Is there any truth in truth serums? (2015)

To my knowledge, criminal charges against MIT and/or its defense contracting partner were never filed.

Apparently no one on the government side ever received the memo about the "replication crisis" that afflicts so much of what is passed off today as "research" in the field of psychology.

In which case, the gullible suckers on the government side provided the perfect audience for this snake-oil selling salesman. The fact that MIT and the defense contractor were only guilty of "marketeer-ing" here (rather than racketeering ... think Jeffrey Epstein, the underage girls that were trafficked to MIT professors, and the thank-you notes from the MIT administration) is probably why this "bad act" on the part of MIT and the defense contractor received far less media attention.

No one is saying that simple mathematics cannot have profound applications to the real world. One need look no further than Claude Shannon's fundamental work in information theory for an universally acknowledged example of this phenomenon.

Also the core BTS papers were published in Science and AAAI, so they are pretty mainstream.

That really doesn't prove anything either. Academia is full of brown-nosing "I'll cite your paper if you cite mine" types. After all, Prelec claims that one of his motivations for introducing a "truth serum" is that consensus opinion can't be trusted, because sometimes the experts have a reason to lie. Has he ever run his own research through the serum to see what comes out? And more importantly, would anyone else really care?

I hadn't heard of the deal/fraud you're describing and am curious to learn more ...

Don't really have that much more to add except that from what I understand, Prelec knowingly lent his name (and by extension, MIT's name) to a grant proposal that to a grant proposal that deliberately misled taxpayers.

The interesting question of course is why would Prelec do something this foolish after securing tenure at the MIT Sloan School of Management?

It is true that there is a lot of pressure on academics to raise money to help support their bloated university administrations, even after receiving tenure. Perhaps this was part of the reason why he allowed himself to become a willing tool for his partners in the defense contracting industry.

It is also possible, however, that Prelec was eager to move beyond the world of art critics and sexual promiscuity surveys into something with more prestige by associating his name, for example, with this country's national intelligence counter-terrorism program ... perhaps motivated in part by professional narcissism and/or delusions of grandeur.

Paper from Science, worth reading ...

Thanks for sharing the link, but including a list of the most significant applications of Prelec's theory over the past 15 years would be even better!

What won't necessarily find the light of day is deception, a pattern of behavior. A drug dealer might get caught up in where he was or who he was with at a given time on a given date, but he'd have to be intellectually impaired to admit he was a professional criminal for a living.

I would argue that makes it unsuccessful — and worse, that it’s a case of Goodhart's law, optimising for the measure (convictions) rather than the much harder task of actually finding the guilty people.

It doesn't seem to agree with the Wikipedia description of the Reid technique.

I've watched this episode quite recently, and from what I remember, it was all about trying to break Sheridan's grip on reality, through techniques such as food and sleep deprivation, making it impossible to track the passage of time, and calling into question his reasoning skills. On top of that, the interrogator was seeking guilt admission, not the truth.