Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sevrene | Hacker News Reader

Not quite truth serum, but if you feel more comfortable with someone, you are more like to be more open to them. If you've watched some police interrogations you might see that one of the things they try and do is build rapport with the person they are questioning for this reason.

So decreasing inhibitions so that you don't care about this, or increasing empathy so that you feel more trust in general can let people be much more truthful. For instance, alcohol or MDMA, or talking to a close friend compared to a stranger.

View on HN

Even if we ignore the strong ethical, humanitarian, and strategic objections, using torture as a tool to extract information always seemed like the wrong tool for the job. Causing someone distress/pain obviously decreases the chance that they will tell you the information willingly and incentivizes simply making something up to make the torture stop. Instead, modern successful[1] methods of interrogation like the Reid technique[2][3] are designed around incentivizing the desired outcome. Very low (sub-psychadelic) doses of MDMA in a comfortable "social" or "party" setting might be very effective.

I don't know how true the story is, but I once heard an anecdote about this method working during WW2. The Allied soldiers took a German POW out for beers and just chatted with without trying to push any particular subject. Then they made a boasting claim about how German aircraft couldn't keep up with the latest American engineering, causing the POW to respond with an excited objection explaining their new airplane's capabilities (the information they wanted).

[1] Often dangerously successful - the Reid technique in particular is know for a very high rate of false positives. "Of the three hundred and eleven people exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing, more than a quarter had given false confessions"[2]

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique

[3] The Babylon 5 episode "Intersections in Real Time" (S4E18) is almost entirely Sheridan being interrogated with the Reid technique.

I have heard that torture is not very effective in obtaining information, but works very well in frightening all people and making them obedient.

> Often dangerously successful - the Reid technique in particular is know for a very high rate of false positives.

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.

> The Babylon 5 episode "Intersections in Real Time" (S4E18) is almost entirely Sheridan being interrogated with the Reid technique.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com