If, hypothetically, Sarah Palin was identified as having genes that made it 70% likely that she was a sociopath, it would get reported by CNN. Bill O’Reilly would yell about how it’s easy to tell that Sarah Palin is not a sociopath if you actually spend five minutes with her, rather than getting all your information filtered by the liberal media. Liberal groups would yell about how this confirmed all of their suspicions that Sarah Palin was a lying manipulator. Conservative tea partiers would make comments about “liberal evolutionist scientists” trying to discredit an American hero. More contemplative conservatives would point to this as an example of an innocent woman being discriminated against by immoral technologies, built by scientists who were “playing god”.
I originally wrote Barack Obama, but many liberals are frustrated with him, so I decided to write the scenario with a more polarizing figure. The point is, no matter how serious of well backed up the science is, there is no situation I can think of where political instincts wouldn’t be able to reduce the reasoning abilities of the average voter down to the level of a chimpanzee in a poo-fight.
If this sort of genetic testing existed, then politicians with very bad genes would never make it through the presidential primaries; they’d be filtered out before it got to partisans spinning or ignoring the evidence.
That is a good point. The essay was written about how DNA testing would change the mind-killing aspect of politics, but we probably should consider what effect it would have on just plain politics. Probably, if a lawyer came to the local political party and said that he was interested in running for some local regional office, and her DNA analysis said that she was likely to be a sociopath, the party would be less inclined to support him. Hopefully, DNA testing might make the quality of the candidates that reach higher levels of office a bit higher. There would probably be some benefits, but I doubt that it would help the mind-killer.
If you don’t think mindkilling sets in until the general election, then you didn’t actually follow the 2008 Democratic Primary (among other primaries, but it was on display in an extreme way in that particular case).
Also, in the specific case of sociopathy, I think that in response to a bad genetic test, the candidate would have an FMRI to measure the white matter in the amygdala, give an interview for the Hare Psychopathy test, and present any other confounding evidence that comes to hand, and then the debate would proceed much as MinibearRex suggests. Partisans would simply selectively weight the tests that supported their pre-existing intuitions.
I don’t think this would apply to genes greatly predisposing a candidate to being a sociopath. (The h+ article focuses on these kinds of genes.)
If, hypothetically, Sarah Palin was identified as having genes that made it 70% likely that she was a sociopath, it would get reported by CNN. Bill O’Reilly would yell about how it’s easy to tell that Sarah Palin is not a sociopath if you actually spend five minutes with her, rather than getting all your information filtered by the liberal media. Liberal groups would yell about how this confirmed all of their suspicions that Sarah Palin was a lying manipulator. Conservative tea partiers would make comments about “liberal evolutionist scientists” trying to discredit an American hero. More contemplative conservatives would point to this as an example of an innocent woman being discriminated against by immoral technologies, built by scientists who were “playing god”.
I originally wrote Barack Obama, but many liberals are frustrated with him, so I decided to write the scenario with a more polarizing figure. The point is, no matter how serious of well backed up the science is, there is no situation I can think of where political instincts wouldn’t be able to reduce the reasoning abilities of the average voter down to the level of a chimpanzee in a poo-fight.
If this sort of genetic testing existed, then politicians with very bad genes would never make it through the presidential primaries; they’d be filtered out before it got to partisans spinning or ignoring the evidence.
That is a good point. The essay was written about how DNA testing would change the mind-killing aspect of politics, but we probably should consider what effect it would have on just plain politics. Probably, if a lawyer came to the local political party and said that he was interested in running for some local regional office, and her DNA analysis said that she was likely to be a sociopath, the party would be less inclined to support him. Hopefully, DNA testing might make the quality of the candidates that reach higher levels of office a bit higher. There would probably be some benefits, but I doubt that it would help the mind-killer.
If you don’t think mindkilling sets in until the general election, then you didn’t actually follow the 2008 Democratic Primary (among other primaries, but it was on display in an extreme way in that particular case).
Also, in the specific case of sociopathy, I think that in response to a bad genetic test, the candidate would have an FMRI to measure the white matter in the amygdala, give an interview for the Hare Psychopathy test, and present any other confounding evidence that comes to hand, and then the debate would proceed much as MinibearRex suggests. Partisans would simply selectively weight the tests that supported their pre-existing intuitions.