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How similar do you think you are to your second cousin? Or your estranged great aunt?
Would you like to have people assess your behaviour from what your great aunt has done? How would you feel if courts used data gained from them to decide how you are likely to behave in the future?
Scientists are making connections between a person's DNA and their tendencies for certain kinds of behaviour. At the same time, commercial DNA databases are becoming more common and police are gaining access to them.
When these trends combine, genetic data inferred about offenders from their relatives might one day be used by courts to determine sentences. In the future, the data from your great aunt could be used by a court to determine how severely you are punished for a crime.
[...] A Florida judge recently approved a warrant to search a genetic genealogy database, GED Match. This American company has approximately 1.3 million users who have uploaded their personal genetic data, with the assumption of privacy, in the hope of discovering their family tree.
The court directly overruled these users' request for privacy and now the company is obliged to hand over the data.
[...] This might be used by the prosecution to make the case for a longer sentence. In some jurisdictions and circumstances, the prosecution may have a means of obtaining a sample of DNA directly from the offender. But where this is not legally possible without the offender's consent, the inference from relatives might fill a gap in the prosecution's case about how dangerous the offender is.
Your ability to be granted bail may hinge on your genes.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 22 2020, @04:34PM (10 children)
This will be the latest scourge inflicted upon us by the "social scientists". Once they get a new tool in their hands, like statistical techniques, or fMRIs or ANY other thing that they really don't understand but is "high tech", they unleash a trove of this behavioral nonsense on society. It quickly gains steam, at least the parts that support the leading (or most vocal) social theories, because it is backed by "science"! Let's measure cranial dimensions, or perhaps quantify the bumps on someone's head! Now let's do the same damn thing but using x-rays or fMRI images. Oh look, these undesirable people correlate with an odd number of bumps! Or their brains light up in the right sections when they're shown a picture of a child! Ooh look, this dead fish is a criminal too! Now let's propose rounding up these people for "reeducation" or to send them somewhere to try to "help" them. I understand electroshock is very good for these things because I have some EKGs and other fancy stuff showing correlations here too!
But I'm sure it will all work out THIS time. Because, you know, DNA sequencing! WAY more reliable than those other methods.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 22 2020, @04:45PM (9 children)
It's weird the things you conflate.
You conflate the very different fields neuropsychology(the field with the fMRIs) with social science(with is the study of societies), and social psychology(examining psychology with hypotheses built on theories of behavior), correctly arriving at the conclusion that neuropsychology has the biggest reproducibility problems, but somehow laying it at the feet of social psychology, which you incorrectly term social science.
And people trying to shortcut reductionist theories of human behavior straight to DNA are called "evolutionary psychologists" and they are all, almost without exception, massive shitheads and have been for decades now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 22 2020, @06:23PM (6 children)
Decades? The scientific racism of the 19th Century was unscientific and pushed by massive shitheads, I don't think you can extrapolate that to modern, peer reviewed academia without you being a massive shithead. Why not explain the error in methodology or falsify the data [twitter.com] if you're so convinced?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 22 2020, @06:57PM (5 children)
"Falsify my spurious correlation or else absolute biological determinism is true". This isn't how a scientist thinks. This is how a lazy-ass racist thinks. Goddamn, what a shitty and worthless position.
This is up there with "number of leaves on an oak tree correlates with temperature, and number of leaves on an oak tree correlates with height, and since this tree is 80 feet tall, it must be summer" level of failure to reason.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 22 2020, @07:13PM (4 children)
What are you talking about? How is it a "spurious correlation" when the results are one of the most widely replicated in social science?
You've yet to refute any data and we are just getting started [nature.com]
Cute - will be mentioning my "unscience" at your next flat earth society meeting?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 22 2020, @07:19PM (3 children)
It speaks volumes that, when criticizing your lazy-ass racial theories, you assume I'm denying the correlation of IQ to life outcomes. There's the whole bird-watching argument to have about that, but at least it's predictive, unlike Murray's rambling bullshit.
What it says to me is that you don't actually read criticism of your theories, but just have canned replies that you assume address all criticism. Equally brainless, but, as a huge win for internet argumentation, much more annoying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 22 2020, @07:54PM (2 children)
Isn't that exactly what you're doing? Postulate mysterium all you like [twitter.com] but I'll withhold judgment until I see some hard data.
What racial theories? If we are not discussing observable traits then why do
positive discriminationaffirmative action SAT penalties correlate inversely with observed racial IQ scores? What "racial theories" did Harvard & UNC apply and why did California ban affirmative action in '96?My theories? I haven't presented any of my own theories.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 22 2020, @08:37PM (1 child)
Why should I?
My own theories are irrelevant to Murray being a dumbass inventing racist just-so stories.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 22 2020, @09:56PM
Sowell performed the most eloquent dismissals. [claremontreviewofbooks.com] The problem is that the available data remains consistent which isn't something to be dismissed if we actually want to understand what's going on.
(Score: 3, Touché) by aristarchus on Wednesday January 22 2020, @07:53PM
Hmmm, probably something wrong with their DNA, then.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday January 22 2020, @08:41PM
Because fMRI-ing a dead trout under interrogation was exclusively a prank, not a warning about faulty methodology, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford