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Comment by pippy | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised a 1930's era pseudoscience is still hanging around professional law enforcement circles. The optimist in me hopes it's a clever ruse to screen people who simply aren't team fit. The pessimist tells me they're the caliber of people who also think calling in a psychic to help with murder cases.

Modern fMRI technologies can tell if people are fabricating stories. There's actual science behind them.

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> Modern fMRI technologies can tell if people are fabricating stories. There's actual science behind them

I think there was some actual science behind the polygraph too, but just having actual science on poorly informed/motivated participants isn't really enough for tech that will have long term adversaries.

I can't recall if 1/3 or 2/3 of myth busters staff could beat the fMRI once prepared and motivated.

Initial experiments on disinterested subjects given no information about past experiments may have legitimately been about the same for both fMRI and polygraph (at the respective times when participants could have had no information)..

Apparently in 3 tries Mythbusters managed to fool the fMRI lie test once. They didn't experiment much with different techniques, I would fully expect success rates to get much worse than that as people get more time to find good techniques for beating the test.

https://mythresults.com/episode93

It wouldn’t be hard to make the scan uninterpretable either, which is a seperate failure mode.

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