Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwthrowuknow | Hacker News Reader

You’re leaving out some options for sure. Not everyone would need to live under the conditions of a police state, you could theoretically screen everyone and assign them to various levels of risk which would determine their level of supervision.

View on HN

While true, I'm not sure this is much better. There are many genetic traits which are correlated with increased criminality, risk taking, obesity, heart disease, unemployment, etc. IQ in particular is the most well correlated metric we have for criminality, for example. This would imply that some people are just born with fewer freedoms. That's probably a good thing for society in aggregate, but something about this doesn't feel quite right.

Gattica disagrees.

However strongly genetic marks predict criminality, zip code does it better.

Any solution to crime that starts with eliminating types of people instead of poverty is just a form of fascism.

There are genetic traits correlated with virtually anything, including things that can't possibly be mechanistically linked to biology, so those correlations are saying less than you'd hope they would.

I didn’t specify genetics

This is why utpoias are actually police state hellscapes. Who decides what risk means? Our current administration has declared that simply being anti-facist makes you a terorrist.

That just sounds like a police state with extra steps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com