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> It's effective at getting the victim to say whatever they think will make the torture stop. Having been awake during some particularly excrutiating medical p

• naasking 7y ago
  > If I was being tortured and what they wanted to hear was the truth, I can be assured to tell it to them in broken english under the right duress. Except you also just said that you weren't able to access memories in any meaningful context, so how are certain you would or even could be truthful? And even if you were truthful, they would then torture you more to "be sure" you were being honest, which they can never be sure of, so where does it end? And then your information might conflict with information they obtianed elsewhere, so they torture you some more to ascertain the truth, but there's no end point at which uncertainty disappears. Ultimately, your panic-addled brain realizes that the truth isn't actually useful in this context and grasps at any straws thus diluting the signal to noise ratio. This progression is simply inevitable. The confidence in anything the victim says is basically nil. "We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.