5 ms·

Isn't this exactly the premise of the movie Gattaca? Great movie, BTW.

• ekianjo 10y ago
  Except that no amount of scrubbing should make you undetectable.
  • Pxtl 10y ago
    The trick was he overwhelmed his real traces with fake ones from Jude Law's character. Vaccuuming out his keyboard and then dumping in somebody else's skin and hair. Traces of the janitor would be reasonable to expect, right?
    • DashRattlesnake 10y ago
      > Traces of the janitor would be reasonable to expect, right? Wasn't that also a major plot point?
• agumonkey 10y ago
  Sadly a lot of SF movies are reaching reality, and it doesn't feel that good.
• mikeash 10y ago
  IMO Gattaca makes a great case for genetic testing. An idiot with a major heart condition bluffs his way onto a space mission where he's likely to die and endanger the rest of the crew. If the testing had been a bit more thorough (say, if the doctor in charge of testing had done his job) then the mission wouldn't have been endangered. It's strange to see everyone hold up this movie as an argument against this sort of testing.
  • DrJokepu 10y ago
    It's been a long while since I saw that movie, but I'm fairly certain that it was way more complicated than your synopsis.
    • mikeash 10y ago
      There's a ton of other stuff in the movie that attempts to make the case against testing, but IMO it's all overshadowed by the main plot wherein a failure of testing likely results in a major problem for an important mission.
      • rosser 10y ago
        You'll have to remind of of the part in the movie where dude's presence on the mission is a problem for the mission. Or, wait, is that just your conjecture? Sorry. My bad.
        • mikeash 10y ago
          He was the navigator. That seems kind of important. If it wasn't, why would they bother to bring him along?
          • rosser 10y ago
            You either missed or evaded my point, simply to re-state your own. (Also: nice shadow-edit.)
            • mikeash 10y ago
              I don't see where I'm evading or missing your point. Perhaps you could explain? And I didn't make any shadow edits. You sound rather paranoid.
              • maxerickson 10y ago
                Did he die during the mission? Did he really have a heart condition?
                • mikeash 10y ago
                  He really had a heart condition which put him at high risk of death during the mission. That is stated in the movie. We don't know if he died during the mission, but I didn't say that, merely that it was likely.
  • whatismyip 10y ago
    Is there a reason why you decided to completely overlook the aspects in the film around discrimination and segregation of the labour force?
    • mikeash 10y ago
      That's all in the background, whereas what I described is the main plot. The movie tries to make a point against testing, but the main plot rather wrecks it.
  • barrkel 10y ago
    The conflict at the heart of the movie is between the rational vs the emotional. In so far as it makes an argument, it's a weak one; but the core it is in the discussion between the brothers about the race / rescue from the sea. It's rational to curtail ambitions; it's rational to give up if you see no hope of an endeavour succeeding. But Ethan Hawke's character didn't let his rational mental model limit what he could achieve; he tested himself by doing, and found that it was possible, and thus he was able to outswim his brother. The swimming story is the inner story for the bigger outer story, but that's the heart of it. The bitter cripple who lends his blood points a very harsh light at rational disillusionment. Any system for genetic selection will impose a model of what ought and what ought not be; we should be wary of what it selects for, because it might not be what matters most.
    • mikeash 10y ago
      I agree with that. It's unfortunate that the movie attempts to illustrate this emotional drive to achieve with something that puts others in danger. If the protagonist had only been risking himself, it would have gotten the message across far better. It's particularly unfortunate because it would have been so easy to fix. The risk to others is unnecessary to anything the movie is saying. That it wasn't fixed says to me that either the writers couldn't be bothered to think things through, or they believe that personal ambition is worth any price, even the lives of people who don't consent. Neither alternative is very attractive.
      • barrkel 10y ago
        You're committing the same mistake that is expressly argued against in the story. The story is directly criticises rationality taken too far; it's advocating a triumph of will to achieve. Who are you to say that the mission is more likely to fail without someone with that will to succeed, and instead with yet another rationalist who will lose hope when their models tell them it won't work out? Who will give up the swim when they see no way back to shore? Teams generally work better with a mix of different people, rather than uniformity. I'd be willing to bet that if the scenario was real, the mix would work better.
  • maxerickson 10y ago
    It's never shown that he actually has a heart condition. The character is also clearly not an idiot.
    • mikeash 10y ago
      It's stated repeatedly. Cmd-F "heart": http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Gattaca.html http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Gattaca.html
      • maxerickson 10y ago
        That's a draft of the script though, not the final film.
        • mikeash 10y ago
          Which of the instances in that script are not in the final film? As I recall, all of them are. The fact that his heart sucks is a pretty major part of the movie.
          • maxerickson 10y ago
            Compare how much of the geneticist scene is struck out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRpQMW77T_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRpQMW77T_o At 1 minute in that clip the nurse talks about probability of heart disorder. 99% probability.
    • gergles 10y ago
      I think the treadmill scene very very strongly suggests he has a heart condition, given that he partially collapses in the locker room and we can hear him having a palpitation.
  • rbanffy 10y ago
    > It's strange to see everyone hold up this movie as an argument against this sort of testing. I read the movie as a criticism towards a society that grew accustomed to certainty, to a very narrow notion of physical perfection and the removal of all risk in favor of that. In that sense, the testing depicted in the movie induces society to an error, optimizing for a narrow set of traits, the expectation of fashionable accomplishments, where the explorers are not those who yearn to explore, but those whose genetic makeup makes them best suitable.
  • rz2k 10y ago
    I think it shows that their model had too few features, and was an excellent example of the streetlight effect of genetic testing. Because genetic results are so easy to obtain the signal is readily overweighted by people for decision making. I would far rather have Ethan Hawke's character as a coast guard swimmer rescuing me in a storm than his brother, even if his brother had no similar heart defect. I would do that because I saw two instances in the movie of him out-performing his brother in feats of swimming endurance when under pressure. His character is statistically more likely to die on the mission. Just to get a handle on the numbers let's say that with their filtering a 30 year old has about 1/20,000 chance of dying in a given month, and he might have a 1/1000 chance. We haven't seen anything about how he outperformed other candidates, but we can consider the respect of his peers and that he has succeeded in spite of appreciable time spent on establishing an identity and tracking down his DNA. It probably doesn't matter if he dies on a routine mission. It is the rare mission with an anomaly where someone who is truly exceptional matters. If he is only 20 times more likely to provide the unusual solution that saves the mission, then it is a wash. Anyway, my point is that one perspective on filling positions is to develop a long list of dis-qualifiers like health forecasts (and minimum competence). That is different than choosing the most extraordinary people possible (where negatives play a role in that determination). I know there is a tendency toward the former when choosing people for very selective and highly sought after roles, but it probably only appropriate when trying to fill out a large headcount with minimal resources for selecting the people. Those who can excel during crunch time are probably far more important for high level positions that are routine but punctuated requirements for extraordinary performance, than the people who look good to a hiring manager playing it safe and relying on clear but potentially less important signals.
    • mikeash 10y ago
      Does this just come down to a difference in the assessment of the protagonists chances? I came away from the movie thinking there was a ~75% chance he'd die en route.
      • rz2k 10y ago
        It must, because I'd feel different if the actual likelihood of him dying were that high. I haven't watched the movie in a while, but was it hyperbole and were they using statistics as a figure of speech? With intellectual laziness being the defining characteristic of the movie's society, exaggerating risks as post hoc justifications of biases against "in-valids" seems possible. DNA makes more sense than, let's say, blood type or astrological sign for hiring decisions, since there is a conceivable mechanism for determining future job performance. However, I wonder if the permission society that they lived in was capable of doing good analysis. How would they cope with the relative weight of environment or even gut flora when DNA practically part of a civic religion with people being randomly tested on the street? Given a situation like the declining accuracy of Google Flu Trends over time, would they insist that the predictions were right, and the indicators of inaccuracy were wrong?