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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

I've heard many times that "torture doesn't work" but I never understood how or why. In my naive mind, if someone pulls out my fingernail and threatens to pull out more if I don't talk, I doubt I would have the courage or resilience to stay silent and take the torture.

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Part of the problem is not that you would hide the truth, but that you would make up lies just to appease your interrogator.

You want the torture to stop; the torturer doesn't know when to stop. They'll keep hurting you until they think you've told them everything, even if you already have.

Torture works at hurting people. That is what it is for, that is what is always has been for, that is what it always will be for. Everything else is just a way people try to justify things. "Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." - George Orwell

It depends what your goal is. If you're trying to get a specific person to say a certain thing, then it works well. If I wanted you to confess to a conspiracy with my political enemies so I could execute them, the fingernail removal strategy works fine.

If you're trying to figure out the truth in a fluid and confusing environment, then it doesn't work well because it motivates the victim to do whatever they can do to end the conversation as quickly as possible.

> I've heard many times that "torture doesn't work" but I never understood how or why

Imagine you're suspected of a crime or terrorist act, but you are innocent.

Your captors however are sure of your guilt and determined to find out what you know by torture.

The more you insist you know nothing and that you are innocent, they more they believe you are resistant to their torture methods and so they keep upping the ante.

Eventually you will reach a breaking point where you can't go on, and you will start making up stories and saying anything just to get them to stop.

And that's why torture doesn't work, because you can't trust the information that you gain from it.

The problem is that someone will tell you anything to stop you from pulling out their nails, so you can get a lot of really incorrect information.

And if you didn't know anything, would you sit there and keep losing fingernails, or tell them what they want to hear?

Exactly! If someone pulls off my fingernails one by one, and I know the answer to the question they are asking, I will absolutely divulge the answer... Torture obviously works. It just also creates a lot of false information from people who don't know the answer and will say anything to make the torture stop. But that's much more nuanced and quite different from the refrain we constantly hear that "torture doesn't work."

> Torture obviously works.

Can you cite some cases where torture has got correct, verifiable, and timely information that couldn't have been got by other means?

> Torture obviously works. It just also creates a lot of false information

Which means it doesn't work.

Torture worked the first time. The other 182 times that month were just for the fun of it.

https://shadowproof.com/2009/04/18/khalid-sheikh-mohammed-wa...

> Torture obviously works. It just also creates a lot of false information from people who don't know the answer and will say anything to make the torture stop. But that's much more nuanced and quite different from the refrain we constantly hear that "torture doesn't work."

How do you determine, ahead of time, when torture will work and when it will produced false information?

That's probably because you don't (yet) have a cause you value higher than your own life. Are you married? Would you give up the location of your wife, knowing she'd be murdered if you told it to your interrogators while they're pulling out your fingernails?

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