Will DNA Analysis Make Politics Less of a Mind-Killer?

James_Miller

I wrote an article for h+ predicting that the rapid fall in the cost of gene sequencing will allow U.S. voters to learn much about presidential candidates' DNA. The candidates won't be able to stop this because:

humans shed so much DNA that unless a politician lived in a plastic bubble he couldn’t shield his DNA from prying eyes. Politicians will probably pass laws making it a crime to involuntarily disclose a politician’s genetic traits. But since it would take only one person to leak the information onto the Internet, and given that any serious candidate for President will have many enemies, candidates’ genomes will undoubtedly become public.

DNA analysis has a decent chance of reducing political bias by providing objective information about candidates. If, for example, 70% of the variation in human intelligence is determined by identified genes then DNA analysis would reduce disagreements among informed voters over a candidate's intelligence.

humans shed so much DNA that unless a politician lived in a plastic bubble he couldn’t shield his DNA from prying eyes. Politicians will probably pass laws making it a crime to involuntarily disclose a politician’s genetic traits. But since it would take only one person to leak the information onto the Internet, and given that any serious candidate for President will have many enemies, candidates’ genomes will undoubtedly become public.

The media spent a lot of time discussing Palin's intelligence presumably because many voters cared about it.

I agree that "political disagreement puts us in a situation where our biases are even less under control than usual" but additional information could reduce these biases. The situation under PitMK isn't hopeless.

Lots of Republicans thought that Bill Clinton was a sociopath. Let's say he was. PitMK would make it challenging for Democrats to see this. But if an analysis of Clinton's genes showed that a child born with his genes had a 70% chance of being a sociopath then I doubt Clinton would have won the Democratic party nomination.

Also worth noting: A candidate who has views I disagree with is even MORE dangerous if they're intelligent. Genes demonstrating intelligence would only really affect things at the primaries, where you're choosing which candidate will best represent your views.

7prase15y

Not because the voters cared about her intelligence per se, but because demonstrating that she's a moron constitutes an argument the Republicans can't easily defend against. It was pretty obvious that Palin isn't exceptionally intelligent - far more obvious for a typical voter than any DNA test could be - and still the debates weren't any less irrational than usually. I would also expect soon emergence of social defense mechanisms against such tests. Saying that somebody is probably an idiot based on her genetic background is like saying somebody is probably a criminal based on his being black. You can expect counterarguments like * people are born equal and nobody is responsible for his genes * discrimination based on DNA test is unfair, because there will necessarily be some non-morons harmed by such a practice * well, even if it is 99% sure that she's a moron, there still is a 1% chance that you can't neglect, so the whole probability argument is worthless People struggle to get Bayesian probabilistic arguments to work in courts where many bias avoiding mechanisms are already employed. In politics, even the most obvious everyday rational arguments don't work regularly. To expect a fairly abstract argument based on numerical probabilities obtained by a method which almost nobody understands to be persuasive in a heated political debate is naïve.

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Will DNA Analysis Make Politics Less of a Mind-Killer?

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