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Comment by rubinelli | Hacker News Reader

One thing to consider is the Pygmalion effect[0]: If you and the people around you believe you inherently lack the moral fortitude to resist those impulses, you are much more likely to make irresponsible choices. Your weakness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Then there is the risk of recreating castes. It is one thing if you abdicate the right and responsibility to control your finances, but what if that became institutionalized? What if only people who pass certain genetic tests have full citizenship rights? Maybe future governments will legalize gambling and recreational drugs, but only for those individuals that don't have a genetic predisposition to addiction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

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The Pygmalion effect is fake. The original result was driven solely by wild outliers that indicate that those students were blowing the test deliberately or that the authors were incompetent, it was buttressed by inappropriate statistics, and, in an extremely familiar pattern now for any 'cool' environmental effect in social psychology, the hundreds of replications turned in ever tinier effects and to the extent that there is any effect, it is effectively zero in the long run: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/Teacher%20Expectations%20...

You could make castes based on measured behavior, not genetic predisposition which is obviously unreliable.

We do this in school by separating kids into different classes according to our guess of their ability. Not very reliable, but it can be better overall than treating everyone equally. We also do genetic "castes" with sports separating males and females. Again, some people end up on the wrong side of the fence but overall it seems to help more than it harms.

I kind of think we should do this in wider society too. As it is, naturally low intelligence or low impulse control people are just thrown in the deep end and expected to compete with people who are biologically superior. They can't win, so all kinds of negative social effects compound, like crime, poor health, poor mental health, and even lower economic success.

> We do this in school by separating kids into different classes according to our guess of their ability. Not very reliable, but it can be better overall than treating everyone equally.

Measured outcomes are generally worse overall. This system is popular with wealthy/high-status parents though.

The way to get better outcomes (in school and society) is to make sure that everyone has enough individual attention and support, not to sort and label everyone.

People who are impulsive or who integrate knowledge in a less regular way or ... are not “biologically inferior”; those differences are a complex trade-off, and our society needs a wide variety of personalities and thinking styles to function.

Respectfully, this sounds like a dystopia to me. In fact this exact structure has been described in multiple dystopian novels and movies [1]. Dividing people into castes that affect their options in life is a really really bad and dangerous idea for a litany of reasons. Regardless of whether it's based on an assessment or your bloodline, ...or anything.

Doesn't this sentence that you wrote ring any alarm bells for you? "Not very reliable, but it can be better overall than treating everyone equally."

[1] Here are a few I can think of off the top of my head:

* 3%, the tv show

* Brave New World (Huxley's book)

* Player Piano (Vonnegut's book)

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