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Comment by rickdeckard | Hacker News Reader

> Because most people believe torture works. They believe we shouldn't do it because it's "bad", rather then the reality which is that it's ineffective at information extraction.

I think most of those people believe torture works AND is also justified to prevent "greater evil", because that's how it is being presented repeatedly in media.

It's still a quite popular trope in TV series that the protagonists "were forced to take drastic actions" to prevent "the bad people" from executing their plan.

They sometimes feel torn about doing it, but in the end it is portrayed as necessary and effective in stopping whatever threat...

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There's only a few media depictions subverting this, like Unthinkable (2010).

taken (2008) liam neeson's character tortures and kills the man who had abducted his daughter.

I see this "torture doesn't work" claim around sometimes and personally I have a hard time accepting it. If you ask me something I don't want to tell you, I won't tell you. But you start tearing out nails (or even threaten to do so) I'll spill all the damn beans I can to make you stop.

The argument being made is that once people are tearing out nails you’d tell them you’re the Easter bunny if you believe that that’ll make them stop.

You’d tell them that you’re guilty even though you are innocent because you’d want the pain to stop.

That’s why people say that confessions gained via torture are not reliable.

"Come on. We already know you're the Easter Bunny, your friend next door already confirmed it. All this can stop immediately, we just need you to admit it and tell us how you did it"

Confessions, sure. But what about location of military bases? Obviously torturing people to make them admit to crimes is just horrible, and sure torture in general is pretty horrible.

But if you capture a soldier and want to know where his friends are, what their plans are etc it's probably worth a shot. You can often verify information and ask followup questions etc. I'm not saying it's the moral thing to do, I'm just saying I think it'd have a non-zero success rate. Maybe even a pretty high success rate. And honestly if I was Ukrainian I'm not sure I'd have any moral obligations to torturing some Russians either. As far as I'm concerned when a nation attacks another they forfeit any kind of human rights. If they wanted to stay safe they could have stayed home.

If you torture the soldier, at best he is providing you the information you can verify and nothing else. At worst he is providing you incomplete/wrong verifiable information. There are only limited studies on this, but consensus of intelligence experts is that it is an ineffective method

In contrast, if you convince the subject to give up information voluntarily, it may provide you not only the location of the military base, but also much more valuable information about the base and its content, and information you didn't know to ask for.

Now imagine you have no beans to spill, I don't believe you and you still want to make me stop...

Sure, you have to verify information.

There are better means to retrieve verifiable information.

Both the interrogator and the subject know which information is verifiable and which is not, torture doesn't create a reliable source of information.

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