3 ms·

I had a somewhat similar experience with the polygraph portion of my clearance process - apparently its common to calibrate the machine to the subject by asking

• stephen_g 4y ago
  The polygraph is 100% pseudoscience - at best it's a prop to make interrogating people that don't know it's fake easier because they believe the interrogator can read their mind, but it falls apart when the person being taken knows that it's woo. So we shouldn't really use technical/scientific terms like "calibration" when talking about it...
  • dr_dshiv 4y ago
    It’s not like, thetans. It may not be reliable, but it’s not pseudoscience. From Wikipedia: >In 2002, a review by the National Research Council found that, in populations "untrained in countermeasures, specific-incident polygraph tests can discriminate lying from truth telling at rates well above chance, though well below perfection". The review also warns against generalization from these findings to justify the use of polygraphs—"polygraph accuracy for screening purposes is almost certainly lower than what can be achieved by specific-incident polygraph tests in the field"—and notes some examinees may be able to take countermeasures to produce deceptive results