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Related headline: humans won't tell you they're lying if they think they're telling the truth

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Related headline: humans won't tell you they're lying if they think they're telling the truth Humans also won't tell you they're lying if they know they're lying, because, well, of the same reason they are lying in the first place.
- varajelle 5y ago
  Oh, they'll tell you. Unconsciously, using their body language.
  - moron4hire 5y ago
    That's a myth promulgated by the prison industrial complex. There are no reliable body language cues to tell if someone is lying.
    - smegsicle 5y ago
      i don't get this meme that just because body language isn't 100% accurate, it is completely meaningless of course it shouldn't be admissible in court, but it's ridiculous to take that and say that body language tells you nothing
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        well first off the body language needs to be interpreted, there may be some people who can tell lies and never be caught by body language and there might be some people who will always be caught by body language. But perhaps the people who will always be caught by body language have issues that cause them not just to be reliably caught when lying but to mislead the interpreters of their body language into thinking they're lying when not. Given that part of the task of interpreting someone as lying by body language also involves understanding cultural differences, and as a human activity is prone to human bias, it might be beneficial for rational people to discount the use of body language interpretation in determining lies completely as an unmeasurable process. In short body language may not be completely meaningless, but it is probably best to treat it as if it were.
        robbedpeter 5y ago
        Unless you know someone very well, you'll be missing context when interpreting body language. Even then, sociopaths and con artists can seem extremely well known to you and you won't have a clue that everything you think you know is a lie. Actors train to control this. You have to wonder if so many Hollywood marriages fail because neither partner can trust that the other isn't just really good at putting on a persona.
        Fnoord 5y ago
        Yes, social engineering, too. And LE and CIA et al are trained to expose it (see the book Spy The Lie).
        smegsicle 5y ago
        part of the productive use of heuristics is understanding their limits by your logic no heuristic should ever be used?
        bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        a common heuristic would be If you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture. the method of drawing a picture is pretty well understood, thus understanding the limits of the method also are. However understanding the limits of using body language as a lie detector in any instance where used requires understanding the biases of the person doing the detecting (which may be yourself, and knowing one's self is traditionally a tricky thing), what their current mental state is in, the culture that the person who may be lying is from, do they have any ongoing problems or conditions that might make them appear to be lying when not, is the potential liar able to mask their lying better than most people, and probably a few more things that are hard to pin down that I haven't thought of here. Getting the heuristic to work in reasonable, measurable way so that one can decide is this giving a good approximation of a correct answer, am I making progress using this, is an important part of having an heuristic. As an example, common heuristics used in construction or software project management. So I would think heuristics that are well understood and that do not depend on imponderable questions that philosophers have been arguing about for millennia should be used, but ones that are not free of these problems should not.
    - dgb23 5y ago
      Not everything is political BS. Some things are just common sense. People can read body language and sometimes they can tell if someone is lying, especially if they know the liar well.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Some things are just common sense. “Common sense” is just a modern positive term for folk mythology; and particularly when it comes to reading “body language” to detect lies, much of that popular wisdom is based on fabrications deliberately popularized by the law enforcement community (not unlike polygraphy, and, until the same fell apart, the FBI’s “fiber science”.) Relying on body language (not independent knowledge of the facts of the claim) to detect lies is at best barely better than a coin flip and tends to rely (like polygraphy, which is also not reliable) on indicators of arousal and the known false assumption that arousal = deception, but with less accuracy in detecting arousal than a polygraph.
      - sgtnoodle 5y ago
        I can usually tell when my 3 year old daughter is lying because either her speech is quieter, or she acts excessively generous. It also helps that she always blames one of the dogs, typically a stuffed one. It's funny the stuff she thinks she needs to sneak. A couple weeks ago I stumbled upon her in the back bedroom, shamefully eating a graham cracker. We celebrate her willingly eating anything that isn't pure sucrose...
  - nikanj 5y ago
    "That person seemed really nervous, so clearly they were lying" Or, you know, that person was really nervous because they might get wrongly deported / jailed / fired / broken up with / etc. This body language stuff is 50/50 bad cop behaviour and bad relationship advice. See also: lie detectors, which really aren't that accurate.
    - isaacfrond 5y ago
      I can really recommend Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Talking to Strangers'. It is a fascinating book in which he tries to explain why it so hard to understand what other people are really thinking.
    - DocTomoe 5y ago
      Body language is real. Formalistic interpretation of body language ("if subject does this, they are lying") is bogus.
      - nikanj 5y ago
        I like how we accept the existence of professional actors/actresses, but think body language can’t be controlled with conscious though
        DocTomoe 5y ago
        And training, which the run-off-the-mill criminal would be unlikely to have. Just because something does not work 100% of the time, every time, with highly sophisticated criminals does not make it worthless as a tool.
  - reshie 5y ago
    sure. unless they lie with that too.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Terry_Roll 5y ago
  This is what makes science so interesting, I've read plenty of scientific papers where claims or assertions are made cited in another paper and if you dont read that other paper, you dont know if the claim/assertion is correct or not. Believe it or not, there are quite a few papers pulling that trick!
layer8 5y ago
The article actually mentions this (“prime ministers”).
ssivark 5y ago
We also don't usually need to raise the question of whether humans are "just statistical models spitting out sequences of words" or whether they "understand the meaning of what they're saying", because we hold it self-evident that the latter applies. Counter to the snark implicit in your comment, that's why the headline regarding AI is more salient than a parallel headline regarding humans.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  I have my doubts about the degree of understanding truly existent in a great deal of human speakers.
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  > humans are "just statistical models spitting out sequences of words" I think a lot of research would suggest that this is actually how the brain works.
  - i_like_waiting 5y ago
    Thats pretty much how I learned spanish, for half of stuff I had no idea about exact meaning, I just knew that my girlfriend used those words in similar situations.
    - mypastself 5y ago
      That might make you a “Spanish room”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
      - iamacyborg 5y ago
        I think the general idea is that the human mind is effectively a Chinese room, consciousness is just a by-product of the brain doing it's thing and free will is merely an illusion. https://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind_Brain_Theory_of_the_Appearance_of_Consciousness https://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwaway787544 5y ago
Well, they could, but they'd be lying about lying.
Brian_K_White 5y ago
Then they aren't lying, merely wrong. Same goes for a AI. Both of which seem like unremarkable facts.
ajuc 5y ago
It's not lying if you think you're telling the truth.
devoutsalsa 5y ago
Doesn’t lying imply an intent to deceive? If I believe the moon is made of cheese and say that, I’m not lying, I’m just wrong.
- ben_w 5y ago
  I’ve seen it used both in that way[0], and in the sense of saying any false thing. There’s also a gap between the two of lying by omission: on the one hand, “I swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth” is a situation where that clearly counts as a lie; on the other, if I go past a street preacher claiming the world is 6000 years old, I don’t consider failing to stop and tell him and his audience that he’s wrong to be a lie. [0] I use the word the same way you do; As a further example, if you did believe that the moon is made of cheese, and you said that it wasn’t, that would be a lie.
- _moof 5y ago
  It does, which is famously why certain newspapers are/were loathe to use the word "lie" in connection with certain politicians. They knew certain utterances were untrue, but they had no evidence of intent. Without intent it's not a lie; it's just wrong.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

> Related headline: humans won't tell you they're lying if they think they're telling the truth Humans also won't tell you they're lying if they know they're lying, because, well, of the same reason they are lying in the first place.

varajelle 5y ago
Oh, they'll tell you. Unconsciously, using their body language.
- moron4hire 5y ago
  That's a myth promulgated by the prison industrial complex. There are no reliable body language cues to tell if someone is lying.
  - smegsicle 5y ago
    i don't get this meme that just because body language isn't 100% accurate, it is completely meaningless of course it shouldn't be admissible in court, but it's ridiculous to take that and say that body language tells you nothing
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      well first off the body language needs to be interpreted, there may be some people who can tell lies and never be caught by body language and there might be some people who will always be caught by body language. But perhaps the people who will always be caught by body language have issues that cause them not just to be reliably caught when lying but to mislead the interpreters of their body language into thinking they're lying when not. Given that part of the task of interpreting someone as lying by body language also involves understanding cultural differences, and as a human activity is prone to human bias, it might be beneficial for rational people to discount the use of body language interpretation in determining lies completely as an unmeasurable process. In short body language may not be completely meaningless, but it is probably best to treat it as if it were.
      - robbedpeter 5y ago
        Unless you know someone very well, you'll be missing context when interpreting body language. Even then, sociopaths and con artists can seem extremely well known to you and you won't have a clue that everything you think you know is a lie. Actors train to control this. You have to wonder if so many Hollywood marriages fail because neither partner can trust that the other isn't just really good at putting on a persona.
        Fnoord 5y ago
        Yes, social engineering, too. And LE and CIA et al are trained to expose it (see the book Spy The Lie).
      - smegsicle 5y ago
        part of the productive use of heuristics is understanding their limits by your logic no heuristic should ever be used?
        bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        a common heuristic would be If you are having difficulty understanding a problem, try drawing a picture. the method of drawing a picture is pretty well understood, thus understanding the limits of the method also are. However understanding the limits of using body language as a lie detector in any instance where used requires understanding the biases of the person doing the detecting (which may be yourself, and knowing one's self is traditionally a tricky thing), what their current mental state is in, the culture that the person who may be lying is from, do they have any ongoing problems or conditions that might make them appear to be lying when not, is the potential liar able to mask their lying better than most people, and probably a few more things that are hard to pin down that I haven't thought of here. Getting the heuristic to work in reasonable, measurable way so that one can decide is this giving a good approximation of a correct answer, am I making progress using this, is an important part of having an heuristic. As an example, common heuristics used in construction or software project management. So I would think heuristics that are well understood and that do not depend on imponderable questions that philosophers have been arguing about for millennia should be used, but ones that are not free of these problems should not.
  - dgb23 5y ago
    Not everything is political BS. Some things are just common sense. People can read body language and sometimes they can tell if someone is lying, especially if they know the liar well.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Some things are just common sense. “Common sense” is just a modern positive term for folk mythology; and particularly when it comes to reading “body language” to detect lies, much of that popular wisdom is based on fabrications deliberately popularized by the law enforcement community (not unlike polygraphy, and, until the same fell apart, the FBI’s “fiber science”.) Relying on body language (not independent knowledge of the facts of the claim) to detect lies is at best barely better than a coin flip and tends to rely (like polygraphy, which is also not reliable) on indicators of arousal and the known false assumption that arousal = deception, but with less accuracy in detecting arousal than a polygraph.
    - sgtnoodle 5y ago
      I can usually tell when my 3 year old daughter is lying because either her speech is quieter, or she acts excessively generous. It also helps that she always blames one of the dogs, typically a stuffed one. It's funny the stuff she thinks she needs to sneak. A couple weeks ago I stumbled upon her in the back bedroom, shamefully eating a graham cracker. We celebrate her willingly eating anything that isn't pure sucrose...
- nikanj 5y ago
  "That person seemed really nervous, so clearly they were lying" Or, you know, that person was really nervous because they might get wrongly deported / jailed / fired / broken up with / etc. This body language stuff is 50/50 bad cop behaviour and bad relationship advice. See also: lie detectors, which really aren't that accurate.
  - isaacfrond 5y ago
    I can really recommend Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Talking to Strangers'. It is a fascinating book in which he tries to explain why it so hard to understand what other people are really thinking.
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    Body language is real. Formalistic interpretation of body language ("if subject does this, they are lying") is bogus.
    - nikanj 5y ago
      I like how we accept the existence of professional actors/actresses, but think body language can’t be controlled with conscious though
      - DocTomoe 5y ago
        And training, which the run-off-the-mill criminal would be unlikely to have. Just because something does not work 100% of the time, every time, with highly sophisticated criminals does not make it worthless as a tool.
- reshie 5y ago
  sure. unless they lie with that too.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Terry_Roll 5y ago
This is what makes science so interesting, I've read plenty of scientific papers where claims or assertions are made cited in another paper and if you dont read that other paper, you dont know if the claim/assertion is correct or not. Believe it or not, there are quite a few papers pulling that trick!

layer8 5y ago

The article actually mentions this (“prime ministers”).

ssivark 5y ago

We also don't usually need to raise the question of whether humans are "just statistical models spitting out sequences of words" or whether they "understand the meaning of what they're saying", because we hold it self-evident that the latter applies. Counter to the snark implicit in your comment, that's why the headline regarding AI is more salient than a parallel headline regarding humans.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
I have my doubts about the degree of understanding truly existent in a great deal of human speakers.
iamacyborg 5y ago
> humans are "just statistical models spitting out sequences of words" I think a lot of research would suggest that this is actually how the brain works.
- i_like_waiting 5y ago
  Thats pretty much how I learned spanish, for half of stuff I had no idea about exact meaning, I just knew that my girlfriend used those words in similar situations.
  - mypastself 5y ago
    That might make you a “Spanish room”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      I think the general idea is that the human mind is effectively a Chinese room, consciousness is just a by-product of the brain doing it's thing and free will is merely an illusion. https://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind_Brain_Theory_of_the_Appearance_of_Consciousness https://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

throwaway787544 5y ago

Well, they could, but they'd be lying about lying.

Brian_K_White 5y ago

Then they aren't lying, merely wrong. Same goes for a AI. Both of which seem like unremarkable facts.

ajuc 5y ago

It's not lying if you think you're telling the truth.

devoutsalsa 5y ago

Doesn’t lying imply an intent to deceive? If I believe the moon is made of cheese and say that, I’m not lying, I’m just wrong.

ben_w 5y ago
I’ve seen it used both in that way[0], and in the sense of saying any false thing. There’s also a gap between the two of lying by omission: on the one hand, “I swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth” is a situation where that clearly counts as a lie; on the other, if I go past a street preacher claiming the world is 6000 years old, I don’t consider failing to stop and tell him and his audience that he’s wrong to be a lie. [0] I use the word the same way you do; As a further example, if you did believe that the moon is made of cheese, and you said that it wasn’t, that would be a lie.
_moof 5y ago
It does, which is famously why certain newspapers are/were loathe to use the word "lie" in connection with certain politicians. They knew certain utterances were untrue, but they had no evidence of intent. Without intent it's not a lie; it's just wrong.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]