James_Miller comments on Will DNA Analysis Make Politics Less of a Mind-Killer? - Less Wrong
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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!
I guess they very occasionally do, and in that case, I would be somewhat more wary about voting for someone with this fabled 70%-chance-of-being-a-sociopath DNA test even if they otherwise had given me no particular cause for alarm. We're not talking about a very common situation here, though.
Don't the names Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung and Pol Pot cause you to think that something about power attracts the wrong kind of people.
Selection bias alert! One can't become a Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung or Pol Pot without power in the first place, so even if potential megakillers were actually much less common among powerful people we would still expect disproportionately more megakillers among the powerful.
I believe this is a matter of some dispute.
A whole, whole, whole lot of people have held political power other than those guys, and with very few exceptions have restrained themselves from committing mass murder.
But the expect cost of a sociopath becoming the U.S. president is huge. Also, although I don't agree with this, lots of people think that George Bush was a mass murderer.
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.