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@brobdingnagians raised a question on genetic discrimination based on COVID-suceptability, which of course got downvoted into oblivion. But this is indeed an is

@brobdingnagians raised a question on genetic discrimination based on COVID-suceptability, which of course got downvoted into oblivion. But this is indeed an issue and a tough gray line to walk as technology continues to advance. (It's probably more like a fractal than a line.) Do we end up in GATTACA, 1984, Brave New World, Dune, Black Mirror, or some combination? Maybe we figure out how to dodge most of those bullets and end up in Star Trek? In the US, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) may be of some tiny value on the particular point raised.

rajin444 5y ago
That's why it's so important for us to come to terms with how we view privilege. Society currently only thinks a limited set of things - parental wealth, social status, skin color, etc. - are forms of privilege and we should work to reduce them (currently in the name of "equity"). Once society starts to understand that everything is privilege we need to rethink how we treat privilege, else we will continue destroying one another in the name of equity. Hard work, intelligence, willpower, perseverance are, at the root, all genetic. Environmental factors may influence these traits, but how you react to environmental factors is also genetic...unless you believe in religious concepts such as free will. We need to stop treating privilege as something that needs to be corrected and instead focus on helping those most in need. The logical conclusion of equity is nothingness (if that's even a thing). Stopping short of that is simply giving more to one side at the expense of the other.
- jhfxddgn 5y ago
  The first step is to use a word besides "privelege" since that's an ideologically loaded term that, regardless of the many definitions its believers and confused non-believers will offer you, is functionally a form of original sin that can never be truly wiped clean, requiring eternal penance from the privileged. If you don't agree with that concept, you shouldn't cede the linguistic territory by using the term coined by the people who invented that concept
  - sreque 5y ago
    Michael Knowles latest book, "Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds", delves extensively into this subject. The PC culture partially wins by corrupting language; redefining words to mean new things, often the opposite of what they used to mean. "Privilege" is one of those corrupted words. So is "equity". These words used to mean something far different than they are being used for now.
  - AstralStorm 5y ago
    Every term used to describe social situations will become ideologically and politically loaded. Originally it was a word used to describe what I mentioned in the other branch, social privilege, a general set of rules that affect you which enable concentration of means and power. It is not a result of these rules which was the main point of confusion. It's not an original sin then, the rules can be changed to be more equitable. (Though some changes done under this name are either ineffective or wrong in principle.) Then someone rightly decided to call whiteness a privilege (a complex of rules pertinent to people declared by society as white, by contrast with the opposite of them), and then somehow it was conflated with immutable characteristics. Yes, a person with light skin color might not actually be or act "white". Another example: age cannot be changed (at least without), but ageism can. Age is not a privilege, set of rules pertinent to may be. (Some positive, others negative, protective or harmful.) The opposite of privilege as sum total (which is beneficial rules) is mostly kyriarchy (set of oppressive rules, mostly hierarchies). Perhaps that is a better focus, at least for now.
    - dcow 5y ago
      I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. For me, at least, rhetoric matters. I don't care for some as it were commentary on the state of language and ideology. If rhetorical poison is being deployed against my ideology, then I want to shed light on it stop it. Things, as most people understand them, are not becoming more equitable. That’s a real problem despite the obtuse linguistic tricks deployed to justify a post-modern agenda.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      Now imagine a future world where (biological) age or skin color of an already living individual really can be changed on demand. But possibly at a huge cost. Given the thread we are in and current strides in gene therapy, we might be there sooner than we expect.
- sreque 5y ago
  Has anyone traced the history as to when equity, which has historically meant fairness, got corrupted to mean "equality of outcome", which is really the opposite of fairness? I've recently discovered Thomas Sowell and I'm really itching to find time to read his book on the subject: Discrimination and disparities.
  - ARandomerDude 5y ago
    Good question. It's interesting that we also use the word in the sense of a profit or return on an investment (e.g., "equity in your home"). I take that as a nod to its former meaning of "justly conducted," since without proper methods (in that sense "fair") business accounting would be impossible.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Who says equity means equality of outcome?
    - corty 5y ago
      Almost everyone nowadays who dabbles in the social justice business. Most people are already equal before the law, do have equal chances, do get equal treatment. But that wasn't enough, so now the demand is equal outcomes, not matter if it leads to inequality in chances, law and treatment.
      - germinalphrase 5y ago
        The social justic argument is that this is explicitly not true and reforms are neccesary to make it more true: “most people are equal before the law, do have equal chances, do get equal treatment”.
        inglor_cz 5y ago
        But this argument often rests on inequality of observable outcomes.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  What is helping people most in need other then giving more to one side at the expense of other? I joke here, ultimately all society is a form of altruism. Equity is not equality and never has been. Equity in life means making it less likely that random events are liable to make it impossible to live a life. The other word for it is fairness. We don't achieve that. We have many rules that are obviously stacked for some group or another, and these synergize with each other. The simplest one that is technically available to everyone is inheritance - but of course poor have nothing to leave to their children. Nations make rules that stack the deck for their citizens. Social roles, jobs and their interactions with status are often easily stacked too. And so on. Genetics are often relatively weak compared to these rules - it mostly comes into play when comparing people from roughly similar backgrounds.
  - rajin444 5y ago
    > What is helping people most in need other then giving more to one side at the expense of other? That's a great question and a lot more philosophical than I'm going to get into in HN comments. I was trying to emphasize how framing is important - focusing on reducing privilege is much different than helping those who are starving. Making LeBron James wear ankle weights will further equity in the NBA, but I don't think anyone wants that. > The other word for it is fairness Fairness in opportunity, or fairness in outcome? Neither is possible with the randomness of the world. The only way to reduce the effect of randomness is to make us all exactly equivalent - I can't think of any good ways to do that. > We have many rules that are obviously stacked for some group or another Life is inherently stacked for some group or another. Even if we manage to make perfectly "fair" rules (which I don't believe is possible), there will still be disparities between however you want to define groups. > Genetics are often relatively weak compared to these rules Depending on the implementation of the rule, I somewhat agree. I don't think our science is advanced enough on the genetic side to determine how much of an impact these rules have.
    - UnFleshedOne 5y ago
      > but I don't think anyone wants that I really hope that's true...
- fay59 5y ago
  Genetic determinism is pseudoscience that is generally associated with eugenism and scientific racism. Giving this much importance to genes is a fringe belief.
- JPKab 5y ago
  I'm an identical twin. When you have a genetic duplicate of yourself walking around, it starts to make you wonder about how much is genetically determined vs other factors. One thing I've noticed is that a segment of highly educated people seem to attribute far more to genetics than they should be. Your statement "unless you believe in religious concepts such as free will" is pretty shocking, considering that you have embraced a science-based version of Calvinist fatalism. That being said, I agree with your broader point of helping those in need. It should be noted that the concept of "privilege" isn't the presence of something, but the absence of discrimination and barriers.
  - rajin444 5y ago
    What do you think dictates the actions we take if not genetics? If your answer is free will, or something similar, I agree you might be right but I don't see how to discuss that further.
    - JPKab 5y ago
      I think it's not a univariate problem. Our society is plagued by people who desperately want to simplify every problem into a univariate issue. Genetics has an influence, along with many other factors, because reality is multivariate and complicated. My twin is significantly overweight. Has been since we were 15. I'm not and haven't ever been. I always enjoyed working out, he didn't. Your univariate view of the world can't explain this. My twin converted to Mormonism a few years ago. I'm not religious at all. Does genetics explain this? Starting with our college years, he and I have divergent life experiences. I fathered a child at a very young age, and the child was born extremely premature, and I was subjected to a life and death medical crisis at this age. He wasn't dealing with that. My father views this as being a tremendously powerful factor in our rather potent differences today. I don't seek to be antagonistic, but my entire life story defies your thesis. Doesn't mean you are wrong, but it certainly means that you are "overfitting" in the classic statistical modeling sense. And to be fair and defend big chunks of your thesis, my twin and I do have a lot of similarities in our lives that are probably strongly influenced by genetics. But one thing we agree on is that a massive factor in both of us being successful is our difficult childhood. My mother was a schizophrenic who left us when we were toddlers, and doomed my father to raise 5 kids by himself. Our family's income put us below the poverty line, and we were subjected to a lot of trauma and occasional abuse when my father would relapse (alcoholism). Coincidentally, my brother's ex-wife was a genetic determinist, and a big point of friction was her constant projection of our family history with mental illness onto every behavior she didn't like from my brother or myself. He got a small tattoo on his arm for his 35th birthday(against her wishes), for example, and she attributed this to mental illness. Because that's what univariate thinkers do: They explain reality with a univariate model, and make everything fit that. It's a shitty model, and if it was productized for data science reasons, it would fail miserably.
- groby_b 5y ago
  "We need to stop treating privilege as something that needs to be corrected and instead focus on helping those most in need." That is what equity work focuses on? It's not about tearing down and taking away, but about ensuring equal access and opportunity. It only takes away when unfair access has existed - a common example here are "legacy admissions" for university. Inherited spots, in a nutshell.
  - rajin444 5y ago
    The ability to work hard is not earned, it is genetic. If equity is our goal, we need to make this ability equivalent across all people. I don't think that's what we want, so the term equity is incorrect.
    - groby_b 5y ago
      Try reading comprehension. I said equal access and opportunity, not "equivalent across all people". Also, [citation needed] on your genetics claim.
  - UnFleshedOne 5y ago
    You have an outdated view on social justice issues -- in fact dangerously close to a view a classic liberal would hold. Current gestalt moved past this outdated view and is now about equal outcomes.
- 86J8oyZv 5y ago
  Um, is your argument that "we could technically classify these random other things as 'privilege' if we really stretch the word, therefore more obviously problematic things related to privilege like family wealth, social status, and race don't need to be addressed?" Because that's how it reads. You also built a straw man by deliberately misunderstanding the word "equity." The word has been clearly defined since the Middle Ages and means simply "share of ownership." i.e. To be equitable, a business must pay all its employees both salary and shares in the company. Same as us software devs get.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Why is a lucky genetic draw less of a privilege than a large inheritance? Look at it this way - how much would a rich heir pay to go from ugly and stupid to beautiful and intelligent? I can't imagine a sum large enough that they wouldn't be willing to trade it away.
    - cortesoft 5y ago
      It isn’t about whether one is more of a ‘privilege’ than the other. It is about the source of the privilege. We are trying to correct privileges given by society, not the ones given by nature.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - inglor_cz 5y ago
        "We are trying to correct privileges given by society, not the ones given by nature." We try to correct privileges given by nature all the time, especially helping disabled people.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Yeah, this is another of those "counterintuitive" takes that are so very popular. Expresses what sounds like legitimate concern about discrimination on the basis of genetics and then "flips the script" halfway through it to tearing down the entire idea of worrying about discrimination. Seductively intellectual nonsense.
- anyonecancode 5y ago
  > Society currently only thinks a limited set of things - parental wealth, social status, skin color, etc. - are forms of privilege and we should work to reduce them. That is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that society reserves privileged status to specific groups and denies this status to others, and that things like parental wealth, social status, skin color, etc are _markers_ of this. In the United States, I believe the latter aligns with the facts we can observe. This is basically the argument of Isabel Wilkerson in "Caste"[0]. I'm not really up for trying to make the case for why I find this view convincing right now, in this comment I just wanted to highlight that it is a different argument than the one you made. If Wilkerson is correct, the actual markers of privilege are quite arbitrary, and phenomena such as racism arise from this rather than being themselves the root issue. The goal then is not so much ending discrimination as it is tearing down the caste system that fuels it. [0]https://www.isabelwilkerson.com/ https://www.isabelwilkerson.com/
- zamfi 5y ago
  > Hard work, intelligence, willpower, perseverance are, at the root, all genetic. Environmental factors may influence these traits, but how you react to environmental factors is also genetic...unless you believe in religious concepts such as free will. This is quite an extreme perspective. By this definition, the ability to read is genetic, the ability to walk is genetic, to talk, etc — these are all genetic, but nearly everyone learns these things because of the “environmental factors” you dismiss as “influence”. We have way more in common, genetically, than we have differences. Privilege primarily comes from environmental and socially constructed factors, not genetics — unless you’re talking about the Olympic Games, and I’m not sure many are arguing for equity there with respect to genetic gifts (with perhaps the notable and wonderful exception of the Paralympics). If you think the entire point of “equity” is to tear people down who have too much privilege, respectfully I think you arguing against a straw man and are missing the point.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
  But the groups in need have a strong correlation to non-privileged groups and their history. Other than the general tenor of racial anxiety that runs through HN, I'm not sure how blood markers ends up in a discussion about privilege in western society. >...Hard work, intelligence, willpower, perseverance are, at the root, all genetic. Kind of leads down a dark path, but isn't surprising.
rossdavidh 5y ago
Do we have any evidence this is due to a genetic difference? Antibodies are an immune system response, and the immune system is a learning system. Past history has a big (and complex and hard to predict) impact on how it responds to things. It could be genetic I suppose, but my guess is it would not be.
- subroutine 5y ago
  As far as i can tell, the study did not collect any patient genotype information nor does it claim antibody expression differences were do to genetic deferences between patients.
monkeybutton 5y ago
>Maybe we figure out how to dodge most of those bullets and end up in Star Trek? Even in Star Trek society didn't dodge those bullets, they just plowed through them and learned from their past.
enumjorge 5y ago
I'm confused at the genetics angle that both you and brobdingnagians took on this. I'll admit that I don't fully understand the science behind the article, and I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong, but I don't see anything in the article that makes a direct link between the blood marker and genetics. As far as the down votes go, it's a little strange that an article talking about new findings about our understanding of COVID prompted a response about the government controlling our bodies. Similar to the genetics angle, I don't see anything in the article that even suggests this information will be used to keep someone inside their house. I guess it could be, but I don't get the point. Should we stop the advancement of science because there's some remote possibility that the Government will use it to "tell us what to do"? I mean you bring an interesting point, but at the same time, we now have an indicator that may tell us more about how one person might react to COVID. I don't see why that's causing us to worry about some 1984-ish dystopian future.
kens 5y ago
It's pretty bizarre that an article saying "more antibodies means less infection" (with nothing to do with genetics) spawns a huge comment thread on privilege and racism.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Imagine topics as celestial bodies with certain gravity. Gravity of the racism-privilege double star is pretty strong right now, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world. An innocent flyby is almost impossible.
ajross 5y ago
I didn't see the one that got downvoted. But I'm horrified that this one seems to be at the top. Who's talking about genetics? This is about antibodies! It's not looking at the DNA of the immunized person. At all. It's not genetics. It's identifying the specific chemical results of their immunication, not the person. At all. Do people not understand that? This is a ridiculous digression from the subject at hand, just to talk about some kind of Sci-Fi fantasy dystopia?
- krapp 5y ago
  >Do people not understand that? This is a ridiculous digression from the subject at hand, just to talk about some kind of Sci-Fi fantasy dystopia? Welcome to Hacker News. I guarantee you almost no one bothered to read past the words "blood marker" in the title. You can tell because the article has pop-ups and no one is ranting about them.
- CrazyPyroLinux 5y ago
  Sorry about that; apparently this is why we can't have nice things. I just wanted to reply to the original downvoted comment, but when I couldn't because it got flagged, that triggered my contrarian response here. But I don't think it's such a ridiculous digression from the subject at hand - The original article was just a "water is wet" study saying that the more antibodies you have floating around in your blood the better able you are to fight off a virus. When you have that kind of article people will naturally digress in their discussions. And with COVID, dystopia is never far off-topic. (Just depends on your politics whether you see it more like V for Vendetta, or more like Pandemic or maybe Omega Man.)
novok 5y ago
About as much discrimination from having a peanut allergy, asthma, glasses or the many other genetic weaknesses to diseases, foods and other wise. So going by previous experience nobody would really care in most of human societies. The caring only starts really when it's directly related to performance on a physical job (ex: lifeguard, industrial scuba diver) or it starts effecting your mental behavior.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
You are on Ark B. Deal with it.

rajin444 5y ago

That's why it's so important for us to come to terms with how we view privilege. Society currently only thinks a limited set of things - parental wealth, social status, skin color, etc. - are forms of privilege and we should work to reduce them (currently in the name of "equity"). Once society starts to understand that everything is privilege we need to rethink how we treat privilege, else we will continue destroying one another in the name of equity. Hard work, intelligence, willpower, perseverance are, at the root, all genetic. Environmental factors may influence these traits, but how you react to environmental factors is also genetic...unless you believe in religious concepts such as free will. We need to stop treating privilege as something that needs to be corrected and instead focus on helping those most in need. The logical conclusion of equity is nothingness (if that's even a thing). Stopping short of that is simply giving more to one side at the expense of the other.

jhfxddgn 5y ago
The first step is to use a word besides "privelege" since that's an ideologically loaded term that, regardless of the many definitions its believers and confused non-believers will offer you, is functionally a form of original sin that can never be truly wiped clean, requiring eternal penance from the privileged. If you don't agree with that concept, you shouldn't cede the linguistic territory by using the term coined by the people who invented that concept
- sreque 5y ago
  Michael Knowles latest book, "Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds", delves extensively into this subject. The PC culture partially wins by corrupting language; redefining words to mean new things, often the opposite of what they used to mean. "Privilege" is one of those corrupted words. So is "equity". These words used to mean something far different than they are being used for now.
- AstralStorm 5y ago
  Every term used to describe social situations will become ideologically and politically loaded. Originally it was a word used to describe what I mentioned in the other branch, social privilege, a general set of rules that affect you which enable concentration of means and power. It is not a result of these rules which was the main point of confusion. It's not an original sin then, the rules can be changed to be more equitable. (Though some changes done under this name are either ineffective or wrong in principle.) Then someone rightly decided to call whiteness a privilege (a complex of rules pertinent to people declared by society as white, by contrast with the opposite of them), and then somehow it was conflated with immutable characteristics. Yes, a person with light skin color might not actually be or act "white". Another example: age cannot be changed (at least without), but ageism can. Age is not a privilege, set of rules pertinent to may be. (Some positive, others negative, protective or harmful.) The opposite of privilege as sum total (which is beneficial rules) is mostly kyriarchy (set of oppressive rules, mostly hierarchies). Perhaps that is a better focus, at least for now.
  - dcow 5y ago
    I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. For me, at least, rhetoric matters. I don't care for some as it were commentary on the state of language and ideology. If rhetorical poison is being deployed against my ideology, then I want to shed light on it stop it. Things, as most people understand them, are not becoming more equitable. That’s a real problem despite the obtuse linguistic tricks deployed to justify a post-modern agenda.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Now imagine a future world where (biological) age or skin color of an already living individual really can be changed on demand. But possibly at a huge cost. Given the thread we are in and current strides in gene therapy, we might be there sooner than we expect.
sreque 5y ago
Has anyone traced the history as to when equity, which has historically meant fairness, got corrupted to mean "equality of outcome", which is really the opposite of fairness? I've recently discovered Thomas Sowell and I'm really itching to find time to read his book on the subject: Discrimination and disparities.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  Good question. It's interesting that we also use the word in the sense of a profit or return on an investment (e.g., "equity in your home"). I take that as a nod to its former meaning of "justly conducted," since without proper methods (in that sense "fair") business accounting would be impossible.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Who says equity means equality of outcome?
  - corty 5y ago
    Almost everyone nowadays who dabbles in the social justice business. Most people are already equal before the law, do have equal chances, do get equal treatment. But that wasn't enough, so now the demand is equal outcomes, not matter if it leads to inequality in chances, law and treatment.
    - germinalphrase 5y ago
      The social justic argument is that this is explicitly not true and reforms are neccesary to make it more true: “most people are equal before the law, do have equal chances, do get equal treatment”.
      - inglor_cz 5y ago
        But this argument often rests on inequality of observable outcomes.
AstralStorm 5y ago
What is helping people most in need other then giving more to one side at the expense of other? I joke here, ultimately all society is a form of altruism. Equity is not equality and never has been. Equity in life means making it less likely that random events are liable to make it impossible to live a life. The other word for it is fairness. We don't achieve that. We have many rules that are obviously stacked for some group or another, and these synergize with each other. The simplest one that is technically available to everyone is inheritance - but of course poor have nothing to leave to their children. Nations make rules that stack the deck for their citizens. Social roles, jobs and their interactions with status are often easily stacked too. And so on. Genetics are often relatively weak compared to these rules - it mostly comes into play when comparing people from roughly similar backgrounds.
- rajin444 5y ago
  > What is helping people most in need other then giving more to one side at the expense of other? That's a great question and a lot more philosophical than I'm going to get into in HN comments. I was trying to emphasize how framing is important - focusing on reducing privilege is much different than helping those who are starving. Making LeBron James wear ankle weights will further equity in the NBA, but I don't think anyone wants that. > The other word for it is fairness Fairness in opportunity, or fairness in outcome? Neither is possible with the randomness of the world. The only way to reduce the effect of randomness is to make us all exactly equivalent - I can't think of any good ways to do that. > We have many rules that are obviously stacked for some group or another Life is inherently stacked for some group or another. Even if we manage to make perfectly "fair" rules (which I don't believe is possible), there will still be disparities between however you want to define groups. > Genetics are often relatively weak compared to these rules Depending on the implementation of the rule, I somewhat agree. I don't think our science is advanced enough on the genetic side to determine how much of an impact these rules have.
  - UnFleshedOne 5y ago
    > but I don't think anyone wants that I really hope that's true...
fay59 5y ago
Genetic determinism is pseudoscience that is generally associated with eugenism and scientific racism. Giving this much importance to genes is a fringe belief.
JPKab 5y ago
I'm an identical twin. When you have a genetic duplicate of yourself walking around, it starts to make you wonder about how much is genetically determined vs other factors. One thing I've noticed is that a segment of highly educated people seem to attribute far more to genetics than they should be. Your statement "unless you believe in religious concepts such as free will" is pretty shocking, considering that you have embraced a science-based version of Calvinist fatalism. That being said, I agree with your broader point of helping those in need. It should be noted that the concept of "privilege" isn't the presence of something, but the absence of discrimination and barriers.
- rajin444 5y ago
  What do you think dictates the actions we take if not genetics? If your answer is free will, or something similar, I agree you might be right but I don't see how to discuss that further.
  - JPKab 5y ago
    I think it's not a univariate problem. Our society is plagued by people who desperately want to simplify every problem into a univariate issue. Genetics has an influence, along with many other factors, because reality is multivariate and complicated. My twin is significantly overweight. Has been since we were 15. I'm not and haven't ever been. I always enjoyed working out, he didn't. Your univariate view of the world can't explain this. My twin converted to Mormonism a few years ago. I'm not religious at all. Does genetics explain this? Starting with our college years, he and I have divergent life experiences. I fathered a child at a very young age, and the child was born extremely premature, and I was subjected to a life and death medical crisis at this age. He wasn't dealing with that. My father views this as being a tremendously powerful factor in our rather potent differences today. I don't seek to be antagonistic, but my entire life story defies your thesis. Doesn't mean you are wrong, but it certainly means that you are "overfitting" in the classic statistical modeling sense. And to be fair and defend big chunks of your thesis, my twin and I do have a lot of similarities in our lives that are probably strongly influenced by genetics. But one thing we agree on is that a massive factor in both of us being successful is our difficult childhood. My mother was a schizophrenic who left us when we were toddlers, and doomed my father to raise 5 kids by himself. Our family's income put us below the poverty line, and we were subjected to a lot of trauma and occasional abuse when my father would relapse (alcoholism). Coincidentally, my brother's ex-wife was a genetic determinist, and a big point of friction was her constant projection of our family history with mental illness onto every behavior she didn't like from my brother or myself. He got a small tattoo on his arm for his 35th birthday(against her wishes), for example, and she attributed this to mental illness. Because that's what univariate thinkers do: They explain reality with a univariate model, and make everything fit that. It's a shitty model, and if it was productized for data science reasons, it would fail miserably.
groby_b 5y ago
"We need to stop treating privilege as something that needs to be corrected and instead focus on helping those most in need." That is what equity work focuses on? It's not about tearing down and taking away, but about ensuring equal access and opportunity. It only takes away when unfair access has existed - a common example here are "legacy admissions" for university. Inherited spots, in a nutshell.
- rajin444 5y ago
  The ability to work hard is not earned, it is genetic. If equity is our goal, we need to make this ability equivalent across all people. I don't think that's what we want, so the term equity is incorrect.
  - groby_b 5y ago
    Try reading comprehension. I said equal access and opportunity, not "equivalent across all people". Also, [citation needed] on your genetics claim.
- UnFleshedOne 5y ago
  You have an outdated view on social justice issues -- in fact dangerously close to a view a classic liberal would hold. Current gestalt moved past this outdated view and is now about equal outcomes.
86J8oyZv 5y ago
Um, is your argument that "we could technically classify these random other things as 'privilege' if we really stretch the word, therefore more obviously problematic things related to privilege like family wealth, social status, and race don't need to be addressed?" Because that's how it reads. You also built a straw man by deliberately misunderstanding the word "equity." The word has been clearly defined since the Middle Ages and means simply "share of ownership." i.e. To be equitable, a business must pay all its employees both salary and shares in the company. Same as us software devs get.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  Why is a lucky genetic draw less of a privilege than a large inheritance? Look at it this way - how much would a rich heir pay to go from ugly and stupid to beautiful and intelligent? I can't imagine a sum large enough that they wouldn't be willing to trade it away.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    It isn’t about whether one is more of a ‘privilege’ than the other. It is about the source of the privilege. We are trying to correct privileges given by society, not the ones given by nature.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      "We are trying to correct privileges given by society, not the ones given by nature." We try to correct privileges given by nature all the time, especially helping disabled people.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Yeah, this is another of those "counterintuitive" takes that are so very popular. Expresses what sounds like legitimate concern about discrimination on the basis of genetics and then "flips the script" halfway through it to tearing down the entire idea of worrying about discrimination. Seductively intellectual nonsense.
anyonecancode 5y ago
> Society currently only thinks a limited set of things - parental wealth, social status, skin color, etc. - are forms of privilege and we should work to reduce them. That is one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that society reserves privileged status to specific groups and denies this status to others, and that things like parental wealth, social status, skin color, etc are _markers_ of this. In the United States, I believe the latter aligns with the facts we can observe. This is basically the argument of Isabel Wilkerson in "Caste"[0]. I'm not really up for trying to make the case for why I find this view convincing right now, in this comment I just wanted to highlight that it is a different argument than the one you made. If Wilkerson is correct, the actual markers of privilege are quite arbitrary, and phenomena such as racism arise from this rather than being themselves the root issue. The goal then is not so much ending discrimination as it is tearing down the caste system that fuels it. [0]https://www.isabelwilkerson.com/ https://www.isabelwilkerson.com/
zamfi 5y ago
> Hard work, intelligence, willpower, perseverance are, at the root, all genetic. Environmental factors may influence these traits, but how you react to environmental factors is also genetic...unless you believe in religious concepts such as free will. This is quite an extreme perspective. By this definition, the ability to read is genetic, the ability to walk is genetic, to talk, etc — these are all genetic, but nearly everyone learns these things because of the “environmental factors” you dismiss as “influence”. We have way more in common, genetically, than we have differences. Privilege primarily comes from environmental and socially constructed factors, not genetics — unless you’re talking about the Olympic Games, and I’m not sure many are arguing for equity there with respect to genetic gifts (with perhaps the notable and wonderful exception of the Paralympics). If you think the entire point of “equity” is to tear people down who have too much privilege, respectfully I think you arguing against a straw man and are missing the point.
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
But the groups in need have a strong correlation to non-privileged groups and their history. Other than the general tenor of racial anxiety that runs through HN, I'm not sure how blood markers ends up in a discussion about privilege in western society. >...Hard work, intelligence, willpower, perseverance are, at the root, all genetic. Kind of leads down a dark path, but isn't surprising.

rossdavidh 5y ago

Do we have any evidence this is due to a genetic difference? Antibodies are an immune system response, and the immune system is a learning system. Past history has a big (and complex and hard to predict) impact on how it responds to things. It could be genetic I suppose, but my guess is it would not be.

subroutine 5y ago
As far as i can tell, the study did not collect any patient genotype information nor does it claim antibody expression differences were do to genetic deferences between patients.

monkeybutton 5y ago

>Maybe we figure out how to dodge most of those bullets and end up in Star Trek? Even in Star Trek society didn't dodge those bullets, they just plowed through them and learned from their past.

enumjorge 5y ago

I'm confused at the genetics angle that both you and brobdingnagians took on this. I'll admit that I don't fully understand the science behind the article, and I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong, but I don't see anything in the article that makes a direct link between the blood marker and genetics. As far as the down votes go, it's a little strange that an article talking about new findings about our understanding of COVID prompted a response about the government controlling our bodies. Similar to the genetics angle, I don't see anything in the article that even suggests this information will be used to keep someone inside their house. I guess it could be, but I don't get the point. Should we stop the advancement of science because there's some remote possibility that the Government will use it to "tell us what to do"? I mean you bring an interesting point, but at the same time, we now have an indicator that may tell us more about how one person might react to COVID. I don't see why that's causing us to worry about some 1984-ish dystopian future.

kens 5y ago

It's pretty bizarre that an article saying "more antibodies means less infection" (with nothing to do with genetics) spawns a huge comment thread on privilege and racism.

inglor_cz 5y ago
Imagine topics as celestial bodies with certain gravity. Gravity of the racism-privilege double star is pretty strong right now, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world. An innocent flyby is almost impossible.

ajross 5y ago

I didn't see the one that got downvoted. But I'm horrified that this one seems to be at the top. Who's talking about genetics? This is about antibodies! It's not looking at the DNA of the immunized person. At all. It's not genetics. It's identifying the specific chemical results of their immunication, not the person. At all. Do people not understand that? This is a ridiculous digression from the subject at hand, just to talk about some kind of Sci-Fi fantasy dystopia?

krapp 5y ago
>Do people not understand that? This is a ridiculous digression from the subject at hand, just to talk about some kind of Sci-Fi fantasy dystopia? Welcome to Hacker News. I guarantee you almost no one bothered to read past the words "blood marker" in the title. You can tell because the article has pop-ups and no one is ranting about them.
CrazyPyroLinux 5y ago
Sorry about that; apparently this is why we can't have nice things. I just wanted to reply to the original downvoted comment, but when I couldn't because it got flagged, that triggered my contrarian response here. But I don't think it's such a ridiculous digression from the subject at hand - The original article was just a "water is wet" study saying that the more antibodies you have floating around in your blood the better able you are to fight off a virus. When you have that kind of article people will naturally digress in their discussions. And with COVID, dystopia is never far off-topic. (Just depends on your politics whether you see it more like V for Vendetta, or more like Pandemic or maybe Omega Man.)

novok 5y ago

About as much discrimination from having a peanut allergy, asthma, glasses or the many other genetic weaknesses to diseases, foods and other wise. So going by previous experience nobody would really care in most of human societies. The caring only starts really when it's directly related to performance on a physical job (ex: lifeguard, industrial scuba diver) or it starts effecting your mental behavior.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

You are on Ark B. Deal with it.