7 ms·

Near-future advances in functional brain imaging will make torture obsolete

• gus_massa 12y ago
  > Still, it is imperative that we gather intelligence from captive terror suspects in order to prevent heinous crimes from taking innocent lives both at home and on the land of our allies abroad. There are a lot of false implicit assumptions here: 1) The image system is good enough to get any information: It' a new technology. I expect that it is overhyped usual and you will not get very much information for a long time. Have you seen my flying car? 2) Torture methods produce accurate information: It's well known that people make false confections and incrimination under torture. Just Google "witch hunt" for an old enough case that is not currently politized. 3) The interrogators are reliable: It's easy to use low quality information extracted from the suspect to incriminate whoever you want. Sometime it's not evil, only that if the interrogator has some previous ideas they can cause a big confirmation bias.