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Comment by HenryKissinger | Hacker News Reader

The federal government could maintain a central database containing the DNA of every citizen. Submitting a sample might be incentivized by barring people from, say, receiving social security, disability, government backed mortgages and student loans, food stamps, tax refunds, and other federal benefits if someone doesn't comply.

The National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the FBI, DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms), ICE, CBP, and DHS (Department of Homeland Security) could then mine the database for insights into disease, epidemics, crime, intelligence, and so many other purposes. Just imagine the possibilities.

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In a perfect world, sure, but in the real world this would obviously be ripe for misuse. Hard to tell if you're being serious or not.

Why would DNA have anything to do with crime?

I am not an expect, but it seems like DNA is responsible for around 50% of the personality variance between individuals. Note that the variance within groups is an order of magnitude bigger than the variance across groups, so there aren't super strong ties to race.

I would imagine personality and/or propensity to mental illness or addiction are decent predictors of likelihood to commit crime.

See this podcast for an actual experts take https://samharris.org/podcasts/211-the-nature-of-human-natur...

That sounds like "predictive policing". The problem is that the institution that wants to predict crime might be inclined to use attributes of people who were previously arrested/convicted as the basis for the predictive model.

They won't be watching out for you based on personality disorders, addiction, or any other reasonable indicator. They'll watch out for you because you have attributes that match the type of people in jail right now. It's not going to be indicative of criminal behavior.

If they put moderate resources into it I'm sure they could come up with something fairly predictive. For example this paper [1] finds a significant, but weak correlation between height and violent criminality. Genetic influences on height are well known. However, point taken that all models are subject to abuse.

The morality is still fairly grey though, and I think the reward vs intrusion ratio would have to be pretty high before it gets widespread buy-in. Personally, I prefer the state being disinterested in my genes.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/43/3/835/760664

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