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Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the recurrence of torture. It's very clearly shown it isn't reliable. We train our military to resist coercive questioning, to plant misleading answers, and avoid use of yes or no answers to prevent video edited confessions later. Is it reasonable to suppose that none of our opponents will be aware of these techniques? An untrained person is just as likely to tell you anything that might make you stop as the crucial fact you need (presuming they even know it).

It might save lives. It might lead to mistreatment of many innocent people. How do you know which beforehand? If you can't know, are you happy with the abandonment of innocent until proven guilty?

Last, I've noticed an increasingly positive portrayal of torture in TV of late, say the last ten years. It's neater. The good guys seem to do it as a matter of course. It's more likely to be effective. Is this coincidental? Am I just watching the wrong shows?

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I was disturbed to see this when I took the kids to see Zootopia this weekend. The protagonists threaten to harm a petty criminal, who then coughs up the information they need. It made me wonder -- the writers seem to have been so careful with their message, so should I take this to mean they endorse torture along with racial tolerance?

So I wasn't the only one? That scene jerked me out of happy animation land and made me think of The Wire.

No, they were trying to make a plausible scene. Many people do give up information when threatened with torture. You probably even remember just such an instance from your grammar school days!

However, because most people, even on HN, have a cognitive bias that forces them to prefer believing that their favored course of action has no downsides ("halo" bias), it has been popular to repeat the high-status meme that Torture Doesn't Work.

Which is true -- it often doesn't "work" for many of the reasons given. But sometimes it does.

Any position against torture that actually plugs into a consistent worldmodel will also accept that it does, in fact, sometimes work, and also have a way of appropriately weighing the ups and downs of any course of action without being tripped into rebranding every down as an up for the CoA you like, and up as a down for every CoA you don't like.

Regardless of whether it "works" sometimes, I consider torture unacceptable, inhumane, and bad policy. I don't give a fig for plausibility. This is a messagey children's movie with talking sloths. Having the good guys sweat a perp by threatening his life is something you don't just back into!

The protagonist also blackmails another character into helping her.

Not really the message I'd expect from a Disney movie.

Well, it was a sociocritical movie.

It's simply lazy writing. "Capture" is an easy way to show progress over a season. The public now knows torture happens, so not showing it seems less realistic. And TV shows are under 40 minutes per hour show. So, it's hard to show things that dead end.

IMO, I think we are going to start seeing more plot lines where torture results in bad Intel for dramatic tension.

Well, it's debatable. Take the Battle of Algiers, during the Algerian War of Independence. Several bombs go off every day. French paratroopers take over, kidnap, torture with electricity and most often assassinate a bunch of people (total death toll ~ 3,000 people, a bunch of them innocent). Three months later, the FLN support network in Algiers has ceased to exist.

On the other hand, a successful operation by French intelligence led to the FLN torturing a number of their members (based on forged documents), which started to denounce additional members, etc, resulting in the torture and execution of hundreds of loyal FLN members.

So, operationally, torture can work (but it's not a sure thing), and it has been part of (AFAIK) the toolkit of all counter-insurgency efforts to this day. The problem is that whoever uses it instantly loses the moral high ground.

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