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.

If it actually worked, they'd have data and results. But, spoilers, they don't.

Seems like it's a useful prop for manipulating people, and in that role it really is effective.

(I also think that most complaints of this science-is-just-another-religion kind are rubbish, but that's a more controversial matter and I will not further derail this thread onto it.)

Creationists and Evolutionists can both agree that scientific process creates good results and is a generally well-reasoned approach to learning about the current state of the universe and making predictions for the future. Where they disagree is the extent to which this is true, especially as it relates to the ability of those predictions to track reality going forward and backward in time, but that’s more covered in a sibling comment.

"Evolutionism" doesn't mean "believing that science is always right" or "believing that science is capable of answering questions about things other than repeatable experiments" or anything of the sort. Nor does it mean, as you put it elsewhere in this thread, "an axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws". (Believing in those things might make someone more likely to be an evolutionist[1], but if that's enough reason for you to call them "evolutionism" then you'd better also be prepared to call being white "wealth" and being tall "playing basketball" and so forth.)

[1] But one doesn't have to believe those things in order to be an evolutionist, and I fear you're engaging in the widespread but unjustifiable practice of seeing that someone disagrees with you, thinking "what cognitive flaw might lead them to be wrong in that way?", picking an answer, and assuming it's right.

"Evolutionism" means "believing in evolution" or sometimes "believing that evolution is responsible for such-and-such particular things". (And sometimes some other related things, like "believing that evolution isn't just a consequence of physical laws but that Progress is somehow built into the fabric of the universe" or "applying the ideas of evolution to particular fields", but those aren't the meaning we're discussing here.)

(This isn't some idiosyncratic usage of the word "evolutionism"; every dictionary I've looked in agrees that this is how it's used.)

In any case, I specifically didn't say that you regard evolutionism as a flaw. What I actually said differs from that in two ways.

1. I said I was making a conjecture about what you might be doing rather than a claim about what you are doing. "I fear you're engaging in ..." were my actual words.

2. The "flaws" I'm suggesting you may think you've identified are not evolutionism itself (at least, not as pretty much everyone uses the word) but other ideas: believing that science is always right, "axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws", etc.

And I believe people are free to pick any axioms that suit them, it is incorrect to say that “I believe they are false”, rather I accept they are axiomatic assumptions equivalent but distinct from those I have made. And I preach so that the folks making them might accept the same.

You’re reaching for a lot that quite simply isn’t there.

Also, I don’t have an issue with “believing science is always right”, I happen to think the scientific process science produces correct results myself. What I contest is the idea that evolutionism itself is somehow “scientific”, as the folks who believe it like to claim. There is quite simply no evidence of it that doesn’t require first axiomatically assuming the conclusion. But that axiom is so fundamental to many evolutionist’s world views that they do not fully consider its ramifications.

There's a difference (at least for me) between "the scientific process generally produces correct results" (which I would vigorously affirm, though if I were going to be facing some sort of cross-examination I would want to be more nuanced about it) and "science is always right" (which I would vigorously deny). Science produces (merely) hopefully-increasingly-accurate approximations to truth; even excellent theories (e.g., Newton's theory of gravitation) often turn out to be wrong or incomplete or applicable only in restricted domains; sometimes the scientific consensus is just flatly wrong about something for a while.

What distinguishes science from every other popular way of trying to arrive at the truth is that it has pretty effective ways of eventually finding out when something's wrong, and pretty effective ways of finding good theories even when that's difficult, with the result that it makes progress in ways that other ways of trying to get at the truth are much worse at.

I'm not sure whether what you say has no non-circular evidence is "evolutionism" or "the idea that evolutionism itself is somehow scientific", nor what idiosyncratic meaning you're giving to "evolutionism" in this particular instance. So I can't really comment on your claims about that.

But, if what you're saying is what might be more conventionally expressed as "there is no non-circular evidence for uniformitarianism" ... well, actually I think I still can't really comment because it's still too vague. I think the right way of looking at this is that uniformitarian theories are simpler and we should prefer simpler theories, that we have uniformitarian theories that seem to do a good job of describing (present evidence concerning) the past and the future, that these theories have done better at predicting subsequent observations than their "creationist" counterparts, that you can jury-rig a non-uniformitarian theory to fit with whatever evidence you please but only at the cost of making it more complicated in a way that makes the overall probabilities at least as much lower as not jury-rigging it would have made them (cf. "the woman next door is a witch; she did it" which in some sense can "explain" any observations but all you're really doing is hiding improbability in parts of your theory that you aren't making explicit); etc. I haven't seen anything that really looks to me as if it's sufficiently better explained by a "deeply non-uniformitarian" theory to outweigh the extra complexity required by any such theory that "predicts" things better. You may of course evaluate things differently, but I'm pretty sure what's going on here is very much not that I am unable to conceive of the possibility that uniformitarianism is wrong.

But your argument is still circular and faith based. There’s no concrete framework whereby your view is “simpler”, but if you already hold it you will perhaps feel that it is. I personally feel Genesis 1 is simpler than anything any scientist has come up with, and I choose to believe it is more correct as well. But I’m not so far down the rabbit hole to not see that other beliefs are equally well supported.

But that’s all missing the main point, which is that science has no way to determine origins, and there’s no way an experiment could get us closer to determining the past. The past is outside the domain of scientific knowledge, as it cannot be experimentally verified. Experimental verification being the cornerstone of science.

Consider I construct a beautiful statue in a room. You awake in the room and attempt to understand the origin of the statue. You observe it for aeons and collect many measurements about its state. You observe that over time, a layer of dust has settled on the statue, clinging to its entire surface evenly. Looking at all your scientific observations, you conclude that many millions of years ago, there was nothing. Then over time, layers and layers of dust settled. Over enough years, you posit, a statue must have formed. It seems surprising, sure. How could this chaotic dust make a beautiful statue? But the science is clear: nothing else has ever been observed that could cause that statue to exist, and winding back the clock millions of years from the observations you make would indeed produce nothing. Thus this is the simplest explanation, so no matter how unbelievable, it is what we must accept barring anything better. What’s that you say? An intelligent being might have designed the statue and put it there for you to observe? Preposterous: we have no evidence of such an intelligent designer. All we have is this beautiful statue.

The past is not outside the domain of scientific knowledge. (Unless you refuse to call something "knowledge" unless it is known absolutely for certain, in which case the situation is much simpler: there is no such thing as knowledge, scientific or otherwise.)

The way science works is: you have a bunch of observations, you come up with theories that attempt to explain them, you try hard to refute those theories by thinking of tests/observations/... that will give different results depending on what theory (if any) is right, and you try hard to look for alternative theories to explain the observations, and the situation you hope for -- which happens very frequently -- is that you have one not-too-complicated theory whose predictions match the observations well, and that despite extensive efforts no one has found a theory that does as well without being much more complicated (e.g., by "baking in" the actual observed results), and then that theory is the one you provisionally treat as "true" until that situation stops obtaining (e.g. because someone found a better theory, or it fails to account for new observations).

(yesyesyes, this is a simplified account, but I claim it captures the essence of how science works)

You will notice that nothing in that paragraph forbids those theories to say things about the past.

Which is just as well, because the very most primitive scientific activity possible, namely making and reporting a single observation, is necessarily about the past. Suppose I measure the temperature of a liquid by immersing a digital temperature probe in it and looking at the output. It takes a bit of time for the sensor in the probe to equilibrate with the liquid around it. It takes a bit of time for the electronics in the probe to do their thing. It takes a bit of time for the light from the display to reach my eyes. It takes a bit of time for my brain to process that and turn it into an actual number. By the time I write "115.2 degrees C" in my notebook, the actual liquid-being-at-that-temperature is several seconds in the past.

But I'm still happy writing the number down, because by far the most likely explanation for my current state of "thinking I have just read the display as saying 115.2 degrees C" is that a few seconds ago the temperature of the liquid was about 115.2 degrees C.

Of course it's always possible that I've suffered some strange brain aberration, or that the probe is malfunctioning, or that an angel reached down and interfered with the experiment. Or that some currently-unknown physical phenomenon invalidates the way the temperature probe works, for this particular liquid in this particular situation. Everything in science is provisional. But the fact that something's in the past doesn't in itself make it more provisional. And, while those exotic alternative scenarios are possible, they aren't likely: strange brain aberrations are thankfully rare, lab equipment usually either works or fails in obvious ways, miracles are rare if they ever happen at all. So we generally do OK to ignore those scenarios until plenty of actual evidence for them turns up.

So, anyway, what of your example? In any actually plausible version of the scenario where one human being makes a statue that's later seen by another, that other human being is going to find plenty of evidence of other intelligent beings who might have made it. (E.g., to be excessively literal about how you set up the scenario, if I observe that statue then I am going to be aware of having seen many many other statues before all of which I have good reason to think were made by people.)

So if you want hypothetical-me not to think it plausible that the statue was made by an intelligent being, even though in fact you made it, you're going to have to go to great lengths to erase from the world -- or at least the portion of it that I get to see -- all evidence of other people who might have made the statue. And it's going to have to be a hypothetical-me that lacks all the real-world knowledge I have involving other people. And, well, if hypothetical-me is looking at a world from which all evidence of other intelligent beings, apart from that statue itself, has been carefully erased, then I am not sure it's much of a gotcha to say "aha, your so-called scientific approach will never discover the intelligent designer here!". If you falsify the evidence competently enough, you can indeed get someone to believe something false; how exactly is that supposed to indicate that they're doing it wrong?

Where the faith of evolutionists lies is in taking those studies showing the most minuscule changes then saying “look, small changes have occurred by random mutation. we know of no other mechanism by which anything might occur, therefore this is how everything was created! what, you don’t trust the science?? heresy!”

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.

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."

Regardless, I’m not talking about functions describing the universal state, I’m talking one layer up from that, those that describe how that state changes, including any instantaneous events. Does the cat instantaneously die at any given second with the same probability, or does something intervene in the one second it does that did not exist in any of the others?

[EDITED to add:] I do agree that when I said "X and Y are clearly not the same thing" I should have added something along the lines of "I see that after treating them as the same thing you say that technically they're different but hardly anyone embraces just one of them, but I don't think the paragraph where you talk about that makes much sense". Sorry about that. In any case, it's rather a side issue; "nondifferentiable things obviously don't imply a god who specially designed you" was the more important point, and one your response doesn't address at all.

Why would there be a "time variant differentiable middle ground" but not a "time invariant nondifferentiable middle ground"?

Why would differentiability imply no God? (You think a god could intervene in the universe but not in a differentiable way??) For that matter, why would nondifferentiability imply a God? (Maybe nondifferentiable things happen that are just random noise.)

Why would having "time-variant" phenomena stop you using science to extrapolate to the past or future? A time-varying law can be expressed as a time-invariant law about time-varying functions. So I suppose when you say "time-variant" you mean something like "varying with time in a way that cannot be described scientifically. But the real-work here is in the "cannot be described scientifically" bit, not the "varying with time" bit. If you had time-invariant behaviour that was beyond scientific description, that would block grandiose scientific ambitions too.

I think that when you say "non-differentiability" you mean "divine intervention", and when you say "time-variant" you mean "fundamentally inaccessible to science", but you know that if you say what you actually mean then people will be all "science demonstrably works really well" and "claims of divine intervention keep not checking out when investigated carefully" and "evidence for gods is really weak" and so on, so you've picked these more modest-sounding mathematics-looking terms to use instead.

Top tip: if you're going to do that, it gives the game away a bit if in the very next paragraph you start saying ridiculous things like "if you take things to be differentiable then you don't get the warm fuzzies of a God who specially designed you", and people will notice.

What does this mean? People who don’t know what they’re talking about will get their feathers all ruffled and start rambling about missing the case of nondifferentiable constants? I guess I should have expected as much. But that is, indeed, my point: evolutionists get stuck against the wall just the same as the rest of the religions the GP mentioned.

LOL. You’re just cargo culting philosophy now, with a thin veneer of sciencey-sounding jargon.

1) An axiom is not an article of faith, it’s something on which we build a theory. Euclid’s axioms are invalid in quite a few situations and nobody loses any sleep about it.

2) The opposite of “the laws of physics never change” is “the laws of Physics can change”, not “god did it”. People would be very interested if you proved that Physics is not invariant with respect to time, because it would mean that energy is not conserved and it would open massive possibilities from a theoretical point of view. That would be much more impactful than most Nobel prizes in the last 60-odd years.

3) There is plenty of “non-differentiable physical behaviour” with invariant laws of Physics. No need for any creator.

> There’s a middle ground of accepting the possibility of differentiable but non-constant mechanisms that should technically be owned by the evolutionists

You fail to even allude to what this middle ground would be. Science itself would be fine with the time invariant being violated. A lot of laws we now know would be wrong, but science itself would not have any more problem than when we realised that the Galilean transformation of velocities was not actually true.

Also, “differentiable but non-constant mechanisms” is just meaningless babble.

> but this is a rarely embraced territory

For a simple reason: it is a straw man and nobody actually believes what you are attacking (mostly because it is meaningless).

> 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.

You seem to be assuming that everyone shares your philosophical system, just swapping “science” for “god”. It is not the case. We do not need warm fuzzies or cool satisfaction. And we do not get any particular pleasure from the fact that any god that is not simply a hands-off creator is exceedingly implausible.

You believe in whatever you tant to, and it’s fine. Do not assume that we are like you are.

2. It can’t be proven that they are time invariant, that’s what you take on belief.

3. That’s not what I’m referring to. I’m referring to the laws themselves suddenly changing, not the state of a given particle suddenly changing.

If you don’t understand point 3 there’s not much more to say. If you did you’d understand a lot of the other things you don’t at the moment, for instance what it might mean for a function to be differentiable but not constant. Contrast G changing over spacetime as can be described by a differentiable function vs a constant vs stepwise at the will of the creator.

When you say "science", do you include scientists?

If not, how does "science" accomplish anything?

And if so, history is filled with numerous instances of scientists "not being fine with" (to put it nicely) ideas that conflict with their beliefs (which are often perceived as, and asserted as, facts).

> We do not need warm fuzzies or cool satisfaction. And we do not get any particular pleasure from the fact that any god that is not simply a hands-off creator is exceedingly implausible.

In science, are things like omniscience &/or mind reading possible? Because I encounter "scientific thinkers" (daily) and actual practicing scientists (frequently) who make explicit, unironic assertions like this about what their brethren do, and believe, and how they think (perfectly), and numerous other literally unknowable things (the future, for one example, counterfactual reality, for another).

I wonder: could it be possible that subscribing to (or being subscribed to) a relatively high quality (yet flawed) metaphysical system doesn't render one perfectly rational?

I also wonder: could something more powerful than science displace it as King of The Throne, considering the psychological grip it has on people (including government, academia, and the media, three of the most powerful reality synchronizers)? Could something do to science, what science did to religion? And if so: what might that be?

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

>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]

footnote: and regardless of innocence, you will be running from the arrest the rest of your life.

Will this information be useful to you? I believe it well could be. It's hard to explain exactly how/why without actually going through the experience though. And the verdict will still depend on many factors, many of which will be out of your control. But a few insights into the deep inner details of the process might be enough to tip the odds in your favor if things are close to begin with.

Another thing I'll add: a good lawyer really helps. The case I was on, the defense attorney was just totally on-point and absolutely "nailed it". Every single time - EVERY time - a witness for the prosecution said something questionable, or contradictory, or that in any way exposed a possible hole in the prosecution's story, he was all over it. By halfway through the trial I was rooting for the guy because watching him work was like watching a maestro in action. Hell, in the jury room during deliberations, we were all joking about how "If I'm ever on trial for a serious crime, I want this guy defending me."

That said, there's always an element of luck involved. In this case, I'm pretty sure the defendant was guilty. But I mean "pretty sure" in the sense that my subjective Bayesian posterior for "guilty" would be more than 50%... but the prosecution definitely did not prove he was guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt". And aside from the skillful performance of the defense attorney pointing out holes in the story being told by the prosecution, was the simple fact that there were holes. And part of that was because the investigators were bumbling and incompetent, borderline "Barney Fife" or "Officer Barbrady" types. To the point that in the jury room during deliberations, we were joking about how "If I'm ever under investigation for a serious crime, I hope this guy is leading the investigation." A better investigation might well has resulted in a guilty verdict, but as it was we acquitted the guy.

Another observation: the defendant took the stand to testify. Usually not recommended for criminal defendants, but it worked for him. Why? Well, not so much because of what he said or didn't say, but because the prosecutor acted like a dick towards the guy, belittling him and demeaning him, talking down to him, and just generally being a prick. Now strictly speaking, none of that had anything to do with whether the defendant was guilty or not. But it created sympathy for the defendant, and the prosecutor basically turned himself into the villain. Did if affect the outcome? TBH, yeah, I think it kinda did. Things were close as it was, and that little bit of extra sympathy might easily have been the deciding factor. But the thing is, this is one of those "things that are outside of your control" if you're ever on trial. Maybe your prosecutor will be more professional and under control. Not much you can do about that. But just seeing how emotional aspects like "sympathy for the defendant" CAN play into a decision can be valuable, I believe.

Anyway... sorry for the long rant. I'll just say that if you ever get invited to jury selection, I'd encourage you to NOT try to "get out of it".

Are jurists more likely to commit crimes that they’ve presided over? Do they absorb any knowledge from the cases they decide that enables them to live a life of crime?

Stealing a flashlight and a radio from a cop car, basically. The funny part is, that's the bit that I'm "fairly sure" the guy was really guilty of. But they also threw in some hinky claim about him stealing a chainsaw and a shotgun and some other stuff from a truck that was parked nearby (this was all at the officer's house). And for the most part, none of us on the jury believed he stole the chainsaw and the shotgun... in fact, we mostly think there never was a chainsaw or a shotgun. Because this guy was on foot, drunk, in the middle of winter, and was somehow able to carry a flashlight, a radio, a shotgun, and a chainsaw off to some safe hiding spot? From which they were never recovered? But he was found wandering on the side of the road later that morning with the radio and the flashlight? Hmm... so yeah, where did the gun and the chainsaw go???

Anyway, basically we thought they tried to "pile on" this guy with some made up bullshit, and that also probably helped us make the decision to acquit him, even if he was guilty of the radio and flashlight bit. And that played in with the prosecutor acting like such an ass to the guy and made the defendant seem like the victim.

Funny thing: after the case was over, they asked the jurors to hang around for a while (voluntarily) and talk to both the defense attorney and the prosecutor about how we reached our decision. And I actually told the prosecutor "dude, you were a total dick to that guy and made yourself look really bad by doing so". He said it was kind of personal with him and that guy, because the guy is a repeat offender and he's tried him like a dozen times. Now whether or not that supports a belief that they tried to set him up on some extra bogus charges I'm not sure, and I didn't ask about that. But man, oh man, did I learn that weird shit goes on that most people never see or hear about.

And of course there was the mysteriously malfunctioning dash-cam that didn't record any audio when the first officer approached the guy when he saw him on the side of the road, and the mysteriously missing 911 audio recordings of the guy supposedly keying up the radio and talking into it, etc., etc. And the fact that the cop car that the stuff was stolen from was left unlocked, and was un-monitored for like 11 hours from the time the officer got home from work until he got up to leave for work the next morning and found the radio and flashlight missing. And the absolute lack of physical evidence (fingerprints, footprints, eyewitnesses, anything) outside of him being seen carrying the missing radio and flashlight (he claimed he found both lying on the side of the road).

Like I said, there were serious holes in their case to leave room for "reasonable doubt" even though the guy was "probably" guilty.

My jaw is on the floor.

Here in Blighty, a jury deliberates in absolute secrecy. Revealing jury deliberations, even after the verdict, is a serious offence.

Without question. The best, most accurate, and most comprehensive texts I ever read about how to go about manipulating people was a series of books aimed at car salesmen. To the degree that "mind control" is a thing, these books were clear how-to guides.

And they convinced me to never talk to a car salesman.

This is why if you detect any nonsense like this, you should always remember that at any time in a car buying transaction, you can just walk.

Yes, but as you note, the point is to make it sound like barely a confession, the minimum possible confession. This makes it just as attractive to the innocent as for the guilty. It's offering a minimally painful way out of a deeply stressful situation.

And as you say, the punchline is that not confessing would lead to minimal or no pain, and every level of confession will equally turn out much worse. An innocent person is just trying to escape from that room, and is being conned into agreeing to a long prison sentence in order to do it.

It’s a weird place to be when you are rooting for the child molester/arsonist/muderer hoping they’d come to their sense and fucking CALL A LAWER YOU FUCKING IDIOT and SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE!!!

But oddly, I guess maybe it’s a good thing “rape the kids and wife, shoot them point blank and burn the house down” criminals are too stupid to exercise such a basic right. Even the scummiest of police investigators give these people the option to shut the fuck up and call the lawyer. Sure the person might have to wait an obscenely long time before the lawyer shows up but they still are given the out yet these moron criminals think they can outsmart a highly trained police interrogator and choose to dig their holes.

Usually these people already dug their hole well before they are drug into the police station though. The on the ground evidence usually pretty much points to them already. All the confession does is save the state millions of dollars taxpayer money with courtroom proceedings.

So yeah… really mixed on the whole topic. Of course these videos on YouTube are selected to be the most interesting of the bunch. There are probably a hundred more mundane interrogations that go unseen for every one that makes it to a widely subscribed YouTube channel.

This is not to challenge anything you said, but you have two rights here: the first is to have a lawyer present while you are being questioned, the second (and more important right) is the right to remain silent.

Talking to a lawyer is obviously a good idea if you are in any sort of legal predicament. Even if you were not arrested or charged, but have certain legal obligations or are considering signing a binding contract etc.

But when it comes to police "interviewing" you, you don't even have to go as far as to ask for a lawyer. You can simply leave it at "I don't want to talk to you." Even THEN you don't have to go that far. You can literally communicate absolutely nothing. Catatonic non-responsiveness is not a crime. This applies whether or not you are under arrest or being detained. You can always refuse to speak. That is your constitutionally protected right.

It's possible I just haven't watched enough of them, but I've never seen that. Usually the interviewer is a calm and dispassionate Columbo type who asks clarifying questions and then lets the suspects slowly trap themselves in their own web of lies. It is fascinating to watch.

That said, even though I have a healthy respect for the criminal justice system, I will still NEVER talk to the police without a lawyer. (Whether or not I've committed a crime.)

This loses its ability to inspire awe when you watch a video of one of these where you know the subject is actually innocent and the interviewer manages to also catch them in their own web of lies and make them look and sound guilty.

So rounds of intense questioning on the same subject infect any recollection of the experience someone has - amplifying or even adding events which didn't exist due to the focus of it.

And this has very real consequences - it was one of the driving forces of the satanic panic in in the 1980s[1] - for which people went to jail on the basis of "recovered memories".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic

The bottom line is that these interviews are all recorded and the police are well aware that if they make a misstep and if the defense has a competent lawyer, they may inadvertently set a thief, killer, or rapist free if they are not extremely careful in their questioning and processes.

Thing is, there isn't an academic journal for voodoo. There is at least one for polygraphy.

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.

Same with poly. If they don't like something, they can just say "He failed his poly"

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.

I would imagine the entire point of doing a test would be to find out who is innocent and who is lying about being innocent. If you pressure the innocent into false confession, wouldn't it just make everything even more difficult?

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.

*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.

Given all the ways polygraphs can be misused or abused, the only real use I see is as in interrogation tool. But given the issues with false confessions in general, I think the interrogation should hold less weight, but that is a whole other issue.

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

It isn’t going to “catch” everyone but it is another way to reveal people with vulnerabilities that could be exploited. I think the real issue is people that “fail” the polygraph, since it isn’t actually a lie detector in any sense. It would be better if they just considered it a polygraph assisted interrogation.

I've done periodic polygraphs, both lifestyle and full-scope, every 5 or so years since 1997. None of mine have ever lasted longer than 30 minutes.

You just sit in a chair while wearing some straps and there's never been any yelling involved.

It's all quite prosaic and relaxing actually.

It has been my experience that the clearance investigation process is quite simple, although I lead a very boring and law-abiding life.

I know of some people who have had quite long polygraphs and failed them repeatedly but my hunch is that the examiner has the findings of the background investigation in-hand and is trying to clarify some findings.

Many people with past financial, drug, or legal problems have gotten through the process with no issues just by being open and honest with the investigators and polygraphers.

So yeah, if the background investigator interviewed a friend of a friend of a friend and was told that 20 years ago you used to get stoned in college and whip your dick out but when asked during the polygraph about past drug use you go "I've been a squeaky clean boy my whole life" you're gonna have issues.

The annual financial disclosure is much more stressful just because of all of the damned paperwork.

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.

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.

> All then that was needed was for everyone to "believe it worked,"

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.

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.

When I was a kid, a new house was being built downhill from my parents and they dowsed out a "good" place for a well. They were all set to drill before my dad went out and told them they were directly downhill from our septic tank.

When the ground doesn't perk naturally, it's common up here to build a mound system where you have a mound of soil that does perk and vegetation (grass) on it to take up the liquid.

A fully closed tank is basically the last resort. We have friends with a house right on a lake, and their tank had to be pumped every three weeks before they had a kid. I can't imagine what the interval is now.

Still-- total bs.

In Britain, until surprisingly recent times, water engineers had been known to use dowsing rods to help find water pipes. As far as I can tell, it's a... method... that helped them to stop overthinking the problem, and subconsciously look at where the the pipe's likely to be, given the many small clues indicating previous engineering work.

The poster talking about finding water in a desert presumably values the water. The studies are more interested in two related questions: the mechanism of the technique and whether its practitioners understand it. To the latter, the answer is an emphatic 'no'.

For the former, the studies use various experimental schema to evaluate hypothesized mechanisms, each time yielding a refutation of those mechanisms. Going from a refutation of specific mechanisms to a rejection of the practice is extrapolation, not sound science.

Part of living in an intelligible universe is accepting that there are phenomena that await discovery, description, and generalization. Whether that is true of this 'dowsing' technique is a separate question. When a flat-Earther fails to address time zones, distance to the horizon, stars, great circle routes over the poles, etc., this dismissiveness is justified, but that does not appear to be the case from what you have cited, and the practice of science is worse off for you insinuating otherwise.

Edit: All of this is apart from the utility of someone doggedly pursuing a course of action which he is convinced will bear fruit as contrasted to someone timidly sampling among options without ever making equivalent commitment.

He didn't indicate any magnitude, your subconscious mind interpreted that part, merged it into your experience, and here we are. As the saying goes: perception is reality (a technically true statement, but the particular meaning of the word "is" (there are many) is very important to understand this saying properly). This is not the only error in your comment by the way.

I am curious: how many hours have you invested in studying consciousness, and in what ways? How about psychedelics, have you substantial experience (and do you study your experiences, and those of others, or just do it for fun)? How about meditation? How about epistemology (ie: Gettier Problems(!!!), non-binary logic, phenomenology, cultural norms of cognition (which puts limits on how accurately/soundly you are taught and even ~allowed to think), etc)? How about Direct vs Indirect Realism (did you even consider this, at all while you were writing your comment)?

Are you going to learn a lesson from this and exert effort in the future to distinguish between shared reality and your personal local "reality", culturally and ideologically conditioned Human Being? Or, are you going to continue behaving inline with your peers here, the easy and pleasurable approach, putting people like me who are trapped on this planet (which is warming up due to your ideologies) with you people at ever increasing levels of risk?

edit: fixed spelling, misplaced brackets

> Several things that Mr. Carl does while dowsing don't fit into many of the definitions that have been proposed.

Everyone who believes in it agrees it works, but not how it works? That's a classic sign of witchcraft.

> There are many aspects of dowsing that were not addressed by this experiment and these results do not apply to them. Additionally, many people claim to have a dowsing sense but are not reputable. Beware of anyone who wields this work as proof of their skill. As in any scientific experiment, repeatability, under the scrutiny of the scientific community, is the determinant of valid results. Unless this validation occurs, these findings will remain experimental data.

In other words, do not take this paper as proof of dousing and do not trust someone who links to this PDF to prove dousing is real.

...

Here's the thing, nobody is here saying you didn't go out into the desert and find water. (Although, you're a random comment on the internet, so I'm not particularly inclined to believe a word of it either.) It's just that "dousing" isn't a likely explanation for how( you found water.

At the very best, "dousing" as a name can be equated to "dark matter" - something is happening, but we know virtually nothing about what is happening or how. Explanations that rely on the type of wood used, or claim to be able to find oil* and lead in addition to water, just don't make sense. With dark matter, yes we're exploring as many explanations as we can, but most scientists agree that the more complicated solutions (such as "gravity works differently at very large scales") are less likely. And they still have a mechanism.

No, its a sign of incomplete scientific investigations. Or are you going to tell me everyone knows how SRRI's work, to take the most overt example of incomplete sciencey/witchcraft?

(We don't know how they work, just that they do work, so hey .. ship the pills, witches ..)

If I clamed I had a pair of glasses that improved your driving, the control would not be driving blidfolded.

Put simply, the polygraph is a powerful tool if the subject believes it is a powerful tool.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

This comment is a perfect study of this almost uniquely American insane phenomenon.

But then I don’t question Koreans about fan death.

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.

The placebo effect is measurable. If there is no measurable improvement, there's no placebo effect either.

Bear in mind that what most claims in favour of the polygraph measure is not truth but potentially-false confession. Extracting false confessions is relatively easy, it's also completely f-ing useless to wider society and massively harmful to the victim.

They don't care if you actually did the crime, they care that they can extract a confession, or provide damning evidence to a prosecutor that lets them throw you in prison, so they can put a nice big checkmark on that case. Did they actually jail who was responsible? Maybe not, but who cares about that, apart from you?

Same reason for Forensics to exist. Don't misunderstand, some Forensic science has validity in many cases, but a lot of it is just straight up nonsense that isn't proven or peer-reviewed in the slightest, in fact many Forensic sciences that appear in modern court cases are completely, 100% debunked.

And like, why should they care? Even if you hire a crack lawyer team that gets you out of the court case, it's not like anyone involved in the investigation that almost threw an innocent man in jail is going to suffer an ounce of consequences. Or hell, even if you're wrongly convicted, worst case scenario you get a financial judgement after years of litigation, that's paid for by the taxpayers.

To stay in your metaphor:

- Not only do sugar pills not cure tumors, but imagine - 60% of recipients don't report decreased pain levels (no placebo effect) - 20% of recipients feel more pain

> The most important study on the placebo effect is Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche’s Is The Placebo Powerless?, updated three years later by a systematic review and seven years later with a Cochrane review. All three looked at studies comparing a real drug, a placebo drug, and no drug (by the third, over 200 such studies) – and, in general, found little benefit of the placebo drug over no drug at all. There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain – but overall H&G concluded that the placebo effect was clinically insignificant. Despite a few half-hearted tries, no one has been able to produce much evidence they’re wrong. This is kind of surprising, since everyone has been obsessing over placebos and saying they’re super-important for the past fifty years.

> while a sugar pill doesn't make a tumor disappear, it can be very good at pain management.

And now you go to this version:

> There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain

So is it real or not? We're just saying the same thing, what's the point of saying it doesn't exist and then revert back to exactly what was said originally?

That's not the topic at hand here, which is "is the PE real?". For me it absolutely is.

Correlation is not causation, as they say.

(Hope your depression is gone or at least not too bad now days, regardless of what drugs or placebos may have played a part!)

> Conclusion: In randomized double-blinded, placebo-controlled trials, presumably with minimum sources of bias, placebos are sometimes associated with improved control of symptoms such as pain and appetite but rarely with positive tumor response. Substantial improvements in symptoms and quality of life are unlikely to be due to placebo effects.

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.

I mean maybe there are other civil suits you could file, but I suspect a lot of that would be signed away before the polygraph.

Saying "there is no evidence" is sloppy cable political TV tier rhetoric. There is absolutely evidence[1]. You and others may not find that evidence convincing, or otherwise think polygraphs shouldn't be used, but nevertheless it exists. A brief survey of the evidence suggests that the polygraph is probably slightly better than chance, but with high enough error bars that we should be very cautious about its use.

[1] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/10420/chapter/7

Obviously once you hit a certain point of drunkness obviously maybe a test like walking in a line can demonstrate something useful. But so would a breathalyzer. The false positives is the problem because they're being used to illegitimately subject innocent people to criminal charges.

Just like you can also be charged and convicted of DUI even with zeros or being under the legal limit. If you’re traveling to/from/around a bar area at 2:30 AM your driving pattern and behavior is going to be heavily scrutinized.

Just because you have an anecdotal example or two doesn’t mean it’s common either. The FSTs are also completely stacked against you. Take a high-pressure scenario, less than ideal conditions (side of the road with passing cars, dark, cold/hot, precipitation, flashing lights, etc), and ridiculous/conflicting/confusing instructions and even people who are completely sober end up providing what could appear as damning evidence.

Even professional athletes have bad days where they just can’t land a shot they’ve nailed thousands of times.

I know at least a few cops who openly admit they struggle with the tests (to the point of “failure” in some cases) in no-pressure ideal classroom training environments.

Of particular curiosity is a lot of police body/dash cam footage where the officer struggles to demonstrate/explain the tests, stumbles over reading Miranda cards, etc. Evidence where if the same observations were applied to them they could be scrutinized as being “impaired”.

Of course I’m not advocating for impaired driving, just highlighting that it’s a tricky situation overall.

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

Arguably the bigger/worse false belief right there.

> First the exam makes you doubt or forget your memories. Then, by forcing you to re-access them again and again under stress, it literally rewrites them.

To some extent this happens naturally, so if the questioner really wants accuracy, you won't force people to re-access the memory for no good reason.

After hours of uncomfortable prodding, an interviewer came into the room and suggested I see a doctor for what looked like heart arrhythmia. I did shortly after and they were right! (It was deemed nothing too serious though.)

Even the telltale spike in the polygraph chart, itself largely a myth created by TV and movies, can indicate anything from a heart problem to sexual attraction. (Indeed, the machine’s inventors used it to detect both of those things. Larson married one of his first test subjects, and Keeler discovered a heart defect while testing the machine on himself.)

I'm actually curious. Do you get an annual physical? Does your PCP give you an EKG? That would be the appropriate way to catch this.

>A polygraph, often incorrectly referred to as a lie detector test, is a junk science device or procedure that measures and records several physiological indicators such as blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and skin conductivity while a person is asked and answers a series of questions.

Naturally, my co-workers and I discussed this among ourselves and we all agreed to test, we knew we were innocent. One of the men said all they're trying to do is see if anyone cracks under the pressure of the test. Being kind of a nervous type of person, I was concerned they might misread my domineer. I talked to my sister and she told me to try my best to control my breathing during the test.

For me the problem wasn't that I was guilty, it was they would think I was guilty. We all passed the test and went back to work, later it was revealed the thief was someone on another shift. Or were they just nervous?

On my own volition and expense, I took a polygraph test about it. On one of the control questions, I kept reacting in a manner the examiner said indicated untruthfulness. I was certainly being truthful, though. No matter how he reworded the question, I failed it.

Fortunately, it wasn't the "payload" questions. He swapped that control question out for a different one and declared me truthful. I presented the results to my manager at the same time as I quit.

That experience, though, got me very interested in polygraph examinations and started a hobbyist interest in the entire field and history of lie detection.

That led to me understanding that it's not a thing that is (currently, anyway) actually possible. What is done instead are psychological tricks that very much depend on the examinee believing that the whole thing is legitimate.

I only post the correction because it took me a couple of minutes to figure out. Domineer is an uncommon word, so initially I thought I had a gap in my vocabulary, but couldn't find any definitions that made sense in this context.

You'd be alarmed to know how many restaurant owners tell the staff to clock out when the store closes and then finish closing duties off the clock, among other types of wage theft.

Eddie: Checks out. OK, sir, you're free to go.

  Moe: Good, 'cause I got a hot date tonight.  [buzz]

       _A_ date.  [buzz]

       Dinner with friends.  [buzz]

       Dinner alone.  [buzz]

       Watching TV alone.  [buzz]

       All right!  I'm going to sit at home and ogle the ladies in the
       Victoria's Secret catalog.  [buzz]

        [weakly] Sears catalog.  [ding]

        [angry] Now would you unhook this already, please?  I don't
       deserve this kind of shabby treatment!  [buzz]

There was a big robbery at a place I worked, luckily I was not a suspect but the FBI came and administered polygraphs to anyone who could have done it. I asked what happens if someone refuses, and the answer was basically "they won't."

Of course it ended up being someone that didn't even work there. The test was clearly for intimidation purposes, at least from the view I had.

HOWEVER. Law enforcement can still use them as another tool in their questioning process to produce a confession when there is other evidence pointing to the guilt of the suspect. But of course is only effective against defendants who represent themselves, don't seek their lawyer's advice, or ignore their lawyer's advice.

You ask them, and a week later they bring in a badly beaten bear, who shouts "Okay, I'm a rabbit! I'm a rabbit!!"

Judges are like every high-level decisionmaker ever - the thing they fear the most is publicly being proven wrong so they always go for the safe option where they can share the responsibility of their decisions with 'experts'.

But then I learn truth detectors are? What more movie tropes are not tropes?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/28/forensics-bi...

It turns out just throwing handcuffs on someone is enough to get a false positive GSR test. And matching a shell casing to a specific gun is essentially impossible.

The false positive rates on forensic "tests" are hard to study because no one has an incentive to, and if you go digging you'll find how bad they can be. Like for example K9 units have about a 50% false detection rate (dog indicated but no drugs/weapons/bombs found). If a cop told you they flipped a coin to decide whether to search a car then the search would be tossed out of evidence immediately!

It's a factless and truthless system.

In the US, I’ve always heard something like every 3 months or 3,000 to 5,000 miles. The cars even warn you in that timeframe.

In Europe, a mechanic was very confused when I talked about an oil change when one was done the prior year. He said it’s more every 2 years or 20,000 to 25,000 kilometers. Once again the cars were set up to warn at that distance.

I’d love to get to the bottom of it. Why such a difference? I can understand the garages wanting the extra business, but why would the car manufacturers go with it?

There is also the case of changing oil for hot and cold seasons- getting thinner oil in the winter and thicker in warmer weather to adjust. I think thats more or less a thing of the past as well, my Honda does not specify/recommend this in the owners manual but perhaps some cars do?

Old adages sometimes stick around forever though- especially when there is money to be made in keeping them alive.

Specifically, transmission fluid is often considered 'lifetime' fluid that doesn't need to be changed, and, if you follow that advice, you end up replacing the transmission, an expensive endeavor, whereas if you don't, you can typically double its usable lifetime.

You also have to be careful about engine oil, because the margin of error is very small. Most modern cars have an oil minder, and those work well provided the oil itself is in spec.

1) Opportunity to upsell other services,

2) Some people (quite a lot, actually) have alien-to-me car buying habits and might be convinced to trade in their new car after only a year or two and buy another new one if you can just get them into the dealer at the right time.

No clue if that’s why they do it, but maybe.

Next time when you deal with these agencies, as a fun mental exercise, try to figure out which one of the two types you've got in front of you. When it comes to climbing to the top through the ranks, which ones will get there more effectively?

If online stories are to trusted, this has occurred in a lot of government clearance related situations.