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Comment by b00ty4breakfast | Hacker News Reader

I'm always surprised to hear that a government agency administers polygraph tests in something as serious as hiring but then I remember the CIA also spent millions of dollars trying to develop telekinetic assassins and train clairvoyants to spy on the Kremlin.

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The polygraph doesn't have to emit any useful data at all to be very useful in interrogations. Like a bomb doesn't have to have any explosive in it to clear a building. Interrogation is a head game and a complicated box with knobs and buttons and maybe even blinking lights makes a fine prop.

And there's enough ambiguity in it that it's easy for the operator to believe it helps. Like a dowser with their rods, a clergyman with a holy book or an astrologist with a horoscope. That gives them the power boost of sincerity.

I'd like to say "I'm always surprised to hear that a government agency administers institutionalized mental abuse". But I'm not surprised at all.

ACAB, Including being B to other C.

Everyone repeats this old canard but no one has any evidence even anecdotes to show that a polygraph machine is better than any other way to head fake someone in an interrogation

Why would it have to be better to still be used?

If people believe it, that's enough. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to mess with people enough.

It's dumber than that.

If the people telling the interviewers to use polygraphs believe the suspects will believe in polygraphs, it's enough.

As normal HN shows that "power structures" completely eludes them as a group.

Here is why lie detectors exist.

1. They are legal. 2. Abusive interrogation of US citizens is not legal.

A polygraph is a risk assessment. If you break under completely safe sanctioned questions. You are gonna spill everything if someone from the others side is questioning you.

This person could have just shown up and shrugged for X hrs and they would have had no more than 1 polygraph every 10 years. Instead they kept doing exactly what the test is concerned about. How easy are you to break? Which is why they kept getting more and more tests. They were considered high risk.

This comment reminds me of one of my favourite scenes from The Wire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgrO_rAaiq0

“Americans are stupid people, by and large. We pretty much believe whatever we’re told”.

“The bigger the lie, the more they believe”.

If you ever get the opportunity to read what people admit, unprompted, during these "conversations" then you'll know why they'll never go away. Stuff like, "yeah i stepped on a kitten's head once, but i was young... No i don't see why anyone would have a problem with that."

No one wants that guy working at the cia.

Are you sure? Post 9/11 the CIA decided they needed to be in the business of kidnapping and torturing. They didn't seem to have any trouble finding employees to do it.

Yeah, they need people who will do the most inhumane things to other human beings, not animals.

Soldiers need to kill people, but you don't want sociopathic soldiers - you want the opposite: Someone who can handle their emotions, not someone who hides from them, runs from them, or tries to bury or ignore them. The latter are not stable or reliable under stress.

Than how do you explain the marine corps? The average enlisted marine is a sociopath. You have to be to get through the crucible.

yeah CIA never has a history of doing terrible things and causing harm to people. Why would they hire pyschopaths?

Actually it sounds more like hazing to me (unethical but not entirely irrational).

That research was oriented towards making sure it wasn't possible though.

You're saying "of course it isn't" - but how do you know that?

At the time the Soviets had the same sort of projects. So until you're sure it's not possible, the potential capability is an enormous threat if it is.

How they went about that research is where the waste creeps in.

> General Brown: So they started doing psy-research because they thought we were doing psy-research, when in fact we weren't doing psy-research?

> Brigadier General Dean Hopgood: Yes sir. But now that they are doing psy-research, we're gonna have to do psy-research, sir. We can't afford to have the Russian's leading the field in the paranormal.

Source: The Men Who Stare at Goats

Plenty of things we could be wasting money on if the only criteria is "how do you know it's not real?", why stop at killing goats with mind bullets? We could be looking for yetis or Atlantis or lunar nazi spaceships.

It was a giant waste of time and money and, this being the CIA, it likely harmed many people.

Was drugging random Americans with LSD also a valid experiment? Parts of the CIA was just insane back then, maybe still is.

Yeah absolutely. Figuring out which, if any, drugs can be used to control people is extremely valuable for defence, not to mention offence. Same with the fascist Japanese frostbite experiments.

Let me be clear: these were all wrong and unethical, and I would not have approved or conducted them. But if you're a government agency tasked with doing wrong and unethical things in the name of national security, they were all good ideas to at least try.

So you have no idea what they actually did.

I always wonder when I see one of those hypnosis shows, where someone from the audience makes themselves a docile fool in front of a large crowd, whether they are stooges or it is the real deal. But I wouldn't volunteer to get hypnotised to figure that out, in fear of being the next person who stands imitating a dog in heat on such a stage.

The few people I’ve asked who’ve been hypnotized said it was true and had no reason to lie or trick me, and it seems true. But if the lens is “we already figured out all biology and physics so we can ignore the possibility of actual hypnosis (putting someone in a trance stage) being possible” then it’s hard to see things that there’s actually immense evidence for (eg the telepathy tapes).

The telepathy tapes don't have immense evidence in their favor, unless they've redone everything recently in a controlled way.

There’s a good book about this called Reality is Plastic. It may give you a new perspective.

You don't waste resources researching something with no plausibility or explanation as to how it could exist.

> train clairvoyants

Hey a goat actually died you know

The main job of every station chief is to sit drunk in bars, listen to the high tales of the locals and yell "i did that" everytime the people had enough into the telephone to washington. Secret services are first and foremost storytellers...

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