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I awhile back I used to do work with a major DARPA contractor. If you're familiar with security clearance for these roles, you know that at the higher levels of

I awhile back I used to do work with a major DARPA contractor. If you're familiar with security clearance for these roles, you know that at the higher levels of clearance you eventually need to take a polygraph exam. I was never interested in going the clearance route, but got into a conversation with a grizzled industry vet that seemed like a character torn from a hard-boiled detective novel. At the time I had recently learned that polygraph exams were "fake" and when the topic of the exam came up I was quick to point this out. His comment surprised me, and, in a sense, demonstrated to me that saying a polygraph is "fake" is akin to saying WWE wrestling is "fake". Of course it is, but that is a misunderstanding that what you're watching is a real performance. He said the polygraph itself is just a tool for the interviewer. The real value was in someone who knew how to use the machine to convince the subject that they knew the truth. He continue that in his time he knew some mighty good interviewers who could easily extract anything they needed from you. My father did go the clearance route, and when I asked him about the polygraph he told me he confessed things to the interviewers he would never have told my mother. "Fake" or "real" the polygraph does work in this sense.

keiferski 2y ago
Yeah, polygraphs remind me of those TV shows where the investigator pretends to use magic, voodoo, astral signs, etc. to solve the crime, but is really just using them to manipulate the psychology of the subject and see their reaction. Put simply, the polygraph is a powerful tool if the subject believes it is a powerful tool.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  That's incomplete. As the article points out: > Even the United States government isn’t dumb enough to believe the polygraph works. The machine’s real purpose is symbolic, as an icon of the power of the state. Law enforcement agencies don’t use the machine to detect lies. They use it to coerce confessions. [...] It’s a fact, part of a story power tells itself to justify its power. Maybe you can beat the machine— they don’t detect lies, so it’s not that hard—but you can’t beat an entire country that believes in it. Even if you know its nonsense, there's still something coercive of any system where it can be used as a pretext to punish you, or where you are punished for not pretending to believe in it.
  - Joker_vD 2y ago
    > They use it to coerce confessions. It boggles my mind than confession even counts as evidence but then again, so does any other testimony. Sure, it made sense when we had almost no forensics (and that's the times that shaped our legal systems) but today we do, don't we?
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      Living in civilised country I find whole confession, anything you say, can't lie in your own defence thing so absolutely abhorrent. To me it seems absolutely sensible that you should be able to decide what is your statement as answer to any question by state. And if you are on stand in trial as defendant you should be able to lie however much you want. The prosecution must prove you were lying, but the act itself cannot be illegal.
    - 542354234235 2y ago
      >Sure, it made sense when we had almost no forensics (and that's the times that shaped our legal systems) but today we do, don't we? The CSI effect. The amount of forensics that people think will be presented in an average case is so much more than actually are. Finding and collecting usable fingerprints, DNA, shoe imprints, etc. does not happen in every case. Most cases are a lot of circumstantial evidence all pointing to the same person.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
        Fingerprints, DNA, shoe imprints, & other forensic evidence are circumstantial. Evidence is legally either circumstantial or testimonial, there's no other category. Most cases are a lot of testimonial evidence all pointing to the same person!
    - lazide 2y ago
      Even if CSI was real (which it isn’t even close), the vast majority of actions anyone takes leave no discernible evidence that isn’t immediately made useless through entropy. And the most important element in almost every crime (intent) almost never leaves any evidence at all. IMO the biggest subtle lie that CSI convinces people of is not that facts can be determined so easily and unambiguously - though that is a lie - but that the evidence found and any conclusions from it will fundamentally matter. Each piece of evidence is always some turn of the plot. In real life, it usually doesn’t. Too much ambiguity, or inconclusive or inconsistent results. Or false positive/negatives. Or data which is useless in the vacuum of other missing information. In real life, it’s a frustrated and depressing slog - punctuated by occasional moments of elation and/or terror - being a detective. So what could be more compelling than someone telling everyone in their own words their intent and their actions, so everyone can stop guessing and ‘know for sure’? That’s what a confession is. Which conveniently at the end of nearly every crime show the suspect actually does. In real life, some do that - but many lawyer up, and you spend years dealing with every kind of bullshit and confusion game a professional can throw at you, instead of closure and a clear answer. The polygraph is an attempt at bluffing folks into ‘we got you’ moments. Which does sometimes work! But the pressure and techniques applied can also result in people falsely confessing to things that never happened, or getting confused themselves and ‘failing/lying’ when they were actually relaying the truth.
ezoe 2y ago
A dangerous thought. There is no proof the interviewee tell the truth. It's easy to plant a fake memory to humans and make them believe it's "real". Oh what am I thinking? The important thing is, the interviewer can produce a lot of "confessions" and "revealing of truth". They will be evaluated a good interviewer. Secure their job position. Sounds good. /s
quadhome 2y ago
Except there is no evidence it helps even “good” interviewers “extract” anything resembling truth. And there is lots of evidence it does not. This comment is a perfect study of this almost uniquely American insane phenomenon. But then I don’t question Koreans about fan death.
- vasco 2y ago
  What do you make of the placebo effect? The polygraph obviously has no basis for working, but while a sugar pill doesn't make a tumor disappear, it can be very good at pain management. I still wouldn't use it in the context of the justice system, though.
  - codr7 2y ago
    So you mind can fix pain, but not tumors? Where do you draw the line?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      At things that only exist in the mind, like, say, pain.
      - codr7 2y ago
        Except that's not even close to true.
        tsimionescu 2y ago
        In what sense? Pain is a complex emotion triggered by various simple sensations (very hot, very high pressure etc). But remember that people with certain kinds of brain damage can feel these same sensations, but not pain. To them these just don't register as painful. Other people feel pain in limbs that they no longer have, so not triggered by any sensation at all. Also, even beyond medical issues, different people perceive pain very differently. Hot peppers are perhaps the clearest example of this, where people accustomed to them feel the same heat, but not the same pain as someone unaccustomed.
powersnail 2y ago
I can see how pressure would be applied when seeing the machine is leaning towards "lying", possibly breaking the subject's effort to lie. But what would be the interviewer's strategy, if the subjects insist that they are telling the truth regardless of how the interviewer manipulates the machine? Wouldn't it immediately start discrediting the whole process if the subject is in fact telling the truth? I'm telling the truth here, and yet your machine says I'm not, hence it's broken, and hence I'll happily lie in the subsequent questions when it actually matters.
- vasco 2y ago
  Most innocent people doubt their innocence when strongly accused even when they know they are right. Just a tiny bit, but in the right setting and with enough wearing you down, you can make innocent people believe they did it. I've seen it happen right in front of me.
  - willis936 2y ago
    That's why you don't talk to cops. Have a lawyer present and use the courts that us taxpayers pay for.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Also why narcissistic and psychopathic manipulators are so dangerous. They don’t have to be cops. Most aren’t.
  - Aerroon 2y ago
    I wonder if this is related to people adding ambiguity to what they're saying. Eg instead of saying "it's 20 degrees outside" they will say "last I checked it was about 20 degrees". They change their phrasing because they want others to not think that they are wrong. By doing this they undermine their own credibility though.
    - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
      Hmmm. People who make absolute statements like that generally* undermine their own credibility in my mind. *I do it lots. Partly because the way my mind runs, I can nearly always (lol, can't help it) come up with possible conditions where I'd be wrong.
callalex 2y ago
That just means the interview process is selecting for only completely uninformed idiots. What does that say about the resulting organization?
- boffinAudio 2y ago
  That its a cult.
  - hunter-gatherer 2y ago
    Commenter subjectsigma understands this. In a former life I had jobs that required a polygraph, and I was not in a cult, nor does the interview process select for uniformed idiots. Both of you are reacting to commentary that the author barely understands and that neither of you clearly understand. Nobody in my circles seemed to think the polygraph was anything but a tool. In fact, the sibject is sometimes gossiped about in thise circles about the "relevancy" of the polygragh today anyways. The thing about buearacracy though is that change happens incredibly slow. If everyone decided to get rid of the polygraph alltogether today, it would still take some years to actually happen.
    - boffinAudio 2y ago
      >Nobody in my circles seemed to think the polygraph was anything but a tool. Just like the e-meter. >buearacracy Yeah, that's a cult.
- subjectsigma 2y ago
  You don’t understand what you’re talking about. It’s an open secret in CDC circles that the polygraph is not effective at catching trained liars, more of a ritual than anything. The polygraph is not a test for how gullible or misinformed you are. It is mostly a test for two things: 1) are you willing to play by the rules and follow orders, even if sometimes they don’t make sense? 2) if you are being lightly interrogated, do you immediately freak out and tell the interrogator everything? Do you have a really bad reaction to pressure? If you don’t match these criteria then you probably aren’t fit to know extremely sensitive government secrets. But like I said, it’s more of a ritual than anything, the value for even those two tests is unproven. Even smart and informed people who know exactly what a poly does can say and do things they wouldn’t normally when they’re strapped to a chair, hooked up to machines, and being yelled at for hours
tommiegannert 2y ago
I have watched quite a few (American) police interview videos lately, and regardless of tools (polygraph or Reid(tm),) I wonder how many interviews start with the perpetrator really having no rationale, and ending in them simply back-rationalizing their emotions. A fit of rage might not have a rationale, if you're that predisposed. But being pushed to explain yourself will make the brain do what it's constantly doing: retroactively explaining your emotions. Especially if you've been promised a reduction in stress if you do. And then there's the opposite, when the subject continuously makes no sense, because they have brain damage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c_lmx4LdNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c_lmx4LdNw
- flir 2y ago
  > I wonder how many interviews start with the perpetrator really having no rationale, and ending in them simply back-rationalizing their emotions That's the core of the Reid technique, isn't it? Here's two rationales, one socially acceptable and one socially unacceptable. Pick one. We don't actually care which one you pick, because a confession is still a confession, but we're handing you a convenient narrative you can use to justify your actions (a carrot), and an alternative people might believe about you if you don't pick Box A (a stick). Something similar happens in high-pressure sales. I bet those guys would make great interrogators.
  - jayrot 2y ago
    Wasn't familar with the "Reid Technique" so I had to look it up. One of the opening wikipedia paragraphs is just perfect. >In 1955 in Lincoln, Nebraska, John E. Reid helped gain a confession from a suspect, Darrel Parker, for Parker's wife's murder. This case established Reid's reputation and popularized his technique.[3] Parker recanted his confession the next day, but it was admitted to evidence at his trial. He was convicted by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. He was later determined to be innocent, after another man confessed and was found to have been the perpetrator. Parker sued the state for wrongful conviction; it paid him $500,000 in compensation.[4]
    - bagels 2y ago
renewiltord 2y ago
Everybody always thinks this about stuff that doesn't work. It turns out it's total bullshit. There was someone I knew who claimed that dowsing rods worked a similar way. A good practitioner of the dowsing rod was really using the information from his audience and was Hans the Mathematical Horsing his way to water. The audience of course had this information from the subtle way they picked up on cues of water, ways even they didn't recognize until the dowsing rod was in action. They all think this. Some can even bend spoons.
- boffinAudio 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    Maybe you should go back and try a control without the dowsing wand
    - boffinAudio 2y ago
      Done precisely that with random Monte Carlo digs on a site, didn't find water. Switched to dowsing, found water within minutes.
      - astura 2y ago
        There's a half a million dollar prize for you if you can prove it - https://cfiig.org/paranormal-challenge/ https://cfiig.org/paranormal-challenge/
      - 542354234235 2y ago
        Why would you do it randomly? When you have the rods, you are using your eyes to navigate the environment. If the dowsing rods are just a way to help key you into your own senses, like seeing depressions or slight differences in color, or feeling slight downhills while walking, then the control should be trying it without them. If I clamed I had a pair of glasses that improved your driving, the control would not be driving blidfolded.
crimsoneer 2y ago
As someone who used to be a cop, this is absolute peak cops justifying the evidence not supporting their intuition by just making bullshit up. If it actually worked, they'd have data and results. But, spoilers, they don't.
- jajko 2y ago
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  - explaininjs 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - danparsonson 2y ago
      What's "evolutionism"?
      - explaininjs 2y ago
        The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors. There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists, but this is a rarely embraced territory: you get neither the warm fuzzies of belief in a God who specially designed you, nor the cool satisfaction of a belief in making observations about the universe now and scaling/time-inverting them to speak confidently about the distant past and future.
        gjm11 2y ago
        People sometimes complain about "motte-and-bailey" rhetoric, where what you argue for explicitly is much more unassuming than what you really believe. I have rarely seen so spectacular an example. Motte: "there might be non-differentiable phenomena in physics". (Note that e.g. anyone who believes that "wavefunction collapse" in quantum physics is an actual real thing believes in non-differentiable phenomena; so does anyone who thinks that inside black holes there are actual singularities rather than merely places where general relativity breaks down and something more complicated happens; so does anyone who thinks that the smooth-looking stuff we seem to observe arises from some combinatorial underlying structure like a cellular automaton or some kind of constantly-evolving network of vertices and edges and whatnot.) Bailey: literal freakin' creationism. (Complete with "a God who specially designed you". Something in the world might not be differentiable, therefore there is a God who specially designed you. Gosh!) As I said elsewhere in this thread: evolutionism means belief in evolution, or belief that evolution happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. And creationism means belief in creation, or belief that creation happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. These are not, even slightly, the same thing as whether or not some functions describing the universe might be non-differentiable. Also, "non-differentiable" is not, even slightly, the same as "not time invariant". E.g., the function y = cos(exp(-x)) + exp(-x) cos(x^2) is not-time-invariant on both large and small scales, but it's differentiable, analytic even. And "x is a continuous function of t, and (dx/dt)^2 = 1 at all but a discrete set of points" is as time-invariant a law as you might care to mention, but almost all its solutions have places where they aren't differentiable."
huppeldepup 2y ago
I’d compare it to the sobriety test of being asked to walk in a straight line. someone who’s drunk will put a lot of effort in it, which is the giveaway.
- kcb 2y ago
  Or someone who's nervous because the police are accusing them of a serious crime...
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Or... it doesn't really matter. By the time the police are commanding you to do a field sobriety test, they have already decided to charge you with DUI. There is literally nothing you can do during the test to change their mind. It's a formality, and the "test" is vague enough that the officer can cite any little twitch or misstep as "evidence" that you failed the test. If you pass a breathalyzer test (blow under the limit), and they still want to charge you with DUI, they will likely do a field sobriety test because the results are non-numeric and are subjective. Heck, you can blow 0.0 and still get arrested for DUI[1][2], and if you tell the world about it, the police will sue you for defamation[3]. 1: https://reason.com/2024/02/14/iowa-cops-arrested-a-sober-college-student-for-driving-intoxicated-his-lawsuit-is-moving-forward/ https://reason.com/2024/02/14/iowa-cops-arrested-a-sober-col... 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGWSbAHaHUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGWSbAHaHUw 3: https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2023/10/02/after-traffic-stop-video-goes-viral-newton-police-sue-citizen-for-defamation/ https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2023/10/02/after-traffic-sto...
    - bongodongobob 2y ago
      Complete nonsense. They need evidence. If you blow 0s, you're not getting a DUI. Just because you have an example or two doesn't mean it's common. I've been pulled over, blew 0s, passed the tests and let go.
      - kkielhofner 2y ago
bitwize 2y ago
I'm reminded of the story about the cops who constructed a "polygraph" by attaching wires to a colander that ran to a photocopier in which a piece of paper that had "You're Lying" written on it was placed. It was enough to intimidate the suspect into singing like a bird.
- malnourish 2y ago
  I believe that, or something very similar, happens in _The Wire_.
- waterhouse 2y ago
  Scene from The Wire doing roughly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg13hyfm2Ik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg13hyfm2Ik
jrm4 2y ago
Great point, it reminds me of when I read about how "trials by ordeal" sometimes worked. Consider the boiling water/oil thing: If you're innocent, you can "stick your hand in and not get burned." What they did was, they faked the water being hot by blowing bubbles in it. All then that was needed was for everyone to "believe it worked," The innocent sticks in, and then the guilty confesses.
- digging 2y ago
  A perfect description of how "trials by ordeal" don't work. This phrase is doing some HEAVY lifting: > All then that was needed was for everyone to "believe it worked,"
  - krferriter 2y ago
    In an era where mass media basically didn't exist, most people couldn't read, and information about how these things work could not easily spread, it might have been easier to convince people that a fake test was really what you were claiming it was. If people could google it they would instantly find out it was fake.
    - Filligree 2y ago
      So guilty people were convicted, and so was anyone who knew how oil works.
      - jrm4 2y ago
        Unlike now, where only innocent people are convicted and everyone knows all the science that always works, like DNA testing?
  - jrm4 2y ago
    Oh, correct. I think by "work" I merely meant "here is the mechanism," not "this is why they are successful."
JohnFen 2y ago
I knew a professional polygraph examiner who told me the exact same thing. It means that the polygraph works as well, and in the same way, as the ancient Roman(?) method of having a tent sealed off from light, with a donkey in it. The examinee is told that he is to hold the tail of the donkey and if the donkey brays while he says the thing he's being tested for, then they know for a fact that he's lying. The actual test, though, was that the donkey's tail was covered in soot. If the examinee comes out of the tent with clean hands, they know that he didn't hold the tail and so is deemed to be untruthful.
- dudeinjapan 2y ago
  What if the donkey kicks you?
  - tlamarre 2y ago
    Means you were about to say something the donkey didn't want to be made public.
  - rad_gruchalski 2y ago
    It means you stood in the wrong place. Don’t stand behind, stand next to the donkey.
  - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    You kick the ass in the ass.
- Xortl 2y ago
  There's a similar "actual test" scene in By The Great Horn Spoon!, a fun kid's book about the California Gold Rush we read in elementary school.
- Puts 2y ago
  Sounds like the premise then is that everybody has got some shit they are hiding but it’s better to employ a criminal than a lier. Which would mean that the polygraph is really good at filtering out genuinely good people from the recruitment process (in the case of this article people whose actually never done drugs or talked shit about their superiors).
Zigurd 2y ago
This is a bit like saying good witch doctors can diagnose you without the voodoo accoutrements, which are just there to get you to open up about how you are feeling. It's still voodoo, and still produces garbage conclusions much of the time. Thing is, there isn't an academic journal for voodoo. There is at least one for polygraphy.
- efitz 2y ago
  Wait, what, Voodoo doesn't work? Has this been studied?
- JohnFen 2y ago
  This reminds me of a study I read decades ago that showed patients have better outcomes from medical care if the doctor has credentials prominently displayed on the office wall.
bbatha 2y ago
> My father did go the clearance route, and when I asked him about the polygraph he told me he confessed things to the interviewers he would never have told my mother. And this is exactly the problem, people make stuff up all of the time under stress. > Of course it is, but that is a misunderstanding that what you're watching is a real performance. This is not the value. The value is that the polygraph is that its an end-run around employment law. You can't use a polygraph on a general employee to fire them nor can you fire them for many of things that they ask in a polygraph interview. However you can revoke their clearance and fire them for not having a clearance.
- ozim 2y ago
  Well I agree but also if someone makes stuff up that is incriminating while on “friendly examination” they shouldn’t get the clearance because they will absolutely incriminate themselves and everyone they met in their lives when on “unfriendly examination”.
  - michaelmrose 2y ago
    If you mean when their tortured I thought the consensus was that everyone talked under sufficient torture and the actual problem was determine fiction from reality.
RajT88 2y ago
I know some govvies who have been through the polygraph circus. One guy knew it was BS and could not get worried enough for them to come up with a baseline - he was too calm. So they took the tack of rescheduling it a bunch of times, making him go home after showing up so he would be good and pissed off when they actually did the test. He passed. Another lady I know had the interviewer go so hard on her she was crying through half of it. Afterward, the interviewer told her the goal was to make every interviewee break down so they would reveal stuff.
lordnacho 2y ago
Don't scientology go around with a similarly fake device?
- UncleSlacky 2y ago
  Yes, the "E-meter" is a primitive form of lie-detector equipment: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dianetics#E-Meter https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dianetics#E-Meter "Basically it is a simple ohmmeter that measures galvanic skin response (electronic resistance of the skin), somewhat similar to a polygraph; the user (the "preclear") provides one of the elements in a Wheatstone bridge."
jvanderbot 2y ago
Yep - this is like field sobriety testing, in my mind. Everyone will display some level of nervousness and inability to perform all the tests, and the officer thus has a baseline level of "cause". They can therefore do all kinds of tests or hold you until you do those tests. B/c "He failed his FST" Same with poly. If they don't like something, they can just say "He failed his poly"
- johnflan 2y ago
  I don’t get how “field sobriety testing” in the sense of observing someone perform some coordinated actions is still a thing. In Ireland if stopped by a member of the police (Gardai) and they have suspicion they can require you to provide a breath or saliva sample. If you pass you are free to go, if you fail or refuse you are escorted to a police station and provide a blood sample or urine sample (I think this depends on if suspected of alcohol or drug offences) refusal to provide the sample is an offence
deleted 2y ago
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Xen9 2y ago
The purpose of polygraphs is to minimize the amount of bits of information one's adversaries can gain information OVERALL while maximizing the amount of bits of information one gains OVERALL—only (but not all bits are equally worthy which makes this partially an algorithmic problem). Then they use the polygraph to obfuscate information (EG about the process of selection, knowledge gathering, and a considerable amount of other things); to have a highly spacious separate "stage" for the real sensors; and can NEVER retire it because that would reveal several bits of information. Consequently they ALSO can never state this.

keiferski 2y ago

Yeah, polygraphs remind me of those TV shows where the investigator pretends to use magic, voodoo, astral signs, etc. to solve the crime, but is really just using them to manipulate the psychology of the subject and see their reaction. Put simply, the polygraph is a powerful tool if the subject believes it is a powerful tool.

Terr_ 2y ago
That's incomplete. As the article points out: > Even the United States government isn’t dumb enough to believe the polygraph works. The machine’s real purpose is symbolic, as an icon of the power of the state. Law enforcement agencies don’t use the machine to detect lies. They use it to coerce confessions. [...] It’s a fact, part of a story power tells itself to justify its power. Maybe you can beat the machine— they don’t detect lies, so it’s not that hard—but you can’t beat an entire country that believes in it. Even if you know its nonsense, there's still something coercive of any system where it can be used as a pretext to punish you, or where you are punished for not pretending to believe in it.
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  > They use it to coerce confessions. It boggles my mind than confession even counts as evidence but then again, so does any other testimony. Sure, it made sense when we had almost no forensics (and that's the times that shaped our legal systems) but today we do, don't we?
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Living in civilised country I find whole confession, anything you say, can't lie in your own defence thing so absolutely abhorrent. To me it seems absolutely sensible that you should be able to decide what is your statement as answer to any question by state. And if you are on stand in trial as defendant you should be able to lie however much you want. The prosecution must prove you were lying, but the act itself cannot be illegal.
  - 542354234235 2y ago
    >Sure, it made sense when we had almost no forensics (and that's the times that shaped our legal systems) but today we do, don't we? The CSI effect. The amount of forensics that people think will be presented in an average case is so much more than actually are. Finding and collecting usable fingerprints, DNA, shoe imprints, etc. does not happen in every case. Most cases are a lot of circumstantial evidence all pointing to the same person.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
      Fingerprints, DNA, shoe imprints, & other forensic evidence are circumstantial. Evidence is legally either circumstantial or testimonial, there's no other category. Most cases are a lot of testimonial evidence all pointing to the same person!
  - lazide 2y ago
    Even if CSI was real (which it isn’t even close), the vast majority of actions anyone takes leave no discernible evidence that isn’t immediately made useless through entropy. And the most important element in almost every crime (intent) almost never leaves any evidence at all. IMO the biggest subtle lie that CSI convinces people of is not that facts can be determined so easily and unambiguously - though that is a lie - but that the evidence found and any conclusions from it will fundamentally matter. Each piece of evidence is always some turn of the plot. In real life, it usually doesn’t. Too much ambiguity, or inconclusive or inconsistent results. Or false positive/negatives. Or data which is useless in the vacuum of other missing information. In real life, it’s a frustrated and depressing slog - punctuated by occasional moments of elation and/or terror - being a detective. So what could be more compelling than someone telling everyone in their own words their intent and their actions, so everyone can stop guessing and ‘know for sure’? That’s what a confession is. Which conveniently at the end of nearly every crime show the suspect actually does. In real life, some do that - but many lawyer up, and you spend years dealing with every kind of bullshit and confusion game a professional can throw at you, instead of closure and a clear answer. The polygraph is an attempt at bluffing folks into ‘we got you’ moments. Which does sometimes work! But the pressure and techniques applied can also result in people falsely confessing to things that never happened, or getting confused themselves and ‘failing/lying’ when they were actually relaying the truth.

ezoe 2y ago

A dangerous thought. There is no proof the interviewee tell the truth. It's easy to plant a fake memory to humans and make them believe it's "real". Oh what am I thinking? The important thing is, the interviewer can produce a lot of "confessions" and "revealing of truth". They will be evaluated a good interviewer. Secure their job position. Sounds good. /s

quadhome 2y ago

Except there is no evidence it helps even “good” interviewers “extract” anything resembling truth. And there is lots of evidence it does not. This comment is a perfect study of this almost uniquely American insane phenomenon. But then I don’t question Koreans about fan death.

vasco 2y ago
What do you make of the placebo effect? The polygraph obviously has no basis for working, but while a sugar pill doesn't make a tumor disappear, it can be very good at pain management. I still wouldn't use it in the context of the justice system, though.
- codr7 2y ago
  So you mind can fix pain, but not tumors? Where do you draw the line?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    At things that only exist in the mind, like, say, pain.
    - codr7 2y ago
      Except that's not even close to true.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        In what sense? Pain is a complex emotion triggered by various simple sensations (very hot, very high pressure etc). But remember that people with certain kinds of brain damage can feel these same sensations, but not pain. To them these just don't register as painful. Other people feel pain in limbs that they no longer have, so not triggered by any sensation at all. Also, even beyond medical issues, different people perceive pain very differently. Hot peppers are perhaps the clearest example of this, where people accustomed to them feel the same heat, but not the same pain as someone unaccustomed.

powersnail 2y ago

I can see how pressure would be applied when seeing the machine is leaning towards "lying", possibly breaking the subject's effort to lie. But what would be the interviewer's strategy, if the subjects insist that they are telling the truth regardless of how the interviewer manipulates the machine? Wouldn't it immediately start discrediting the whole process if the subject is in fact telling the truth? I'm telling the truth here, and yet your machine says I'm not, hence it's broken, and hence I'll happily lie in the subsequent questions when it actually matters.

vasco 2y ago
Most innocent people doubt their innocence when strongly accused even when they know they are right. Just a tiny bit, but in the right setting and with enough wearing you down, you can make innocent people believe they did it. I've seen it happen right in front of me.
- willis936 2y ago
  That's why you don't talk to cops. Have a lawyer present and use the courts that us taxpayers pay for.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Also why narcissistic and psychopathic manipulators are so dangerous. They don’t have to be cops. Most aren’t.
- Aerroon 2y ago
  I wonder if this is related to people adding ambiguity to what they're saying. Eg instead of saying "it's 20 degrees outside" they will say "last I checked it was about 20 degrees". They change their phrasing because they want others to not think that they are wrong. By doing this they undermine their own credibility though.
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    Hmmm. People who make absolute statements like that generally* undermine their own credibility in my mind. *I do it lots. Partly because the way my mind runs, I can nearly always (lol, can't help it) come up with possible conditions where I'd be wrong.

callalex 2y ago

That just means the interview process is selecting for only completely uninformed idiots. What does that say about the resulting organization?

boffinAudio 2y ago
That its a cult.
- hunter-gatherer 2y ago
  Commenter subjectsigma understands this. In a former life I had jobs that required a polygraph, and I was not in a cult, nor does the interview process select for uniformed idiots. Both of you are reacting to commentary that the author barely understands and that neither of you clearly understand. Nobody in my circles seemed to think the polygraph was anything but a tool. In fact, the sibject is sometimes gossiped about in thise circles about the "relevancy" of the polygragh today anyways. The thing about buearacracy though is that change happens incredibly slow. If everyone decided to get rid of the polygraph alltogether today, it would still take some years to actually happen.
  - boffinAudio 2y ago
    >Nobody in my circles seemed to think the polygraph was anything but a tool. Just like the e-meter. >buearacracy Yeah, that's a cult.
subjectsigma 2y ago
You don’t understand what you’re talking about. It’s an open secret in CDC circles that the polygraph is not effective at catching trained liars, more of a ritual than anything. The polygraph is not a test for how gullible or misinformed you are. It is mostly a test for two things: 1) are you willing to play by the rules and follow orders, even if sometimes they don’t make sense? 2) if you are being lightly interrogated, do you immediately freak out and tell the interrogator everything? Do you have a really bad reaction to pressure? If you don’t match these criteria then you probably aren’t fit to know extremely sensitive government secrets. But like I said, it’s more of a ritual than anything, the value for even those two tests is unproven. Even smart and informed people who know exactly what a poly does can say and do things they wouldn’t normally when they’re strapped to a chair, hooked up to machines, and being yelled at for hours

tommiegannert 2y ago

I have watched quite a few (American) police interview videos lately, and regardless of tools (polygraph or Reid(tm),) I wonder how many interviews start with the perpetrator really having no rationale, and ending in them simply back-rationalizing their emotions. A fit of rage might not have a rationale, if you're that predisposed. But being pushed to explain yourself will make the brain do what it's constantly doing: retroactively explaining your emotions. Especially if you've been promised a reduction in stress if you do. And then there's the opposite, when the subject continuously makes no sense, because they have brain damage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c_lmx4LdNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c_lmx4LdNw

flir 2y ago
> I wonder how many interviews start with the perpetrator really having no rationale, and ending in them simply back-rationalizing their emotions That's the core of the Reid technique, isn't it? Here's two rationales, one socially acceptable and one socially unacceptable. Pick one. We don't actually care which one you pick, because a confession is still a confession, but we're handing you a convenient narrative you can use to justify your actions (a carrot), and an alternative people might believe about you if you don't pick Box A (a stick). Something similar happens in high-pressure sales. I bet those guys would make great interrogators.
- jayrot 2y ago
  Wasn't familar with the "Reid Technique" so I had to look it up. One of the opening wikipedia paragraphs is just perfect. >In 1955 in Lincoln, Nebraska, John E. Reid helped gain a confession from a suspect, Darrel Parker, for Parker's wife's murder. This case established Reid's reputation and popularized his technique.[3] Parker recanted his confession the next day, but it was admitted to evidence at his trial. He was convicted by a jury and sentenced to life in prison. He was later determined to be innocent, after another man confessed and was found to have been the perpetrator. Parker sued the state for wrongful conviction; it paid him $500,000 in compensation.[4]
  - bagels 2y ago

renewiltord 2y ago

Everybody always thinks this about stuff that doesn't work. It turns out it's total bullshit. There was someone I knew who claimed that dowsing rods worked a similar way. A good practitioner of the dowsing rod was really using the information from his audience and was Hans the Mathematical Horsing his way to water. The audience of course had this information from the subtle way they picked up on cues of water, ways even they didn't recognize until the dowsing rod was in action. They all think this. Some can even bend spoons.

boffinAudio 2y ago
[flagged]
- Y_Y 2y ago
  Maybe you should go back and try a control without the dowsing wand
  - boffinAudio 2y ago
    Done precisely that with random Monte Carlo digs on a site, didn't find water. Switched to dowsing, found water within minutes.
    - astura 2y ago
      There's a half a million dollar prize for you if you can prove it - https://cfiig.org/paranormal-challenge/ https://cfiig.org/paranormal-challenge/
    - 542354234235 2y ago
      Why would you do it randomly? When you have the rods, you are using your eyes to navigate the environment. If the dowsing rods are just a way to help key you into your own senses, like seeing depressions or slight differences in color, or feeling slight downhills while walking, then the control should be trying it without them. If I clamed I had a pair of glasses that improved your driving, the control would not be driving blidfolded.

crimsoneer 2y ago

As someone who used to be a cop, this is absolute peak cops justifying the evidence not supporting their intuition by just making bullshit up. If it actually worked, they'd have data and results. But, spoilers, they don't.

jajko 2y ago
[flagged]
- explaininjs 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - danparsonson 2y ago
    What's "evolutionism"?
    - explaininjs 2y ago
      The worldview characterized by an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws. It is contrasted by creationism, which posits non-differentiable physical behaviors. There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists, but this is a rarely embraced territory: you get neither the warm fuzzies of belief in a God who specially designed you, nor the cool satisfaction of a belief in making observations about the universe now and scaling/time-inverting them to speak confidently about the distant past and future.
      - gjm11 2y ago
        People sometimes complain about "motte-and-bailey" rhetoric, where what you argue for explicitly is much more unassuming than what you really believe. I have rarely seen so spectacular an example. Motte: "there might be non-differentiable phenomena in physics". (Note that e.g. anyone who believes that "wavefunction collapse" in quantum physics is an actual real thing believes in non-differentiable phenomena; so does anyone who thinks that inside black holes there are actual singularities rather than merely places where general relativity breaks down and something more complicated happens; so does anyone who thinks that the smooth-looking stuff we seem to observe arises from some combinatorial underlying structure like a cellular automaton or some kind of constantly-evolving network of vertices and edges and whatnot.) Bailey: literal freakin' creationism. (Complete with "a God who specially designed you". Something in the world might not be differentiable, therefore there is a God who specially designed you. Gosh!) As I said elsewhere in this thread: evolutionism means belief in evolution, or belief that evolution happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. And creationism means belief in creation, or belief that creation happened some particular way or did some particular set of things. These are not, even slightly, the same thing as whether or not some functions describing the universe might be non-differentiable. Also, "non-differentiable" is not, even slightly, the same as "not time invariant". E.g., the function y = cos(exp(-x)) + exp(-x) cos(x^2) is not-time-invariant on both large and small scales, but it's differentiable, analytic even. And "x is a continuous function of t, and (dx/dt)^2 = 1 at all but a discrete set of points" is as time-invariant a law as you might care to mention, but almost all its solutions have places where they aren't differentiable."

huppeldepup 2y ago

I’d compare it to the sobriety test of being asked to walk in a straight line. someone who’s drunk will put a lot of effort in it, which is the giveaway.

kcb 2y ago
Or someone who's nervous because the police are accusing them of a serious crime...
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Or... it doesn't really matter. By the time the police are commanding you to do a field sobriety test, they have already decided to charge you with DUI. There is literally nothing you can do during the test to change their mind. It's a formality, and the "test" is vague enough that the officer can cite any little twitch or misstep as "evidence" that you failed the test. If you pass a breathalyzer test (blow under the limit), and they still want to charge you with DUI, they will likely do a field sobriety test because the results are non-numeric and are subjective. Heck, you can blow 0.0 and still get arrested for DUI[1][2], and if you tell the world about it, the police will sue you for defamation[3]. 1: https://reason.com/2024/02/14/iowa-cops-arrested-a-sober-college-student-for-driving-intoxicated-his-lawsuit-is-moving-forward/ https://reason.com/2024/02/14/iowa-cops-arrested-a-sober-col... 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGWSbAHaHUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGWSbAHaHUw 3: https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2023/10/02/after-traffic-stop-video-goes-viral-newton-police-sue-citizen-for-defamation/ https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2023/10/02/after-traffic-sto...
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    Complete nonsense. They need evidence. If you blow 0s, you're not getting a DUI. Just because you have an example or two doesn't mean it's common. I've been pulled over, blew 0s, passed the tests and let go.
    - kkielhofner 2y ago

bitwize 2y ago

I'm reminded of the story about the cops who constructed a "polygraph" by attaching wires to a colander that ran to a photocopier in which a piece of paper that had "You're Lying" written on it was placed. It was enough to intimidate the suspect into singing like a bird.

malnourish 2y ago
I believe that, or something very similar, happens in _The Wire_.
waterhouse 2y ago
Scene from The Wire doing roughly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg13hyfm2Ik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg13hyfm2Ik

jrm4 2y ago

Great point, it reminds me of when I read about how "trials by ordeal" sometimes worked. Consider the boiling water/oil thing: If you're innocent, you can "stick your hand in and not get burned." What they did was, they faked the water being hot by blowing bubbles in it. All then that was needed was for everyone to "believe it worked," The innocent sticks in, and then the guilty confesses.

digging 2y ago
A perfect description of how "trials by ordeal" don't work. This phrase is doing some HEAVY lifting: > All then that was needed was for everyone to "believe it worked,"
- krferriter 2y ago
  In an era where mass media basically didn't exist, most people couldn't read, and information about how these things work could not easily spread, it might have been easier to convince people that a fake test was really what you were claiming it was. If people could google it they would instantly find out it was fake.
  - Filligree 2y ago
    So guilty people were convicted, and so was anyone who knew how oil works.
    - jrm4 2y ago
      Unlike now, where only innocent people are convicted and everyone knows all the science that always works, like DNA testing?
- jrm4 2y ago
  Oh, correct. I think by "work" I merely meant "here is the mechanism," not "this is why they are successful."

JohnFen 2y ago

I knew a professional polygraph examiner who told me the exact same thing. It means that the polygraph works as well, and in the same way, as the ancient Roman(?) method of having a tent sealed off from light, with a donkey in it. The examinee is told that he is to hold the tail of the donkey and if the donkey brays while he says the thing he's being tested for, then they know for a fact that he's lying. The actual test, though, was that the donkey's tail was covered in soot. If the examinee comes out of the tent with clean hands, they know that he didn't hold the tail and so is deemed to be untruthful.

dudeinjapan 2y ago
What if the donkey kicks you?
- tlamarre 2y ago
  Means you were about to say something the donkey didn't want to be made public.
- rad_gruchalski 2y ago
  It means you stood in the wrong place. Don’t stand behind, stand next to the donkey.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  You kick the ass in the ass.
Xortl 2y ago
There's a similar "actual test" scene in By The Great Horn Spoon!, a fun kid's book about the California Gold Rush we read in elementary school.
Puts 2y ago
Sounds like the premise then is that everybody has got some shit they are hiding but it’s better to employ a criminal than a lier. Which would mean that the polygraph is really good at filtering out genuinely good people from the recruitment process (in the case of this article people whose actually never done drugs or talked shit about their superiors).

Zigurd 2y ago

This is a bit like saying good witch doctors can diagnose you without the voodoo accoutrements, which are just there to get you to open up about how you are feeling. It's still voodoo, and still produces garbage conclusions much of the time. Thing is, there isn't an academic journal for voodoo. There is at least one for polygraphy.

efitz 2y ago
Wait, what, Voodoo doesn't work? Has this been studied?
JohnFen 2y ago
This reminds me of a study I read decades ago that showed patients have better outcomes from medical care if the doctor has credentials prominently displayed on the office wall.

bbatha 2y ago

> My father did go the clearance route, and when I asked him about the polygraph he told me he confessed things to the interviewers he would never have told my mother. And this is exactly the problem, people make stuff up all of the time under stress. > Of course it is, but that is a misunderstanding that what you're watching is a real performance. This is not the value. The value is that the polygraph is that its an end-run around employment law. You can't use a polygraph on a general employee to fire them nor can you fire them for many of things that they ask in a polygraph interview. However you can revoke their clearance and fire them for not having a clearance.

ozim 2y ago
Well I agree but also if someone makes stuff up that is incriminating while on “friendly examination” they shouldn’t get the clearance because they will absolutely incriminate themselves and everyone they met in their lives when on “unfriendly examination”.
- michaelmrose 2y ago
  If you mean when their tortured I thought the consensus was that everyone talked under sufficient torture and the actual problem was determine fiction from reality.

RajT88 2y ago

I know some govvies who have been through the polygraph circus. One guy knew it was BS and could not get worried enough for them to come up with a baseline - he was too calm. So they took the tack of rescheduling it a bunch of times, making him go home after showing up so he would be good and pissed off when they actually did the test. He passed. Another lady I know had the interviewer go so hard on her she was crying through half of it. Afterward, the interviewer told her the goal was to make every interviewee break down so they would reveal stuff.

lordnacho 2y ago

Don't scientology go around with a similarly fake device?

UncleSlacky 2y ago
Yes, the "E-meter" is a primitive form of lie-detector equipment: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dianetics#E-Meter https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dianetics#E-Meter "Basically it is a simple ohmmeter that measures galvanic skin response (electronic resistance of the skin), somewhat similar to a polygraph; the user (the "preclear") provides one of the elements in a Wheatstone bridge."

jvanderbot 2y ago

Yep - this is like field sobriety testing, in my mind. Everyone will display some level of nervousness and inability to perform all the tests, and the officer thus has a baseline level of "cause". They can therefore do all kinds of tests or hold you until you do those tests. B/c "He failed his FST" Same with poly. If they don't like something, they can just say "He failed his poly"

johnflan 2y ago
I don’t get how “field sobriety testing” in the sense of observing someone perform some coordinated actions is still a thing. In Ireland if stopped by a member of the police (Gardai) and they have suspicion they can require you to provide a breath or saliva sample. If you pass you are free to go, if you fail or refuse you are escorted to a police station and provide a blood sample or urine sample (I think this depends on if suspected of alcohol or drug offences) refusal to provide the sample is an offence

deleted 2y ago

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Xen9 2y ago

The purpose of polygraphs is to minimize the amount of bits of information one's adversaries can gain information OVERALL while maximizing the amount of bits of information one gains OVERALL—only (but not all bits are equally worthy which makes this partially an algorithmic problem). Then they use the polygraph to obfuscate information (EG about the process of selection, knowledge gathering, and a considerable amount of other things); to have a highly spacious separate "stage" for the real sensors; and can NEVER retire it because that would reveal several bits of information. Consequently they ALSO can never state this.