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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

Even if they did work, it would be awful.

Our society was built on large amounts of discretion being exercised by law enforcement and the ability to convincingly lie to law enforcement.

Society is going to get flipped on its head if we are able to detect total truth, and enforce all laws with 100% effectiveness. Even worse when these tools will be mostly in the hands of the government, and not the people.

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There's a sci-fi novel called _The Truth Machine_ that looks at what happens in a society when a perfect lie detector is introduced.

> Our society was built on large amounts of discretion being exercised by law enforcement

This I get.

> and the ability to convincingly lie to law enforcement.

This less so. Can you elaborate?

Sometimes, law enforcement can only be lenient (the first part of my original post can only hold) if it's "on the record" that you say something excusable. The LEO might know it's probably a lie, but either they understand a circumstance doesn't merit citation, or they know it's a crappy law.

If everything were some day 100% honest, the polite niceties of "oh sorry didn't see the speed limit change" or "Forgot I left my pocket knife in carryon, sorry" would go away. Of course these are only two of countless examples.

Eliminating the shit laws is a much better solution than ignoring them or working around them with lies.

It seems to me that the concept is basically analogous to the idea people have that we should eliminate the human element from contract enforcement. Or suppose we tried to eliminate all tolerances and slippage in engineering. It's utopian/dystopian and even seriously attempting it would be disastrous, in my opinion. I don't see why people need to touch the hot stove to understand that.

I don't think that's reasonable. Speed limits aren't shit, but it's good to have officer discretion on it.

so... add a clause for officer discretion, like is already implied to exist? having it as an invisible clause doesn't make it any more or less game-able.

If you cannot lie to law enforcement it makes it a lot harder to overthrow a fascist regime for example.

"Do you have any intention of overthrowing the government?" - "No" - beep, and now you're in a forced labor camp

Are you currently engaged in an activity that may not be in the interest of the Monarchy?

> Society is going to get flipped on its head if we are able to detect total truth, and enforce all laws with 100% effectiveness. Even worse when these tools will be mostly in the hands of the government, and not the people.

Even if these tools worked, they wouldn't be able to detect truth, only belief.

Yes, tools like this can be so focused on accuracy and efficiency they forget to account for the value of paper bag compromises: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9YgBF58Qks

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