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Comment by crystal_revenge | Hacker News Reader

I awhile back I used to do work with a major DARPA contractor. If you're familiar with security clearance for these roles, you know that at the higher levels of clearance you eventually need to take a polygraph exam.

I was never interested in going the clearance route, but got into a conversation with a grizzled industry vet that seemed like a character torn from a hard-boiled detective novel.

At the time I had recently learned that polygraph exams were "fake" and when the topic of the exam came up I was quick to point this out. His comment surprised me, and, in a sense, demonstrated to me that saying a polygraph is "fake" is akin to saying WWE wrestling is "fake". Of course it is, but that is a misunderstanding that what you're watching is a real performance.

He said the polygraph itself is just a tool for the interviewer. The real value was in someone who knew how to use the machine to convince the subject that they knew the truth. He continue that in his time he knew some mighty good interviewers who could easily extract anything they needed from you.

My father did go the clearance route, and when I asked him about the polygraph he told me he confessed things to the interviewers he would never have told my mother. "Fake" or "real" the polygraph does work in this sense.

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As someone who used to be a cop, this is absolute peak cops justifying the evidence not supporting their intuition by just making bullshit up.

If it actually worked, they'd have data and results. But, spoilers, they don't.

Doesn't the polygraph machine just play a role similar to "the manager" in a used car negotiation? Just like the salesman can leave the room, get a coffee, never actually talk to anyone, and come back in and say "Sorry the manager says I can't go that low" and lots of people will buy it - the polygraph interviewer is "saying" to the interviewee (in not so many words) "sorry pal, I'd love to believe you, but the machine says you're lying - my hands are tied"

Seems like it's a useful prop for manipulating people, and in that role it really is effective.

> Seems like it's a useful prop for manipulating people, and in that role it really is effective.

Similar to e-meters in Scientology.

What's your opinion of the copy machine polygraph scene from the opening of The Wire's final season?

That was a pretty accurate presentation of how polygraph machine testing works. The machine isn't doing anything useful in terms of determining if what is being said is true or not.

I knew a professional polygraph examiner who told me the exact same thing.

It means that the polygraph works as well, and in the same way, as the ancient Roman(?) method of having a tent sealed off from light, with a donkey in it. The examinee is told that he is to hold the tail of the donkey and if the donkey brays while he says the thing he's being tested for, then they know for a fact that he's lying.

The actual test, though, was that the donkey's tail was covered in soot. If the examinee comes out of the tent with clean hands, they know that he didn't hold the tail and so is deemed to be untruthful.

Sounds like the premise then is that everybody has got some shit they are hiding but it’s better to employ a criminal than a lier.

Which would mean that the polygraph is really good at filtering out genuinely good people from the recruitment process (in the case of this article people whose actually never done drugs or talked shit about their superiors).

There's a similar "actual test" scene in By The Great Horn Spoon!, a fun kid's book about the California Gold Rush we read in elementary school.

What if the donkey kicks you?

Means you were about to say something the donkey didn't want to be made public.

It means you stood in the wrong place. Don’t stand behind, stand next to the donkey.

You kick the ass in the ass.

> My father did go the clearance route, and when I asked him about the polygraph he told me he confessed things to the interviewers he would never have told my mother.

And this is exactly the problem, people make stuff up all of the time under stress.

> Of course it is, but that is a misunderstanding that what you're watching is a real performance.

This is not the value. The value is that the polygraph is that its an end-run around employment law. You can't use a polygraph on a general employee to fire them nor can you fire them for many of things that they ask in a polygraph interview. However you can revoke their clearance and fire them for not having a clearance.

Well I agree but also if someone makes stuff up that is incriminating while on “friendly examination” they shouldn’t get the clearance because they will absolutely incriminate themselves and everyone they met in their lives when on “unfriendly examination”.

If you mean when their tortured I thought the consensus was that everyone talked under sufficient torture and the actual problem was determine fiction from reality.

I have watched quite a few (American) police interview videos lately, and regardless of tools (polygraph or Reid(tm),) I wonder how many interviews start with the perpetrator really having no rationale, and ending in them simply back-rationalizing their emotions. A fit of rage might not have a rationale, if you're that predisposed. But being pushed to explain yourself will make the brain do what it's constantly doing: retroactively explaining your emotions. Especially if you've been promised a reduction in stress if you do.

And then there's the opposite, when the subject continuously makes no sense, because they have brain damage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c_lmx4LdNw

> I wonder how many interviews start with the perpetrator really having no rationale, and ending in them simply back-rationalizing their emotions

That's the core of the Reid technique, isn't it? Here's two rationales, one socially acceptable and one socially unacceptable. Pick one.

We don't actually care which one you pick, because a confession is still a confession, but we're handing you a convenient narrative you can use to justify your actions (a carrot), and an alternative people might believe about you if you don't pick Box A (a stick).

Something similar happens in high-pressure sales. I bet those guys would make great interrogators.

Wasn't familar with the "Reid Technique" so I had to look it up. One of the opening wikipedia paragraphs is just perfect.

>In 1955 in Lincoln, Nebraska, John E. Reid helped gain a confession from a suspect, Darrel Parker, for Parker's wife's murder. This case established Reid's reputation and popularized his technique.[3] Parker recanted his confession the next day, but it was admitted to evidence at his trial. He was convicted by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. He was later determined to be innocent, after another man confessed and was found to have been the perpetrator. Parker sued the state for wrongful conviction; it paid him $500,000 in compensation.[4]

It's the same story with: bite mark analysis, police dogs, hair comparison analysis, firearm toolmark analysis, many arson analysis techniques, bloodstain patterns. Discredited or unproven, yet still used in court.

Having served on a jury I implore you: Stay as far away from the criminal justice system as you can. Once you're in that courtroom your life is a coin toss away from effectively ending.

footnote: and regardless of innocence, you will be running from the arrest the rest of your life.

I will add this: serving on a jury is - IMO - a very valuable experience. Or, that is, IF you think you might ever find yourself on trial, I think it would be very valuable to have served on a jury yourself. You'll understand a lot about jury dynamics, and how juries make decisions (hint: it's not always as cut and dried as the facts and evidence presented). You may have insights that even your lawyer won't have, depending on whether of not they themselves have ever served on a live jury.

Will this information be useful to you? I believe it well could be. It's hard to explain exactly how/why without actually going through the experience though. And the verdict will still depend on many factors, many of which will be out of your control. But a few insights into the deep inner details of the process might be enough to tip the odds in your favor if things are close to begin with.

Another thing I'll add: a good lawyer really helps. The case I was on, the defense attorney was just totally on-point and absolutely "nailed it". Every single time - EVERY time - a witness for the prosecution said something questionable, or contradictory, or that in any way exposed a possible hole in the prosecution's story, he was all over it. By halfway through the trial I was rooting for the guy because watching him work was like watching a maestro in action. Hell, in the jury room during deliberations, we were all joking about how "If I'm ever on trial for a serious crime, I want this guy defending me."

That said, there's always an element of luck involved. In this case, I'm pretty sure the defendant was guilty. But I mean "pretty sure" in the sense that my subjective Bayesian posterior for "guilty" would be more than 50%... but the prosecution definitely did not prove he was guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt". And aside from the skillful performance of the defense attorney pointing out holes in the story being told by the prosecution, was the simple fact that there were holes. And part of that was because the investigators were bumbling and incompetent, borderline "Barney Fife" or "Officer Barbrady" types. To the point that in the jury room during deliberations, we were joking about how "If I'm ever under investigation for a serious crime, I hope this guy is leading the investigation." A better investigation might well has resulted in a guilty verdict, but as it was we acquitted the guy.

Another observation: the defendant took the stand to testify. Usually not recommended for criminal defendants, but it worked for him. Why? Well, not so much because of what he said or didn't say, but because the prosecutor acted like a dick towards the guy, belittling him and demeaning him, talking down to him, and just generally being a prick. Now strictly speaking, none of that had anything to do with whether the defendant was guilty or not. But it created sympathy for the defendant, and the prosecutor basically turned himself into the villain. Did if affect the outcome? TBH, yeah, I think it kinda did. Things were close as it was, and that little bit of extra sympathy might easily have been the deciding factor. But the thing is, this is one of those "things that are outside of your control" if you're ever on trial. Maybe your prosecutor will be more professional and under control. Not much you can do about that. But just seeing how emotional aspects like "sympathy for the defendant" CAN play into a decision can be valuable, I believe.

Anyway... sorry for the long rant. I'll just say that if you ever get invited to jury selection, I'd encourage you to NOT try to "get out of it".

Now I’m curious if anyone has studied criminal activity by jury pools.

Are jurists more likely to commit crimes that they’ve presided over? Do they absorb any knowledge from the cases they decide that enables them to live a life of crime?

It's an interesting question. Speaking only for myself though, I would never do something like that!

Muwahahahahahaha...

Based on your username, I’m… skeptical :-)

What was the crime being prosecuted?

> What was the crime being prosecuted?

Stealing a flashlight and a radio from a cop car, basically. The funny part is, that's the bit that I'm "fairly sure" the guy was really guilty of. But they also threw in some hinky claim about him stealing a chainsaw and a shotgun and some other stuff from a truck that was parked nearby (this was all at the officer's house). And for the most part, none of us on the jury believed he stole the chainsaw and the shotgun... in fact, we mostly think there never was a chainsaw or a shotgun. Because this guy was on foot, drunk, in the middle of winter, and was somehow able to carry a flashlight, a radio, a shotgun, and a chainsaw off to some safe hiding spot? From which they were never recovered? But he was found wandering on the side of the road later that morning with the radio and the flashlight? Hmm... so yeah, where did the gun and the chainsaw go???

Anyway, basically we thought they tried to "pile on" this guy with some made up bullshit, and that also probably helped us make the decision to acquit him, even if he was guilty of the radio and flashlight bit. And that played in with the prosecutor acting like such an ass to the guy and made the defendant seem like the victim.

Funny thing: after the case was over, they asked the jurors to hang around for a while (voluntarily) and talk to both the defense attorney and the prosecutor about how we reached our decision. And I actually told the prosecutor "dude, you were a total dick to that guy and made yourself look really bad by doing so". He said it was kind of personal with him and that guy, because the guy is a repeat offender and he's tried him like a dozen times. Now whether or not that supports a belief that they tried to set him up on some extra bogus charges I'm not sure, and I didn't ask about that. But man, oh man, did I learn that weird shit goes on that most people never see or hear about.

And of course there was the mysteriously malfunctioning dash-cam that didn't record any audio when the first officer approached the guy when he saw him on the side of the road, and the mysteriously missing 911 audio recordings of the guy supposedly keying up the radio and talking into it, etc., etc. And the fact that the cop car that the stuff was stolen from was left unlocked, and was un-monitored for like 11 hours from the time the officer got home from work until he got up to leave for work the next morning and found the radio and flashlight missing. And the absolute lack of physical evidence (fingerprints, footprints, eyewitnesses, anything) outside of him being seen carrying the missing radio and flashlight (he claimed he found both lying on the side of the road).

Like I said, there were serious holes in their case to leave room for "reasonable doubt" even though the guy was "probably" guilty.

"He said it was kind of personal with him and that guy,"

Completely unethical and possibly malicious prosecution. Amazing.

If you think this is an isolated case, you vastly overestimate humanity. Stay away from the criminal justice system.

Yeah. The whole process was rather eye-opening.

> they asked the jurors to hang around for a while (voluntarily) and talk to both the defense attorney and the prosecutor about how we reached our decision

My jaw is on the floor.

Here in Blighty, a jury deliberates in absolute secrecy. Revealing jury deliberations, even after the verdict, is a serious offence.

Here in the US that kind of thing generally varies from state to state. But as I understand it, in most states, once the verdict is rendered and the jury has been discharged, the jurors are free to discuss the case with anyone.

> We don't actually care which one you pick, because a confession is still a confession

Yes, but as you note, the point is to make it sound like barely a confession, the minimum possible confession. This makes it just as attractive to the innocent as for the guilty. It's offering a minimally painful way out of a deeply stressful situation.

And as you say, the punchline is that not confessing would lead to minimal or no pain, and every level of confession will equally turn out much worse. An innocent person is just trying to escape from that room, and is being conned into agreeing to a long prison sentence in order to do it.

Totally. I remembered the phrase I should have used: a false dichotomy (https://xkcd.com/2592/)

If you were going to buy a car today sir, would your budget be above or below $40k?

"$40k is way too much on the low side. Sorry, I'm looking for something a lot higher end." And walk off never to come back. ;)

> Something similar happens in high-pressure sales. I bet those guys would make great interrogators.

Without question. The best, most accurate, and most comprehensive texts I ever read about how to go about manipulating people was a series of books aimed at car salesmen. To the degree that "mind control" is a thing, these books were clear how-to guides.

And they convinced me to never talk to a car salesman.

Really important similarity to cops is that car sales people try really hard to control the physical space you are in. Can be simple, like, offering coffee, through shady, like taking your license on some pretext, to games like "wait here while I get the manager". The point is to lock you in a space and control the pacing and narrative.

This is why if you detect any nonsense like this, you should always remember that at any time in a car buying transaction, you can just walk.

> you should always remember that at any time in a car buying transaction, you can just walk.

Not just with cars!

> I bet those guys would make great interrogators.

Maybe on the context of US criminal interrogators, where discovering what actually happened isn't one of the goals.

I’ve watched police interrogations too and they are both fascinating and horrifying. Those interrogators have a lot in common with shady used car salesmen. They twist and contort the truth to get whoever they want out of the person being interviewed. Except unlike the car salesmen the good interviewers really know their shit and can “corner” a person in their own lies. (I suppose a good salesman is just the same though)

It’s a weird place to be when you are rooting for the child molester/arsonist/muderer hoping they’d come to their sense and fucking CALL A LAWER YOU FUCKING IDIOT and SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE!!!

But oddly, I guess maybe it’s a good thing “rape the kids and wife, shoot them point blank and burn the house down” criminals are too stupid to exercise such a basic right. Even the scummiest of police investigators give these people the option to shut the fuck up and call the lawyer. Sure the person might have to wait an obscenely long time before the lawyer shows up but they still are given the out yet these moron criminals think they can outsmart a highly trained police interrogator and choose to dig their holes.

Usually these people already dug their hole well before they are drug into the police station though. The on the ground evidence usually pretty much points to them already. All the confession does is save the state millions of dollars taxpayer money with courtroom proceedings.

So yeah… really mixed on the whole topic. Of course these videos on YouTube are selected to be the most interesting of the bunch. There are probably a hundred more mundane interrogations that go unseen for every one that makes it to a widely subscribed YouTube channel.

> Sure the person might have to wait an obscenely long time before the lawyer shows up but they still are given the out

This is not to challenge anything you said, but you have two rights here: the first is to have a lawyer present while you are being questioned, the second (and more important right) is the right to remain silent.

Talking to a lawyer is obviously a good idea if you are in any sort of legal predicament. Even if you were not arrested or charged, but have certain legal obligations or are considering signing a binding contract etc.

But when it comes to police "interviewing" you, you don't even have to go as far as to ask for a lawyer. You can simply leave it at "I don't want to talk to you." Even THEN you don't have to go that far. You can literally communicate absolutely nothing. Catatonic non-responsiveness is not a crime. This applies whether or not you are under arrest or being detained. You can always refuse to speak. That is your constitutionally protected right.

> They twist and contort the truth to get whoever they want out of the person being interviewed.

It's possible I just haven't watched enough of them, but I've never seen that. Usually the interviewer is a calm and dispassionate Columbo type who asks clarifying questions and then lets the suspects slowly trap themselves in their own web of lies. It is fascinating to watch.

That said, even though I have a healthy respect for the criminal justice system, I will still NEVER talk to the police without a lawyer. (Whether or not I've committed a crime.)

>Usually the interviewer is a calm and dispassionate Columbo type who asks clarifying questions and then lets the suspects slowly trap themselves in their own web of lies.

This loses its ability to inspire awe when you watch a video of one of these where you know the subject is actually innocent and the interviewer manages to also catch them in their own web of lies and make them look and sound guilty.

Academia has reproduced this result a fair bit: under interrogation it's very easy to convince people to admit to events happening which didn't. Eyewitness testimony is thus intensely unreliable - and psychologically as far as can be told, the act of remembering something makes the memory itself labile - i.e. you rewrite a memory as you recall it.

So rounds of intense questioning on the same subject infect any recollection of the experience someone has - amplifying or even adding events which didn't exist due to the focus of it.

And this has very real consequences - it was one of the driving forces of the satanic panic in in the 1980s[1] - for which people went to jail on the basis of "recovered memories".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic

I have seen these too and although I'm certain there are bad interviewers out there, I have to say I gained a lot of respect for the detectives who conduct those interviews. They are much better than I could ever be at remaining dispassionate, curious, and above all, extremely patient.

The bottom line is that these interviews are all recorded and the police are well aware that if they make a misstep and if the defense has a competent lawyer, they may inadvertently set a thief, killer, or rapist free if they are not extremely careful in their questioning and processes.

This is a bit like saying good witch doctors can diagnose you without the voodoo accoutrements, which are just there to get you to open up about how you are feeling. It's still voodoo, and still produces garbage conclusions much of the time.

Thing is, there isn't an academic journal for voodoo. There is at least one for polygraphy.

This reminds me of a study I read decades ago that showed patients have better outcomes from medical care if the doctor has credentials prominently displayed on the office wall.

Wait, what, Voodoo doesn't work? Has this been studied?

The purpose of polygraphs is to minimize the amount of bits of information one's adversaries can gain information OVERALL while maximizing the amount of bits of information one gains OVERALL—only (but not all bits are equally worthy which makes this partially an algorithmic problem).

Then they use the polygraph to obfuscate information (EG about the process of selection, knowledge gathering, and a considerable amount of other things); to have a highly spacious separate "stage" for the real sensors; and can NEVER retire it because that would reveal several bits of information.

Consequently they ALSO can never state this.

I can see how pressure would be applied when seeing the machine is leaning towards "lying", possibly breaking the subject's effort to lie.

But what would be the interviewer's strategy, if the subjects insist that they are telling the truth regardless of how the interviewer manipulates the machine? Wouldn't it immediately start discrediting the whole process if the subject is in fact telling the truth? I'm telling the truth here, and yet your machine says I'm not, hence it's broken, and hence I'll happily lie in the subsequent questions when it actually matters.

Most innocent people doubt their innocence when strongly accused even when they know they are right. Just a tiny bit, but in the right setting and with enough wearing you down, you can make innocent people believe they did it. I've seen it happen right in front of me.

That's why you don't talk to cops. Have a lawyer present and use the courts that us taxpayers pay for.

Also why narcissistic and psychopathic manipulators are so dangerous.

They don’t have to be cops. Most aren’t.

But what's the point of making innocent confess to false crimes in this setting? (i.e. requiring polygraph for job application)

I would imagine the entire point of doing a test would be to find out who is innocent and who is lying about being innocent. If you pressure the innocent into false confession, wouldn't it just make everything even more difficult?

In the context of a job application? Making up excuses to hide discrimination, maybe artificially limit the pool of applications to get around other hiring restrictions? Put the applicant on the back foot or make them share information they normally wouldn't? There are probably many ways to abuse it.

Good points. It never occurred to me that there are situations where recruiters intentionally try to remove legit applicants from the pool.

I wonder if this is related to people adding ambiguity to what they're saying.

Eg instead of saying "it's 20 degrees outside" they will say "last I checked it was about 20 degrees".

They change their phrasing because they want others to not think that they are wrong. By doing this they undermine their own credibility though.

Hmmm. People who make absolute statements like that generally* undermine their own credibility in my mind.

*I do it lots. Partly because the way my mind runs, I can nearly always (lol, can't help it) come up with possible conditions where I'd be wrong.

I am the opposite. I constantly add ambiguity even when I'm sure. I'm trying to learn to do less of it.

The polygraph would be used as the “bad cop” in the good cop, bad cop routine. After a line of questioning where the interrogator/polygrapher suspects lying, or is fishing for more information, they might say something like “everything sounded good but the machine is showing some deception. Is there anything you can think of that might be causing these readings? Anything you didn’t tell me? I want to get you out of here, but we need to resolve these results.” If the machine does show spikes during certain lines of questioning but not others, for instance about someone’s timeline on the day of a murder vs their relationship to the victim, it can be a reason to pursue further questioning in that area.

Given all the ways polygraphs can be misused or abused, the only real use I see is as in interrogation tool. But given the issues with false confessions in general, I think the interrogation should hold less weight, but that is a whole other issue.

Yep - this is like field sobriety testing, in my mind. Everyone will display some level of nervousness and inability to perform all the tests, and the officer thus has a baseline level of "cause". They can therefore do all kinds of tests or hold you until you do those tests. B/c "He failed his FST"

Same with poly. If they don't like something, they can just say "He failed his poly"

I don’t get how “field sobriety testing” in the sense of observing someone perform some coordinated actions is still a thing. In Ireland if stopped by a member of the police (Gardai) and they have suspicion they can require you to provide a breath or saliva sample. If you pass you are free to go, if you fail or refuse you are escorted to a police station and provide a blood sample or urine sample (I think this depends on if suspected of alcohol or drug offences) refusal to provide the sample is an offence

That just means the interview process is selecting for only completely uninformed idiots. What does that say about the resulting organization?

You don’t understand what you’re talking about. It’s an open secret in CDC circles that the polygraph is not effective at catching trained liars, more of a ritual than anything. The polygraph is not a test for how gullible or misinformed you are. It is mostly a test for two things:

1) are you willing to play by the rules and follow orders, even if sometimes they don’t make sense?

2) if you are being lightly interrogated, do you immediately freak out and tell the interrogator everything? Do you have a really bad reaction to pressure?

If you don’t match these criteria then you probably aren’t fit to know extremely sensitive government secrets. But like I said, it’s more of a ritual than anything, the value for even those two tests is unproven.

Even smart and informed people who know exactly what a poly does can say and do things they wouldn’t normally when they’re strapped to a chair, hooked up to machines, and being yelled at for hours

I think that is true, but not the whole truth (staying on theme). It is an interrogation, but it isn’t meant, or likely, to catch a trained, hardened spy or someone that can stand up to interrogations. It is to attempt to find if there is information that would make someone a bad candidate for a clearance, the same as the general background check is doing. If you are in massive debt, you are at much higher risk of being bribed. If you are cheating on your wife, and attempt to hide it during your polygraph, you are at much higher risk of being blackmailed.

It isn’t going to “catch” everyone but it is another way to reveal people with vulnerabilities that could be exploited. I think the real issue is people that “fail” the polygraph, since it isn’t actually a lie detector in any sense. It would be better if they just considered it a polygraph assisted interrogation.

Yep, IIUC blackmail or coercion is one of the primary concerns. Looking at people who sold out to foreign actors I think financial troubles are the #1 reason

>strapped to a chair, hooked up to machines, and being yelled at for hours

I've done periodic polygraphs, both lifestyle and full-scope, every 5 or so years since 1997. None of mine have ever lasted longer than 30 minutes.

You just sit in a chair while wearing some straps and there's never been any yelling involved.

It's all quite prosaic and relaxing actually.

It has been my experience that the clearance investigation process is quite simple, although I lead a very boring and law-abiding life.

I know of some people who have had quite long polygraphs and failed them repeatedly but my hunch is that the examiner has the findings of the background investigation in-hand and is trying to clarify some findings.

Many people with past financial, drug, or legal problems have gotten through the process with no issues just by being open and honest with the investigators and polygraphers.

So yeah, if the background investigator interviewed a friend of a friend of a friend and was told that 20 years ago you used to get stoned in college and whip your dick out but when asked during the polygraph about past drug use you go "I've been a squeaky clean boy my whole life" you're gonna have issues.

The annual financial disclosure is much more stressful just because of all of the damned paperwork.

That’s a little comforting at least… only met one guy IRL who ever said “Yeah the polygraph was fine.” Everyone else said it was a miserable experience for one reason or another, even people who were very straight laced

That its a cult.

Commenter subjectsigma understands this. In a former life I had jobs that required a polygraph, and I was not in a cult, nor does the interview process select for uniformed idiots. Both of you are reacting to commentary that the author barely understands and that neither of you clearly understand.

Nobody in my circles seemed to think the polygraph was anything but a tool. In fact, the sibject is sometimes gossiped about in thise circles about the "relevancy" of the polygragh today anyways. The thing about buearacracy though is that change happens incredibly slow. If everyone decided to get rid of the polygraph alltogether today, it would still take some years to actually happen.

>Nobody in my circles seemed to think the polygraph was anything but a tool.

Just like the e-meter.

>buearacracy

Yeah, that's a cult.

Great point, it reminds me of when I read about how "trials by ordeal" sometimes worked.

Consider the boiling water/oil thing: If you're innocent, you can "stick your hand in and not get burned."

What they did was, they faked the water being hot by blowing bubbles in it. All then that was needed was for everyone to "believe it worked," The innocent sticks in, and then the guilty confesses.

A perfect description of how "trials by ordeal" don't work. This phrase is doing some HEAVY lifting:

> All then that was needed was for everyone to "believe it worked,"

In an era where mass media basically didn't exist, most people couldn't read, and information about how these things work could not easily spread, it might have been easier to convince people that a fake test was really what you were claiming it was. If people could google it they would instantly find out it was fake.

So guilty people were convicted, and so was anyone who knew how oil works.

Unlike now, where only innocent people are convicted and everyone knows all the science that always works, like DNA testing?

Oh, correct. I think by "work" I merely meant "here is the mechanism," not "this is why they are successful."

Don't scientology go around with a similarly fake device?

Yes, the "E-meter" is a primitive form of lie-detector equipment:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dianetics#E-Meter

"Basically it is a simple ohmmeter that measures galvanic skin response (electronic resistance of the skin), somewhat similar to a polygraph; the user (the "preclear") provides one of the elements in a Wheatstone bridge."

I'm reminded of the story about the cops who constructed a "polygraph" by attaching wires to a colander that ran to a photocopier in which a piece of paper that had "You're Lying" written on it was placed. It was enough to intimidate the suspect into singing like a bird.

Scene from The Wire doing roughly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg13hyfm2Ik

I believe that, or something very similar, happens in _The Wire_.

I know some govvies who have been through the polygraph circus.

One guy knew it was BS and could not get worried enough for them to come up with a baseline - he was too calm. So they took the tack of rescheduling it a bunch of times, making him go home after showing up so he would be good and pissed off when they actually did the test. He passed.

Another lady I know had the interviewer go so hard on her she was crying through half of it. Afterward, the interviewer told her the goal was to make every interviewee break down so they would reveal stuff.

Everybody always thinks this about stuff that doesn't work. It turns out it's total bullshit.

There was someone I knew who claimed that dowsing rods worked a similar way. A good practitioner of the dowsing rod was really using the information from his audience and was Hans the Mathematical Horsing his way to water. The audience of course had this information from the subtle way they picked up on cues of water, ways even they didn't recognize until the dowsing rod was in action.

They all think this. Some can even bend spoons.

A friend bought land to build a house on where dowsing was culturally pervasive. He knew it was bogus but it was cheap compared to the land price and everybody around was heavily pushing it. An old guy came out and, during the performance, told him the total history of the land parcel, including stuff that would be inappropriate in formal disclosures ("those neighbors are assholes" etc). They did hit water, but the whole area is pretty verdant.

Dowsing rods are an excuse to trust common sense; that dip in the land where plants are greener is probably a good place for a well. But digging wells is expensive so people want something more than a guess, but also something cheap.

When I was a kid, a new house was being built downhill from my parents and they dowsed out a "good" place for a well. They were all set to drill before my dad went out and told them they were directly downhill from our septic tank.

What's "downhill from a septic tank"? Isn't a septic tank a container that slowly fills up and is periodically emptied by a truck or something? There is no "flow downhill", is there? I thought the whole reason to have a septic tank is that you have no place for the stuff to go.

Unless you're in a location where you absolutely can't leach the liquid waste out into a leach field (like right on a lake), the tank usually just settles the solids and give the liquid some time to mingle with whatever biological processes are happening in the tank.

When the ground doesn't perk naturally, it's common up here to build a mound system where you have a mound of soil that does perk and vegetation (grass) on it to take up the liquid.

A fully closed tank is basically the last resort. We have friends with a house right on a lake, and their tank had to be pumped every three weeks before they had a kid. I can't imagine what the interval is now.

Thanks for explaining, I had no idea.

Septic systems are more interesting than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septic_drain_field

A straight tank would fill up in no time.

The best brain power a human possess is subconscious-- its all the perception that allows you to run fast around moving people and catch a ball. You can do it but you can't explain how. You can probably train yourself to be good at finding water or reading people but you might be bad at explaining why. Worse-- trying to explain yourself might be forcing you to use the feeble symbol processing power of your brain. So a prop helps you feel your way.

Still-- total bs.

Yeah, polygraphs remind me of those TV shows where the investigator pretends to use magic, voodoo, astral signs, etc. to solve the crime, but is really just using them to manipulate the psychology of the subject and see their reaction.

Put simply, the polygraph is a powerful tool if the subject believes it is a powerful tool.

That's incomplete. As the article points out:

> Even the United States government isn’t dumb enough to believe the polygraph works. The machine’s real purpose is symbolic, as an icon of the power of the state. Law enforcement agencies don’t use the machine to detect lies. They use it to coerce confessions. [...] It’s a fact, part of a story power tells itself to justify its power. Maybe you can beat the machine— they don’t detect lies, so it’s not that hard—but you can’t beat an entire country that believes in it.

Even if you know its nonsense, there's still something coercive of any system where it can be used as a pretext to punish you, or where you are punished for not pretending to believe in it.

> They use it to coerce confessions.

It boggles my mind than confession even counts as evidence but then again, so does any other testimony. Sure, it made sense when we had almost no forensics (and that's the times that shaped our legal systems) but today we do, don't we?

>Sure, it made sense when we had almost no forensics (and that's the times that shaped our legal systems) but today we do, don't we?

The CSI effect. The amount of forensics that people think will be presented in an average case is so much more than actually are. Finding and collecting usable fingerprints, DNA, shoe imprints, etc. does not happen in every case. Most cases are a lot of circumstantial evidence all pointing to the same person.

Fingerprints, DNA, shoe imprints, & other forensic evidence are circumstantial. Evidence is legally either circumstantial or testimonial, there's no other category. Most cases are a lot of testimonial evidence all pointing to the same person!

Even if CSI was real (which it isn’t even close), the vast majority of actions anyone takes leave no discernible evidence that isn’t immediately made useless through entropy.

And the most important element in almost every crime (intent) almost never leaves any evidence at all.

IMO the biggest subtle lie that CSI convinces people of is not that facts can be determined so easily and unambiguously - though that is a lie - but that the evidence found and any conclusions from it will fundamentally matter. Each piece of evidence is always some turn of the plot.

In real life, it usually doesn’t. Too much ambiguity, or inconclusive or inconsistent results. Or false positive/negatives. Or data which is useless in the vacuum of other missing information.

In real life, it’s a frustrated and depressing slog - punctuated by occasional moments of elation and/or terror - being a detective.

So what could be more compelling than someone telling everyone in their own words their intent and their actions, so everyone can stop guessing and ‘know for sure’? That’s what a confession is.

Which conveniently at the end of nearly every crime show the suspect actually does.

In real life, some do that - but many lawyer up, and you spend years dealing with every kind of bullshit and confusion game a professional can throw at you, instead of closure and a clear answer.

The polygraph is an attempt at bluffing folks into ‘we got you’ moments. Which does sometimes work! But the pressure and techniques applied can also result in people falsely confessing to things that never happened, or getting confused themselves and ‘failing/lying’ when they were actually relaying the truth.

Living in civilised country I find whole confession, anything you say, can't lie in your own defence thing so absolutely abhorrent. To me it seems absolutely sensible that you should be able to decide what is your statement as answer to any question by state. And if you are on stand in trial as defendant you should be able to lie however much you want. The prosecution must prove you were lying, but the act itself cannot be illegal.

Except there is no evidence it helps even “good” interviewers “extract” anything resembling truth. And there is lots of evidence it does not.

This comment is a perfect study of this almost uniquely American insane phenomenon.

But then I don’t question Koreans about fan death.

It's not about extracting facts, it's about establishing justification for the decision made by the interviewer. Sorry you "failed your poly".

Here's a good example: https://www.salon.com/2013/11/03/lies_i_told_to_become_a_spy...

What do you make of the placebo effect?

The polygraph obviously has no basis for working, but while a sugar pill doesn't make a tumor disappear, it can be very good at pain management.

I still wouldn't use it in the context of the justice system, though.

> What do you make of the placebo effect?

The placebo effect is measurable. If there is no measurable improvement, there's no placebo effect either.

Bear in mind that what most claims in favour of the polygraph measure is not truth but potentially-false confession. Extracting false confessions is relatively easy, it's also completely f-ing useless to wider society and massively harmful to the victim.

You're assuming truth is the goal, which isn't correct. The goal of police is to close cases, and in this goal, polygraphs are quite effective.

They don't care if you actually did the crime, they care that they can extract a confession, or provide damning evidence to a prosecutor that lets them throw you in prison, so they can put a nice big checkmark on that case. Did they actually jail who was responsible? Maybe not, but who cares about that, apart from you?

Same reason for Forensics to exist. Don't misunderstand, some Forensic science has validity in many cases, but a lot of it is just straight up nonsense that isn't proven or peer-reviewed in the slightest, in fact many Forensic sciences that appear in modern court cases are completely, 100% debunked.

And like, why should they care? Even if you hire a crack lawyer team that gets you out of the court case, it's not like anyone involved in the investigation that almost threw an innocent man in jail is going to suffer an ounce of consequences. Or hell, even if you're wrongly convicted, worst case scenario you get a financial judgement after years of litigation, that's paid for by the taxpayers.

I see no issues with using polygraphs for hiring at intelligence agencies (I defer back to the comment about people missing the point of it), but as an investigative tool it's definitely a net negative.

The problem is that the polygraph doesn't work on both levels. Obviously, it doesn't detect lies. But more to the point, it also doesn't extract useful information from most liars, and leads to fake confessions.

To stay in your metaphor:

- Not only do sugar pills not cure tumors, but imagine - 60% of recipients don't report decreased pain levels (no placebo effect) - 20% of recipients feel more pain

The placebo effect itself isn't real (at least in the vast majority of cases where it has been claimed to exist), when people measure a "placebo effect" what they are actually measuring is simply a regression toward the mean, not a causal effect.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/31/powerless-placebos/

https://www.dcscience.net/2015/12/11/placebo-effects-are-wea...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6369471/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6707261/

I don't think this is right. Placebo effect definitely exists for conditions that are largely influenced by mental perception. The common example is pain. You can reduce people's perception of pain by deploying the placebo effect, e.g. giving them sugar pills that you convince them will reduce their pain. It extends to other similar conditions which are not generally (or possible to be) measured directly, but rather based on a patient's self-reported scoring. Like "on on a scale of 1-10 how would you rate your experience of this condition". Placebo effect can work for that. But not for other more tangible conditions.

Not only does a placebo reduce pain, naloxone will reverse the pain reduction just like it would if you'd given them morphone instead. Placebo effect isn't simple psychosomatic, rather something real and physical is going on inside the human body.

In my mid 20s I tried antidepressants for the first time. To me it was a big step because like many, I had a false perception of it having an unnatural effect on my personality, but I was finally ready to try them. The doctor said they will take at least 2 weeks to have any effect, and despite knowing that AND knowing about the placebo effect, I still "felt better" for several days after I started the regimen. To me, that was absolutely proof of the placebo effect, especially because after the 2 week window the effect was a backfire where I was in bed for a day and couldn't do anything. The pills backfired on me.

A single data point like that should never be considered anything close to "absolute proof" of anything - because you have absolutely no way of knowing that, for whatever reason (random chance, or the food you were eating at the time, or a compliment somebody paid you on the day you started taking them, or....), you might have felt better on those first days even if you hadn't started taking antidepressants at all.

Correlation is not causation, as they say.

(Hope your depression is gone or at least not too bad now days, regardless of what drugs or placebos may have played a part!)

Did you read any of the articles I linked?

> The most important study on the placebo effect is Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche’s Is The Placebo Powerless?, updated three years later by a systematic review and seven years later with a Cochrane review. All three looked at studies comparing a real drug, a placebo drug, and no drug (by the third, over 200 such studies) – and, in general, found little benefit of the placebo drug over no drug at all. There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain – but overall H&G concluded that the placebo effect was clinically insignificant. Despite a few half-hearted tries, no one has been able to produce much evidence they’re wrong. This is kind of surprising, since everyone has been obsessing over placebos and saying they’re super-important for the past fifty years.

The words "clinically significant" and "benefit" are not the same thing as the effect being real. To me it reads as if they are testing the hypothesis that a patient comes into ER with a sprained ankle and the doctor gives them this "new powerful prescription pain pill that just came out" and instead tricks them with a sugar pill. If this worked, I'm sure it would be used as much as possible. And the study you linked is simply confirming that PE is not an effective treatment for anything.

That's not the topic at hand here, which is "is the PE real?". For me it absolutely is.

This is what you were replying to when you said "The placebo effect itself isn't real":

> while a sugar pill doesn't make a tumor disappear, it can be very good at pain management.

And now you go to this version:

> There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain

So is it real or not? We're just saying the same thing, what's the point of saying it doesn't exist and then revert back to exactly what was said originally?

Using science to attempt to measure qualia sounds like a good way to produce whatever results you want.

In a small but measurable percent of cases, the sugar pill does actually make tumors disappear though. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12509397/], and helps with almost every other factor of care in much larger percentages of the time.

Literally from your link :

> Conclusion: In randomized double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials, presumably with minimum sources of bias, placebos are sometimes associated with improved control of symptoms such as pain and appetite but rarely with positive tumor response. Substantial improvements in symptoms and quality of life are unlikely to be due to placebo effects.

A sugar pill does not make tumors disappear. That's not what the placebo effect does; it changes your perception of pain and well-being, but not much else. (Of course, that can have a value in itself, but it's nothing like the magical healing effects found in urban legends.)

I think OP is trying to say exactly what you’re arguing

You must've misread what I wrote, since we both said the same thing.

the healing effect comes from the fact that your perception of pain and well-being actually contribute to the healing process.

So you mind can fix pain, but not tumors?

Where do you draw the line?

At things that only exist in the mind, like, say, pain.

Except that's not even close to true.

In what sense? Pain is a complex emotion triggered by various simple sensations (very hot, very high pressure etc). But remember that people with certain kinds of brain damage can feel these same sensations, but not pain. To them these just don't register as painful. Other people feel pain in limbs that they no longer have, so not triggered by any sensation at all.

Also, even beyond medical issues, different people perceive pain very differently. Hot peppers are perhaps the clearest example of this, where people accustomed to them feel the same heat, but not the same pain as someone unaccustomed.

In the sense that it's a physical process triggering mental reactions.

Pain is the mental reaction, not the whole process (of course, mental reactions are themselves physical processes, but that's a different discussion). When you take an opioid, the pain goes away, but the physical process that was previously causing it doesn't.

This is such a one sided dogmatic view of how the body works and heals that I honestly don't know where to start. I've seen enough evidence of bodies healing themselves just from changed minds. The truth is the synthesis of western scientific reasoning and eastern mysticism and holistic thinking. The problem was always blind faith, dogmatism, which is exactly what you're doing.

The point is not to extract truth, it's to extract behavior. It's the fact you can convince a judge or jury to take the evidence as evidence of truth that's a problem.

If the interviewee's behavior is not indicative of truth then the test serves no purpose other than allowing the interviewer or whoever commissioned the test (like a prosecutor or employer) to invalidly convince other people that the interviewee was lying

That and to convince the interviewee that the interviewer knows they are lying.

That's exactly the point.

Not if you view the interview as a process to expose reasons to not eg hire someone rather than to establish a list of facts or earnest perspectives. Literally just putting the candidate under stress. For this to apply in court you'd have to be suing them for not hiring out of discrimination over a protected class (i think, I am not a lawyer).

I mean maybe there are other civil suits you could file, but I suspect a lot of that would be signed away before the polygraph.

Polygraphs are usually inadmissible in court. It's unfortunate that "usually" applies.

https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/is-a-polygraph-test-admiss...

What evidence do you have that there is no evidence?

For sure, you have:

- your opinion

- your knowledge (which is a subset of all that is known/"known", which is a subset of all that exists...though, it all typically seems other than this, such is culturally conditioned consciousness), have you something over and above this?

Just in case, please do not do this:

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Shiftin...

My dude you are way over-thinking the polygraph. This is the more-usual setting it is applied in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgrO_rAaiq0

> no evidence

Saying "there is no evidence" is sloppy cable political TV tier rhetoric. There is absolutely evidence[1]. You and others may not find that evidence convincing, or otherwise think polygraphs shouldn't be used, but nevertheless it exists. A brief survey of the evidence suggests that the polygraph is probably slightly better than chance, but with high enough error bars that we should be very cautious about its use.

[1] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/10420/chapter/7

I’d compare it to the sobriety test of being asked to walk in a straight line. someone who’s drunk will put a lot of effort in it, which is the giveaway.

Sobriety tests are notorious for being very subjective and not having well defined criteria and cops failing people even if they aren't drunk. The subjectivity in the test is a feature that allows cops to justify their arrests or uses of force.

Obviously once you hit a certain point of drunkness obviously maybe a test like walking in a line can demonstrate something useful. But so would a breathalyzer. The false positives is the problem because they're being used to illegitimately subject innocent people to criminal charges.

Or someone who's nervous because the police are accusing them of a serious crime...

Or... it doesn't really matter.

By the time the police are commanding you to do a field sobriety test, they have already decided to charge you with DUI. There is literally nothing you can do during the test to change their mind. It's a formality, and the "test" is vague enough that the officer can cite any little twitch or misstep as "evidence" that you failed the test.

If you pass a breathalyzer test (blow under the limit), and they still want to charge you with DUI, they will likely do a field sobriety test because the results are non-numeric and are subjective. Heck, you can blow 0.0 and still get arrested for DUI[1][2], and if you tell the world about it, the police will sue you for defamation[3].

1: https://reason.com/2024/02/14/iowa-cops-arrested-a-sober-col...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGWSbAHaHUw

3: https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2023/10/02/after-traffic-sto...

Complete nonsense. They need evidence. If you blow 0s, you're not getting a DUI. Just because you have an example or two doesn't mean it's common. I've been pulled over, blew 0s, passed the tests and let go.

With the wide availability of countless drugs that impair driving (that may not even be detectable on a urine/blood panel) and obviously don’t register on a breathalyzer you absolutely can be charged with and convicted of DUI based on behavior, FST performance, officer observations, driving pattern, etc alone. Stumbling over a word or two like I do on conference calls everyday could be considered “evidence”.

Just like you can also be charged and convicted of DUI even with zeros or being under the legal limit. If you’re traveling to/from/around a bar area at 2:30 AM your driving pattern and behavior is going to be heavily scrutinized.

Just because you have an anecdotal example or two doesn’t mean it’s common either. The FSTs are also completely stacked against you. Take a high-pressure scenario, less than ideal conditions (side of the road with passing cars, dark, cold/hot, precipitation, flashing lights, etc), and ridiculous/conflicting/confusing instructions and even people who are completely sober end up providing what could appear as damning evidence.

Even professional athletes have bad days where they just can’t land a shot they’ve nailed thousands of times.

I know at least a few cops who openly admit they struggle with the tests (to the point of “failure” in some cases) in no-pressure ideal classroom training environments.

Of particular curiosity is a lot of police body/dash cam footage where the officer struggles to demonstrate/explain the tests, stumbles over reading Miranda cards, etc. Evidence where if the same observations were applied to them they could be scrutinized as being “impaired”.

Of course I’m not advocating for impaired driving, just highlighting that it’s a tricky situation overall.

Are you white?

Yeah... Cause it's hard to do when you're drunk.

A dangerous thought. There is no proof the interviewee tell the truth. It's easy to plant a fake memory to humans and make them believe it's "real".

Oh what am I thinking? The important thing is, the interviewer can produce a lot of "confessions" and "revealing of truth". They will be evaluated a good interviewer. Secure their job position. Sounds good. /s

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