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Misha comments on Will DNA Analysis Make Politics Less of a Mind-Killer? - Less Wrong
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I doubt the barrier is actually identifying genes. Most genes that affect intelligence are probably not a clear-cut win for any of the alleles, but are trade-offs for different modes of thinking. Plus of course it's questionable how much of an effect genetic intelligence has on a President's success.
Furthermore, even if we could determine a numerical intelligence from DNA that worked like IQ, but combined all factors into an unambiguous ranking, and these were published on the Internet about every politician ever, I doubt it would affect votes all that much.
If, for example, Sarah Palin had many identified "high IQ genes" I doubt that the mainstreem media would have been able to characterize her as a dullard.
This study claims to "unequivocally confirm that a substantial proportion of individual differences in human intelligence is due to genetic variation."
At some point it was pointed out that George W. Bush DID have a higher IQ than John Kerry. As far as I know, this did not affect anyone's judgment of him in the slightest. The people who liked him still liked him. The people who thought he was an idiot still thought he was an idiot in the ways that actually mattered.
What I remember was that he had a higher college GPA...
He did, but they also both took military officer aptitude tests, which are essentially IQ tests. Bush took the Air Force one, Kerry took the Navy one- so you can't compare scores directly- but it's most likely that Bush had a slightly higher IQ.
Why would they not? Why shouldn't they? Phenotype dominates genotype.
Yes, but PitMK makes it hard to judge phenotype.
Hard? Harder than trying to infer IQ from genes? Genes are great, but let's not kid ourselves about how much one will be able to infer - a bad IQ test beats the most sophisticated attempt to infer from genes.
Perhaps not because of variations of individual IQ scores across time. Lots of people retake the IQ test known as the SATs hoping to get a better score.
This assumes no correlation between whether she's a dullard and whether she sounds like one when she talks. I assume that this hypothetical non-dullard version of Sarah Palin would also not have been able to be characterized as a dullard because she wouldn't have said all the things that she said, thereby appearing to anyone who was paying attention to be a dullard.
You seem to be implicitly accepting the left's view of Palin. Many Republicans thought that the way she spoke indicated that she was smarter than Joe Biden.
OK, I will put my biases on display as an example of why the kind of thing you're talking about doesn't work. My political views are generally opposed to Sarah Palin's in the context of US politics. If you told me that, despite the judgments I formed listening to her talk in public, there is genetic evidence that she is actually very smart and Joe Biden is very stupid, I would reply "Then I feel sorry for the good Lord. She sounded like a world-class idiot." I think most people, mutatis mutandis, would respond similarly.
In other words, I doubt that our confidence in DNA evidence regarding things like intelligence (which, NB, is surely correlated only imperfectly with skill in governing, which is one of the points I was trying to make in my comment below), is going to trump things like political ideology and our own judgments of whether someone sounds smart or not when they talk.
I know a lot about how Republicans think and was a Republican candidate for the Massachusetts State Senate. Many Republicans think that Palin is smarter than Biden.
If gene analysis could somehow tell us definitively that Sarah Palin had an IQ of 90 and Joe Biden had an IQ of 130, would that change your political opinions or your vote in the last election? Do you think it would change the opinion of a substantial number of Republicans?
I understand that they hold that view, and I am not trying to argue in favor of my own opposing view. What I'm saying is that, inasmuch as I do hold an opposing view (which is also tied in with political ideology, identity politics, and so forth), I'm really unlikely to be persuaded to change my mind on the basis of DNA evidence for intelligence. And I'm arguing that nearly everyone is just like me in this respect (again, modulo their own political views).
Would learning that your favorite presidential candidate had genes predisposing him to being a sociopath make you less likely to vote for that candidate?
It would, at least a bit. But I'd have to consider it alongside the other stuff I knew about the candidate. If some candidate had attained the office of, let's say, the governor of a large state while reliably carrying out my policy preferences and not getting embroiled in a major scandal of some kind, I doubt I'd give much credence to the hypothesis that they'd controlled their sociopathic urges, biding their time until they were elected US President and then unleashed terror upon the populace. Also note that there are enough veto points within the structure of the US government to prevent any one person from carrying out Stalin-level genocide or whatever; your point would maybe stand a bit better if we were electing a dictator, but then, dictators don't get elected.
Sometimes they do!
Yes, definitely.
How less likely would you be to vote for Sarah Palin if she turned out to be 70% likely to be a sociopath?
Much less.
I submit that this is actually a testable proposition. Sample 100 people from a country where English is taught well, but the political system is so different from the US that people are unlikely to have tribal predispositions to favor Democrats or Republicans (100 Singaporeans, maybe). Show them the Palin-Biden debate, and a couple of examples of each of them speaking impromptu. Then ask the respondents whom they think is more intelligent. How substantial a sum would you be willing to wager that Palin would win such a poll?
Er, Biden's pretty stupid. Palin's pretty stupid too, but I only suspect Biden's IQ is higher with about 60% confidence.