmosphere" of the Earth, borders are ultimately arbitrary delineations no matter how you define them and populations will move around, mix and change over time. The abstractions they help us create are likewise arbitrary and have more to do with assertions of power and control than any grander mythology used to justify them.
Now do England, Ireland, Germany, France :)
Exactly! I'm sure most Asian people would fail that test. What a silly thing to measure.
Check the About section. The author is Asian and can’t tell them apart. The website isn’t meant to shame those who can’t do it, it’s to prove they can’t.
I got 5/18, whoops.
1/18 must be some new low. Inverse genius it told me.
Exceptional! Can I short your whole portfolio? :)
Speaking as another inverse genius, at your own peril.
In my second go around I scored 11/18. Genius learn fast.
it's a trap: they are all chinese
3/18