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> Local media report that the [fishing] pair were disqualified as winners at an event last year, because one of them failed a polygraph test. wtf? That is defi

> Local media report that the [fishing] pair were disqualified as winners at an event last year, because one of them failed a polygraph test. wtf? That is definitely not how to use a polygraph. First off, why would you ever submit to that? Second, they are notoriously questionable, and something tells me the fishing championship didn’t get the world’s leading expert to run it.

a1369209993 4y ago
> the fishing championship didn’t get the world's leading expert to run it. That would actually make the results less reliable, not more. Polygraphs are good at two things: interrogation, which is basically hitting the subject's knowledge-tree with a stick and seeing what falls out, with the polygraph giving a crude estimate of where to aim for more information. And legitimization, pretending that the interrogation 'produced' some specific result (interrogation does not work that way) to trick people into thinking that result is true. Interrogation is mostly useless (you might get information about how they (may have) cheated, but that's worth less than nothing unless you can verify it against real evidence), and legitimization makes your beliefs wronger than they were to begin with, because you no longer know that you don't know things.