[HN Gopher] How can you tell if someone is lying?
___________________________________________________________________
How can you tell if someone is lying?
Author : samizdis
Score : 399 points
Date : 2021-03-28 02:10 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| themgt wrote:
| This was good, and I mostly agree that using verbal strategies
| that amount to digging into/reviewing the details of what a
| person is claiming is the best way to detect liars.
|
| The TSA thing at the end seems like a bit of a derail though:
|
| _But, Mann says, without knowing how many would-be terrorists
| slipped through security undetected, the success of such a
| program cannot be measured. And, in fact, in 2015 the acting head
| of the TSA was reassigned after Homeland Security undercover
| agents in an internal investigation successfully smuggled fake
| explosive devices and real weapons through airport security 95
| percent of the time._
|
| I don't doubt the TSA "behavioral detection" is extremely
| ineffective, but presumably TSA is mostly leaning on other means
| to detect dangers and failure to detect weapons is more on the
| xray/backscatter scanners. It doesn't strike me as realistic for
| TSA to use verbal techniques like asking each passenger to sketch
| out his travel story to detect if he's lying about having a gun.
|
| One interesting difference it raises is lying about the
| past/experienced events vs. lying about future intentions. Their
| techniques seem mostly geared towards differentiating between a
| person accurately recalling an event from memory vs reciting a
| fabricated version of their memory/actions. It makes sense this
| would be helpful for police interrogating a suspect, but it's not
| intuitively obvious the underlying idea maps to detecting someone
| lying about their intended future actions.
| saberdancer wrote:
| It's likely they want to use "behavioral detection" to be able
| to arbitrarily choose and pick who to examine. Who can say that
| the person they are examining did not fidget or look to the
| side.
|
| This allows them to easily deflect potential racial screening
| complaints.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's like the "smell of marijuana" for cops. I'm convinced
| that the reason (right-wing) law enforcement is against pot
| legalization is because it removes this excuse, along with
| "the dog alerted" for arbitrary searches.
| MertsA wrote:
| Meth and crack also have an odor after smoking them and
| dogs already can alert on them even when they aren't
| smoked. It's already a commonplace lie and there's no
| repercussions when a search turns up empty so why wouldn't
| they just keep lying? Or even easier, just claim they
| smelled alcohol.
|
| Police will continue with warrantless search and seizure
| until they actually face repercussions for misconduct.
| airstrike wrote:
| IIRC their 95% failure includes failing to spot explosives and
| the like in their scanners
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| I went through a screening with a "robot" - in quotes because
| it was literally a breadboard with a bunch of wires sticking
| out of it, a battery and a squarish box. Didn't even have to
| open the bag to show the agents what it was, went right
| through the scanner with no comment. And I was nervous as
| hell cause I was sure I was going to have to explain it,
| maybe even show that it worked. But nope, not a peep.
| wl wrote:
| I've taken a lot of messy electronic prototypes through
| security when traveling for work. The TSA has never cared.
| My camera bag, on the other hand, seems to get some baggage
| screeners very excited. Something about the glass being
| opaque to x-rays? But most screeners don't care.
| Applejinx wrote:
| How white are you, out of curiosity? What's your
| demographic look like, and how closely did it match the
| screeners? Seems like if you were nervous that would be
| additional weighting in the direction of you being
| questioned, so the additional weighting doesn't seem to
| have motivated anything.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Before we jump to "how white are you?", it may make sense
| to ask "was there anything that could possibly have been
| the explosive?"
|
| Random wires, breadboards, etc aren't going to explode
| without a source of fuel.
| rhizome wrote:
| It would be pointless for the scanners to ping on copper,
| ABS, or batteries because every single flyer would have to
| open their bags and buttholes. It's the C4 and other pyro
| that they want to know about.
| mod wrote:
| Pretty sure they weren't going to let you uhhh..."demo" it.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Here's a nice article about their internal tests that failed
| 95% of the time: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tsa-
| fails-95-percent-tests-ho...
|
| > In one test an undercover agent was stopped after setting
| off an alarm at a magnetometer, but TSA screeners failed to
| detect a fake explosive device that was taped to his back
| during a follow-on pat down.
|
| That doesn't inspire much confidence.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > That doesn't inspire much confidence.
|
| It does example how superfluous the TSA is.
|
| The 9/11 commission's recommendations never included
| anything like the TSA - just better comm between the
| 3-letters and reinforced cockpit doors.
| asdff wrote:
| I've seen TSA open a bag because they see something on the
| scanner, see the bag is too much of a mess, and close the
| back up seconds later and hand it back off to the passenger
| without investigating at all.
| Leary wrote:
| Just think of it as like a GAN neural network.
|
| The liar and the discriminator continue to evolve in an arms
| race.
|
| I, as an average discriminator can probably tell the bad liars
| but could be fooled by the good ones.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| That's not how GANs work.
| notsuoh wrote:
| I read the article. It sounds more like practically everyone is
| stuck in a steady state of believing the same "tells" like
| fidgeting, averting gaze, and stuttering they have been told
| forever, and those things don't work. That's not really like a
| GAN at all.
|
| Additionally what you say about being able to spot the average
| liar, as an average person, is contrary to the article. I would
| encourage you to read the article more carefully to distill the
| main points.
| plasma wrote:
| A great TED talk video about trying to spot kids lying
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6diqpGKOvic
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| In short, you can't.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Well, actually, according to the article, you can.
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| True, but these claims do not survive a scientific review.
| arbitrage wrote:
| I prefer to trust the science. Haven't seen a review about
| this specific article we are discussing yet.
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| Would be interesting though if we had a scientific way to
| tell if someone is lying. Would make life easier for
| courts.
| surajs wrote:
| You have the right to be suspicious
| mihaaly wrote:
| People are lying when they make false statements deliberately
| with the intention to deceive. I guess to know if someone is
| lying we need:
|
| - to know the facts
|
| - if the person knows the facts
|
| - and the intentions of the person
|
| all the rest is just guesswork, woodoo.
|
| (and yes, many times we will not know if someone is lying or not.
| But listening to what a person says and confirming it from
| independent sources could help a lot in the third of the
| discovery)
| oftenwrong wrote:
| This video is relevant:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BemHqUqcpI8
|
| It's about interrogation, and the common notion that a guilt can
| be inferred by the suspect's behaviour. It shows two example
| interrogations of innocent suspects, each displaying completely
| different behaviour.
| [deleted]
| hikerclimb wrote:
| It's impossible...
| williesleg wrote:
| They're chinese or indian?
| SMAAART wrote:
| You can't.
|
| When I was younger I had both severe case of Anxiety and I had
| mastered the art of covering it up very well.
|
| Too many times I have been accused of things I didn't do or lying
| because of my counterintuitive behaviors.
| foobiekr wrote:
| David Simon's book, Homicide, has an apropos section:
|
| """Terry McLarney once mused that the best way to unsettle a
| suspect would be to post in all three interrogation rooms a
| written list of those behavior patterns that indicate deception:
| Uncooperative. Too cooperative. Talks too much. Talks too little.
| Gets his story perfectly straight. Fucks his story up. Blinks too
| much, avoids eye contact. Doesn't blink. Stares."""
|
| ... which (although in a slightly different context) captures the
| problem of detecting lies in interrogation very well.
| zakember wrote:
| I wonder if this would unsettle innocent people as well. Sounds
| like this would unsettle some non-suspects too
| jacquesm wrote:
| You are operating on the principle that finding the truth is
| the purpose of an interrogation. This belief may be false.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I'd also recommend watching this quite famous talk about
| the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
|
| Well worth the time.
|
| EDIT: Seems I wasn't the first to make that recommendation:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26608636 ;)
| Spivak wrote:
| It's not. The purpose of interrogation is for the officer
| to gather evidence pointing to your guilt which will be
| presented at trial.
|
| The trial is about figuring out the truth.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The trial is about figuring out the truth.
|
| Even that is an assumption.
| cutemonster wrote:
| I'm thinking about trials more as tools for the people in
| the legal system to advance their careers (unfortunately.
| I don't work there)
| tarsinge wrote:
| Countless times when I was a kid (and sometimes now) people
| thought I lied when I was innocent because of timidity (and not
| diagnosed but maybe on the spectrum), so yeah I was unsettled.
| Uncontrollable smiles were the worst ("that makes you laugh!").
| I can't blame neurotypical people for having heuristics, but
| I'm still afraid to be interrogated in something serious with
| my reactions analyzed.
| Veen wrote:
| The article shows neurotypical people should have the same
| concerns. Interogators who think they know how to spot lying
| are usually wrong, regardless of whether they are
| interviewing neurotypical people or people on the spectrum.
|
| I'm not on the spectrum, but I was a rebellious kid who
| didn't like to take shit from teachers. My defiant and
| sarcastic reactions to accusations were often considered
| evidence that I'd done wrong when I was innocent.
|
| It's not that lie-spotting heuristics work better for
| neurotypical people or worse for people on the spectrum. They
| don't work at all for anyone. We're all in the same boat.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "My defiant and sarcastic reactions to accusations were
| often considered evidence that I'd done wrong when I was
| innocent."
|
| You were rebellious. From the point of view of a common
| teacher, that means you are not innocent. There is actually
| a old common saying, when some kid got a beaten, but it
| later turned out to be not guilty of that ... "well, he
| deserved it anyway" or "well, then the beating was in
| advance for something he is about to do" "or some other
| hidden sin", instead of a apology.
|
| Which means self fulfilling prophecy. Punishing someome for
| something they didn't do - and for sure there will be
| reasons later on for things they will have done.
|
| There are still way too many teachers and alike, who think
| a childs free spirit needs to be broken first, before they
| can learn something useful.
| simonh wrote:
| Having been through army basic training, I can confirm
| this is not an attitude unique to school teachers. To be
| fair, discipline and self control is incredibly valuable
| even if it's not the be all and end all.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| It's more like people wanting to be done with it using any
| excuse. I don't think jobsworths would particularly care
| who did what, they wanted things to go away. They were
| probably paid so little it made no sense to play a
| detective.
| [deleted]
| ImprovedSilence wrote:
| Well to be fair, even if you weren't in the wrong at first,
| a sarcastic response to a teacher does put you in the
| wrong...
| [deleted]
| cbozeman wrote:
| Well to be fair, you shouldn't accuse someone of
| something they aren't, or something they didn't do.
|
| For instance, it'd be incredibly unfair for me to accuse
| you of being a jackass for a comment like this, when I
| know nothing about you... it'd also be equally unfair for
| me to assume you're an authoritarian... because I don't
| know anything about you, and therefore have no reason to
| make such an assumption.
|
| Sort of like the teachers in the prior comments.
| rovr138 wrote:
| For being sarcastic. You shouldn't be punished for
| everything at that point.
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| I remember being berated for uncontrollably smiling as a fear
| response. In one sense, it was a good lesson - smiling at
| people who are angry with you can make them angrier. But it
| was also a lesson in abject helplessness: interacting with
| people who have power over you will result in arbitrary,
| potentially unbounded pain and your best efforts to "play the
| game" will fail. Internalizing that lesson has done me very
| little good!
| specialist wrote:
| My bro has a thyroid condition. So he doesn't blink, holds
| eye contact. We were cold busted so many times as kids. Often
| with physical evidence. He _always_ got off.
| Razengan wrote:
| I have the same issue! When anyone asks me about something I
| haven't done (or should have done and did), I feel like they
| won't believe me anyway and go into a over-
| defensive/explanatory mode, basically acting like a culprit.
| cutemonster wrote:
| How does that tend to end?
| Razengan wrote:
| Usually not in my favor, especially if it's my word
| against somebody else's.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Funny you mention this, Freud wrote a whole essay about how
| people how people who suffer neurotic disorders are in
| serious risk of being convincingly misinterpreted when being
| drilled under pressure in legal settings, and that legal
| officials need to rethink what they think true speech is, as
| a neurotic will _indict themselves_ even if they 're innocent
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You get better with practice.
|
| I had a time where a group of bullies picked up the
| innovation of using the school administration to harass. So I
| found myself in the situation of having chats with the
| principal a few times a week.
|
| The optimal strategy was to courteously deny and be silent.
| It works over half the time. I'd also use my time waiting
| around to "charm" the support staff by being nice to them and
| making myself useful. Eventually, most disciplinary referrals
| ended up getting lost, as the secretaries clued up to what
| was happening.
| User23 wrote:
| My high school was a similar object lesson in how the world
| actually works. I went from almost getting expelled
| freshman year for "breaking the library computer"[1] to
| having the assistant principal accept, but probably not
| believe, every word I said over underclassmen in any sort
| of conflict.
|
| [1] 10 PRINT "C:\> " 20 READ 30
| PRINT "Bad command or file name" 40 GOTO 10
| theelous3 wrote:
| I was a fairly disruptive kid in school. It was all
| boyswillbeboys stuf. Drinking and smoking with friends in
| abandoned sections of the school. The kind of stuff that
| seems really serious then, and inconsequential now.
|
| I was brought in front of the board for expulsion after a
| litany of these types of things, and questioned about
| anything and everything for about two hours.
|
| We took the case to the board of education and got copies of
| all of the board members notes, one of which enraged me then
| and now.
|
| Scrawled in the margins of this members notes - random
| physiological and psychological phrases. "R.E.M?" for rapid
| eye movement, "no empathy", "slouching" etc.
|
| Some armchair psychologist that thinks a kid in a high
| pressure situation, looking around at a board of nine people,
| is displaying sociopathic traits. That somehow my seating
| posture related to my character.
|
| They expelled me, and it was ultimately overturned by the
| state. Still bothers me that people try to apply these
| dogshit cues to make real life major decisions.
|
| "Vindictive" and "spiteful" were some other good ones. They'd
| convinced themselves I was doing it to _get_ them or
| something. The truth is, I was a bored unstimulated kid and
| the only consideration they got, was how I could avoid them
| as much as possible. Absolutely zero interest in sticking it
| to them or making their lives more difficult.
| darkerside wrote:
| It is pretty shitty of them to write those things about a
| kid, but they were asked to make a judgement. They weren't
| using these observations to figure out if you were lying,
| and when you say they thought you were "out to get them",
| you're actually playing into the same armchair psychology
| they were.
|
| I don't mean to give you grief because I've been in similar
| situations. But I hope you've learned from it that people
| will hold you responsible for behaviors they observe, and
| not for your intentions behind them (e.g. acting sullen
| because you are actually terrified inside).
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| If they wrote that he was being vindictive and spiteful,
| then I don't think it quite qualifies as armchair
| psychology on GP's part
| darkerside wrote:
| They were assessing character and yes, making a judgement
| on it, which was their role. I find it likely that OPs
| behavior came off as seeming vindictive and spiteful,
| even if not intended that way. They would have done
| better to observe specific behaviors (which they did
| fairly with "slouching"), but their intent was likely to
| judge character and fit for the school, based on the
| evidence in front of them.
|
| Not saying it's easy, especially for a kid, but if you go
| in front of a panel like that, if you can demonstrate
| remorse and desire to change, it goes a long way.
| theelous3 wrote:
| > if you can demonstrate remorse and desire to change, it
| goes a long way
|
| It sounds like you're presuming to know more about what
| happened there than you can. I fully expressed remorse,
| and explained how in hindsight I understand that what I
| was doing was disruptive, and that I wouldn't behave that
| way in the future, etc.
|
| Their rubbish analysis was just that. Also, how is
| "slouching" a fair thing to observe in analysis? I sit
| with bad posture. I did then and I do now. It's
| completely irrelevant.
|
| Oh, I should also point out that by this point I had been
| clinically diagnosed with ADD - which they expressed, and
| I'll have to paraphrase as it was about 13-14 years ago,
| was "made up" and that it couldn't possibly explain my
| behaviour.
| darkerside wrote:
| Yeah, I wasn't there and don't presume to know what
| actually happened. This will come off the wrong way, but
| I don't know another way to say it so... Feedback is a
| gift. Even if it's wrong, it is based on some kind of
| truth in someone's perception. Sometimes it's truly
| worthless, but I believe there's always something to
| learn from our fellow humans, even if they express their
| message in an utterly disgusting way.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _Not saying it 's easy, especially for a kid, but if you
| go in front of a panel like that, if you can demonstrate
| remorse and desire to change, it goes a long way._
|
| This only furthers the advantage of those most willing
| and able to lie. Especially so when the system and
| punishment is arbitrary and capricious rather than rooted
| in first principles. We should focus on outcomes and
| shared goals, not easily faked attitudes.
| darkerside wrote:
| Why do you assume it's a lie? I'd say it's at worst
| uncorrelated to the truth. And, apart from whether you
| mean it or not, I believe there's value in learning how
| to tell people that you do. It's up to you then to decide
| whether you want to use that power to lie.
| everdrive wrote:
| This is an extreme case, but not an unusual one. People
| draw conclusions about people with very little information.
| They then carry on to believe that their conclusions have
| real weight, and are based in fact. It's part of why there
| were always be socially fluid types and con artists.
| cutemonster wrote:
| It's as if directly when they draw some random conclusion
| about someone, they stop thinking, stop evaluating that
| person any more.
|
| And they go on believing forever that that weird first
| random idea they got, was right.
|
| (I might be exaggerating a bit.)
| [deleted]
| threatofrain wrote:
| So how does one take this over to metaphorical poker? Because
| if the situation calls for having physical control over someone
| with the threat that they're about to go to jail, then okay,
| sure.
| raducu wrote:
| I'd like to see some hot-shot detective try to get a random
| number from 1-1000 out of my head by using those techniques.
|
| Yeah, he couldn't.
| zakember wrote:
| That is because the stakes are too low to make you feel
| unsettled (in getting a random number).
|
| But if you knew you did something that could land you in
| prison and you were supposed to hide it, that would be a
| completely different scenario.
| Nitramp wrote:
| The article linked explicitly cites a study that disproves
| that assumption. People cannot tell liars apart better than
| chance even when watching videos of murderers'
| interrogations.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Scenarios in the article may be cherry picked and videos
| are not the same as being in the same situation in real
| life. Also in article they didn't have a chance to
| provoke subject into verbal contradictions as they were
| only looking at visual cues.
|
| Even in the article they mentioned 85% success rate after
| some training.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I don't quite understand what point you're making. The
| article explicitly says that "spotting" a liar, that is
| detecting lies based on non-verbal clues does not work.
| However, other interrogation techniques, such as getting
| the subject to talk more freely to give them chance to
| make contradictive statements does work. That's what the
| 85% rate is about, don't use nonverbal cues, use verbal
| techniques.
| raducu wrote:
| I bet even if the stakes were "if I find out the number,
| you go to prison for one year" he wouldn't be able to.
|
| My point was not that detectives are useless, interrogation
| does work wonders -- in some cases making the criminal
| confess, in others making the innocent confess to something
| he did not do.
|
| My point was getting convicted based on some lie detection
| bullshit or just some confession alone is evil.
| rhizome wrote:
| People go to jail for things they didn't do all the time,
| by the time you see those signs on the wall you better be
| nervous. Unless you like jail.
| andi999 wrote:
| That's actually easy:the number is 50. Answer:no it isn't.
| Reply: he lied, get him boys we have the number.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| You might want to watch this in full before gambling on that:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
|
| In summary, you lose the moment you agree to talk.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I knew it was going to be that video before I even clicked
| the link. I agree completely.
| [deleted]
| MrDrDr wrote:
| Thank you for posting - I found this video fascinating.
| Made me think about the law in the UK. Interestingly when
| arrested here we are told : "You do not have to say
| anything. But, it may harm your defence if you do not
| mention when questioned something which you later rely on
| in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
|
| I'd be interested if anyone has experience of the UK system
| and if the same strategy of staying silent would be advised
| in the uk.
| laurieg wrote:
| I'm definitely not a lawyer, but I believe that the court
| may draw an inference from your silence. You are innocent
| and decided to remain silent only to have a perfect
| explanation that fits will all evidence known to the
| police weeks later. Why didn't you offer this earlier?
|
| There is an interesting TV show called 24 Hours in Police
| Custody[1] that follows people in the 24 hours after they
| are arrested. Naturally, there are many scenes of police
| questioning. Plenty of people do just answer "No comment"
| to every question, even after consulting a solicitor.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_in_Police_Custody
| mlrtime wrote:
| "Under advisement of my lawyer I respectfully decline to
| comment"
| leetcrew wrote:
| > I'm definitely not a lawyer, but I believe that the
| court may draw an inference from your silence. You are
| innocent and decided to remain silent only to have a
| perfect explanation that fits will all evidence known to
| the police weeks later. Why didn't you offer this
| earlier?
|
| this is my understanding of the UK system too (note: I am
| an american). it's quite different in the US because,
| among other things, the jury is explicitly instructed not
| infer anything from the defendant's use of their 5th
| amendment protection against self-incrimination. even if
| you have a perfect explanation for what happened, it's
| often best to just be quiet and let the prosecution fall
| apart.
| lawtalkinghuman wrote:
| The negative inference comes from the fact that you can't
| push an affirmative defence at trial that you haven't
| hinted at during questioning.
|
| So, if you are arrested for beating up X, and you invoke
| your right to silence, THEN at trial you put forward a
| defence of "I wasn't there!" without any substantive
| evidence to back it up, the prosecutor can say "well,
| look, if there was an alibi, why didn't you tell the
| police about it?" The judge is supposed to then instruct
| the jury that they can draw an inference as to your
| honesty on the grounds you didn't bring it up during
| police interview.
|
| The legislation that brings that into force are ss34-39
| of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
|
| https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/III/cro
| ssh...
| Cullinet wrote:
| "The negative inference comes from the fact that you
| can't push an affirmative defence at trial that you
| haven't hinted at during questioning."
|
| absolute nonsense
|
| the statute with the meaning that you are trying to
| whitewash your argument applies only to application for
| dismissal of the indictment based on a claim it's
| reasonable for you to have provided earlier thereby
| preventing the proceedings progressing to court
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| If they ask you why you didn't offer this earlier, you
| send them a link to this video. But in all honesty, I
| think it's of course very different when it's a PR
| situation vs a court situation. If you are asked about
| what just happened by press, "no comment" or "wanting to
| plead the fifth" might instantly make you enemy of the
| public even if you are innocent and want to be strategic
| about it.
| Cullinet wrote:
| "Plenty of people do just answer "No comment" to every
| question, even after consulting a solicitor."
|
| precisely because that's the best advice that you will
| get from a solicitor in the circumstances!
|
| I rather belaboured my earlier responses to this same
| question, because I wanted to make it understood how
| rarely there's any justification to arrest someone. UK
| LEO arrest people by default and they absolutely do not
| have a automatic right to arrest anyone and certainly not
| only to bring you in to interview.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| I'd also be interested to hear the advice, particularly
| as the Police seem to have a number of situations where
| you must give them varying amounts of information, and
| could be committing an offence if you don't, and other
| situations where you can say "no comment" to everything
| including name and address even when arrested. It's
| really confusing.
|
| For example, the police can get you to show your
| documents, name, address if they think you are not a UK
| citizen. Another example: in a stop and search you must
| tell the police what they might find during a search.
|
| i.e. https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/advice_informa
| tion/sto...
| Cullinet wrote:
| if you are stopped lawfully the law does require you to
| identify yourself if asked, generally.
|
| this requirement you linked to also provide your address
| I'd have to look at further to tell you categorically
| that providing your ad is specifically in connection with
| this stature, but when you are asked to identify yourself
| providing a address is quite normal, but I am surprised
| that I actually don't know if you have to give your
| address with your name by law or if your name is always
| sufficient for all other cases. it is equally likely that
| I'm trying to clarify ambiguity that arises only from the
| language of the linked information of course
| Cullinet wrote:
| you know I could have answered from personal experience
| and toll you that I have absolutely no reason to believe
| that silence causes anyone any harm whatsoever nor will
| silence be construed to your detriment by any court and
| my experience with this includes courts in which I
| believed I was going to get nothing except for a
| prejudicial hammering on all points
|
| but I haven't even ever heard anything said in any court
| about the accused giving a no comment interview. never.
|
| I probably shouldn't have gone to such length as I did
| earlier only to respond to your questions, either, but
| the reason why I replied at length is because it is so
| important for people to learn how much everything is
| biased against the individual member of the public in
| every way beginning with our popular understanding of the
| applicable laws and logic.
|
| the warning that you quoted, the UK Miranda equivalent
| warning, people somehow always seem to think applies to
| subsequent procedure in particular the interview process.
|
| if you are arrested on suspicion of committing a crime,
| the first thing you should do is to establish whether you
| should have been arrested in the first place and prior to
| letting anything else further happen to you.
|
| obviously this is a little difficult when you are in
| custody.
|
| police station solicitors even for large firms are a
| neglected and weary bunch totally disconnected from the
| rest of everything that is going to happen to you. right
| here is the worst disconnect of incentives imaginable
| because the actions of a smart lawyer in the earliest
| stages of every proceedings can have disproportionate and
| incredibly serious consequences.
|
| I wrote to tell anyone who is in such a position where
| possible to get a barrister specialist in police law to
| consult with as soon as you have gained any understanding
| of the situation at all.
|
| this will not make your solicitor happy. but a solicitor
| who refuses the instructions of their client in the UK
| commits a crime and your life is not a joke but the kind
| of service for anyone in this situation who hasn't
| prepared or already gotten good connections, sure makes
| you think someone's laughing at your rights.
|
| it should be obvious that you want to stop the police
| before they think that spending time and resources on
| finding evidence to incriminate you is a good idea. But
| it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that this is when you
| can do this and about your only chance very likely.
|
| I think the majority of arrests are actually unlawful in
| the UK, because it has been standard procedure for all of
| my lifetime and the knowledge of anyone older than me
| I've asked, to automatically go arrest the person of
| interest and bring them in to custody as if that's their
| perfect God given birthright. Well heck it is not!
|
| I only hope by my admittedly rather long comments that
| somebody who has to go through things like this can
| possibly experience UK LEO without a bunch of unnecessary
| fears and emotions and prejudicial ideas in their heads
| that are altogether doing nothing except work against the
| individual freedoms and rights which we still mercifully
| but effectively tragically don't in effect often really
| have.
| lawtalkinghuman wrote:
| Refusing to cooperate or exercising one's right to
| silence is absolutely NOT the best strategy in the UK.
| Whether you should or not will depend heavily on a
| variety of factors. If you plan to offer an affirmative
| defence at trial, you can't just spring it on
| prosecutors.
|
| In addition, England (dunno about Scotland) does NOT have
| the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine regarding
| illegally or improperly collected evidence as is seen in
| a lot of US legal dramas.
|
| The best strategy if arrested in England is to seek legal
| advice, either from your own solicitor or from the duty
| solicitor.
| Cullinet wrote:
| I waited overnight before checking that this still needs
| a contrary opinion just for the way you phrased your
| advice, which seems to impart greater and hidden argument
| to always cooperate with UK LEO.
|
| a court "may" infer from your silence a negative
| presumption...
|
| so goes the doctrine
|
| "may"
|
| "may"
|
| "may" conduct a mis-trial if they do.
|
| the UK police have very few powers in reality.
|
| you may not be coerced to provide a statement or submit
| to a interview.
|
| you can be arrested for justified suspicion and required
| to attend a police interview.
|
| you are not required to respond in any way
|
| you can elect to provide a prepared written statement
| instead, which must be construed by a court to have
| answered and not been un-cooperative. It is a good idea
| to prepare this prior to your interview and amend if you
| wish afterwards.
|
| Handing over a statement won't excuse you from a formal
| interview when under arrest.
|
| But a advance statement can enable your attorney to
| challenge the grounds for your arrest and detention.
|
| the UK has very strict controls governing arrest for
| investigation purposes.
|
| arrest is in fact prohibited unless the arrest is
| required for your attendance or protection of evidence.
|
| the justifying facts can be challenged at any time. A
| good attorney will pay close attention to the detail of
| your interview questions and your attorney and you both
| have the right at any time to stop the interview and seek
| advice and counsel in private including from additional
| specialist lawyers. no time limit applies to the time out
| you call, although it may not count for the maximum limit
| of time you can be detained without judiciary approval
|
| this being hn I'm g to assume that you have some recourse
| to the agency of trusted friends and financial resources.
|
| specifically if you have such resources, I cannot
| recommend enough for you to make your solicitor instruct
| a reputable criminal barrister the moment you find out
| what's going on. cooperation with interview obviously
| helps you learn something helpful and if it doesn't you
| absolutely should be alarmed and proceed as follows :
|
| you require your counsel to immediately obtain your
| warrant and any advance information available from the
| Crown Prosecution Service to be able to advise you on the
| possibility that your arrest is prejudicial because of a
| preexisting theory of your guilt.
|
| bogus arguments for your arrest will never be fully
| compiled for reference and the possibility of
| embarrassing you calling you at work surely applies to
| most of us and all who we know.
|
| unless you are unlikely to attend interview on request
| and unless you are provably likely to destroy evidence or
| interfere with witnesses YOU SHOULD NEVER BE ARRESTED AT
| ALL
|
| the fact that potential witnesses won't be disclosed to
| you normally before interview is why you need to find out
| what you can as well as decisively excercise your right
| to counsel the moment you understand more regardless if
| it's two minutes into a interview everyone took all day
| to arrange.
|
| as soon as the police can be said to not be forthcoming
| with witnesses you supposedly will meddle with, presuming
| you are not vagrant, the game is over for keeping you
| under arrest
|
| now for 24 hours the duty custody sergeant must authorise
| your detention at intervals usually connected with the
| fact that the sergeants job is to oversee the correctness
| of proceedings and the provision of the rationale to go
| arrest you and slam you in a cell.
|
| UK police sergeants are good stuff and I say that
| notwithstanding the contrary is true for too many
| officers in UK LEO - sergeants are on a different career
| path and don't like nonsense. they're also much older and
| more experienced folk. you'll be stood in front of yours
| at various times when you get your phone call and when
| you are called to interview and if the station isn't busy
| you can usually question them directly about your
| detention. officers have played endless games and
| detectives likewise - that's the business of it. UK LEO
| is in a woeful state but your Sarge is the sanest voice
| of reason you'll hear through your experience and
| including your attorneys because they're playing another
| game as well and one which I think has caused a lot of
| transgressions by officers to take place in the knowledge
| that you have to be seriously lucky to get a good station
| attorney attending on you and blessed by the Lord to
| receive someone who is going to be on point for you if
| you are arrested in the UK today.
|
| I stress these points : Sarge Good : your attending
| attorney : suspect.
|
| although anyone who cares will obtain a lot of details
| very quickly convening your situation, your reality
| created by silence and concurrent reticence on the part
| of the police, during the first stages, gives nothing
| whatsoever for anyone who can do anything for you to go
| on.
|
| if you are brought before a judge the next morning
| (Saturday courts do operate and >24hr detention isn't
| allowed unless you are charged of a offence, IF CPS FAIL
| TO BRING TO YOUR FIRST HEARING ANY EVIDENCE CAPABLE OF
| DISPROOF OF THEIR CHARGES FROM THAT MOMENT THE WHOLE
| PROCEEDINGS ARE ONLY A ABUSE OF PROCESS AND UNLAWFUL AND
| THE DISCOVERY OF INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE LATER ON IN
| PROCEEDINGS IS IRRELEVANT. I have forgotten the case
| you'll find it in Blackstone Criminal Practice (the 2
| volume reference for barristers to apply proceedings in
| criminal law - nota very bene because the other volume
| covers civil law few firms have copies of this vital
| reference work.
|
| [0]
|
| I'M WRONG YOU CAN purchase Blackstones Criminal Practice
| individually and for only PS350 which is much cheaper
| than the 2012 set including the companion civil practice
| volume, which cost me a thousand pounds together.
|
| GET a copy!
|
| I'm crazy huh?
|
| just get your copy and start reading it from a random
| page : I will take bets (friendly, I'd feel bad for
| taking from you too easy) that you will be astonished to
| learn that the foundations and assumptions that you have
| accumulated inadvertently over the years are simply
| utterly rotten and dangerous nonsense, within the hour.
|
| (you'll find the critical case law I refer to if you look
| at the maximum detention of a accused person and
| regardless I'm going to find a place where this can be
| found, myself, but it is also in the Judicial Review
| Handbook (Fordham / Hart Publ. PS202) and was given in
| 1951 meaning that you can pick up used copies of these
| references for a very modest price which is easy to
| recoup - at least firm demand always existed however the
| reduction in price by almost twenty percent for BCP makes
| me think someone's finally scanned all the thousands of
| Bible weight oversize pages..
|
| I've placed such emphasis on the value of reference texts
| because if you can prove to me that a solicitor attending
| a arrest or representing a first hearing, had any
| awareness of these vital rights I'm describing today, I
| shall gladly make it my genuine pleasure to gift you this
| year's editions as well as additional copies for the use
| of whomever you subsequently instruct to represent your
| abrogated rights and obtain for you n necessary redress.
| only condition to be the payment for as many more copies
| out of the costs ordered against or settled with your I
| learned former lawyers to offer the same again to the
| next soul who was effectively sacrificed by the
| incompetence of the only profession who by law not only
| can but must be paid for their work fully in advance at
| all times except for attending to arrests.
|
| I must wrap up my points but I hope that I have made it
| abundantly clear ideally beyond the possibility for
| doubting the importance to us all in or visiting the UK,
| this fact that the rights we are supposed to enjoy are so
| rarely sought for anyone's benefit that I can fairly
| assert that in criminal prosecution in the UK, the
| rotting fishes head is this carelessness and ignorance
| right here.
|
| [0] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/blackstones-
| criminal...
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I had few issues with that video while it was extremely
| entertaining and captivating. Yes, there are innocent
| people getting a guilty verdict. But the actual question
| is, statistically how often? It's easy to cherrypick few
| examples, because law of large numbers means that if
| there's 0.0001% chance of getting wrongfully prosecuted if
| you talk as an innocent person, there's bound to be some
| famous examples.
|
| But maybe in 99.99% cases speaking the truth and co-
| operating quickly will spare you many months of stress and
| time.
|
| All I'm saying is, that from the video alone it is not
| clear to me what the risk/reward here is and of course it
| is situation dependant.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| He talks about this at ~9 minutes. Even if you said
| something good for your case, it won't be heard in court
| because its hearsay. And if you're in a spot when the
| police wants to interview you, the decision for your
| arrest was already made; you can only make the situation
| worse.
| treis wrote:
| >when the police wants to interview you, the decision for
| your arrest was already made;
|
| That's not true. The police will interview everyone
| connected to a crime. Like if your SO turns up dead
| you're going to be one of the first people the police
| talk to. Depending on what else they've found they will
| have varying levels of suspicion. That level will
| absolutely change on how you do in that interview or if
| you refuse to talk.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Fine, but the police level of suspicion is not relevant.
|
| Never, ever agree to be interviewed by police without
| your attorney. There is no reason not to have someone who
| knows the game play for you. You have _no clue_ what the
| police know or think they know already and your innocuous
| answer about something that seems unrelated may seem to
| confirm some wrong information they already have.
|
| Again, your word cannot exonerate you but it can
| absolutely get you charged or even convicted.
| treis wrote:
| >Fine, but the police level of suspicion is not relevant.
|
| Of course it is. The police aren't the sole decision
| maker in the process, but as a rule if they don't think
| you did it you won't get arrested. Conversely if they
| think they can prove you did it you probably will end up
| getting arrested.
|
| >Again, your word cannot exonerate you but it can
| absolutely get you charged or even convicted.
|
| Sure it can. Juries and the police are fallible and can
| be swayed by a convincing performance. Jeffrey Dahmer, as
| an infamous example, managed to get the police to return
| one of his drugged victims by convincing them he was
| drunk and it was a lovers quarrel.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Extremely wrong. If you don't agree to speak with police
| you will always have an opportunity to clear your name in
| the future, through an attorney who knows the game either
| before or during court. Every shred of information you
| share with them is ammunition and, again, you have no
| clue how they will use it, what it may appear to confirm
| or _even what crimes they are actually investigating._
|
| Every assertion you make to police opens you up to being
| prosecuted for completely separate crimes, including
| lying to the police, depending on what other information
| they already have (correct or incorrect).
|
| Take the advice that every cop, every attorney takes and
| also gives to their kids: don't talk to the police. Just
| get an attorney.
|
| (A wild scenario of police catching someone in the act of
| a crime is not only _not_ what we are talking about, but
| that individual was not exonerated.)
| leetcrew wrote:
| if there's enough evidence to justify an arrest, you're
| not going to talk your way out of it. even if you're
| innocent, it's much more likely you say something that
| makes the officer decide _to_ arrest you.
| kaminar wrote:
| 17 pantomimes...nuff said.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Is it? Is it really "nuff said"? Cuz I have no clue what
| you're talking about. From my perspective, a lot more needs
| to be said.
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| It was a joke, a reference to a Quentin Tarrantino movie
| where a character says there are 17 pantomimes that give a
| male liar away, but the character doesn't list them.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Luckily, there is this one reliable method for detecting a lie,
| checking whether what the suspect says is true.
| golergka wrote:
| Saying something that is false and lying are not the same
| thing.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I think that might be the only way.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Unless the suspect was misinformed or misunderstood some
| questions / interpreted differently
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| None of those things are lying, tho.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| There's no difference to an observer. If you tell me you
| saw a white car in a parking lot and video footage shows
| a blue car, there's no way to know if you were lying or
| mistaken/misremembering.
| swayvil wrote:
| That means making personal observations and/or consulting
| various witnesses and authorities.
|
| Now convenience and reliability are issues. Also maybe
| intelligibility.
| lotophage wrote:
| I'm surprised that "micro-expressions" and the work of Dr. Paul
| Ekman weren't mentioned given how hyped it was several years ago
| (there was even a drama series called "Lie to Me" I believe). Has
| this all been debunked?
| rhizome wrote:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6158306/
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Most of us can't reliably tell when a romantic interest is
| actively signaling their mutual interest. If we can't get
| cooperative activities right, most of us don't have a chance to
| spot a liar through nonverbal cues. The fact is that random
| effects are huge when dealing with people. Is that person you're
| interrogating not showing emotion because they're a psychopath,
| or because they were taught not to display emotion? Is someone
| not looking a cop in the eye because they are lying, or because
| staring someone in the eye is perceived as defiance in many
| cultures and they don't want to anger the cop? We'll probably
| never be perfectly accurate at spotting lies. A bunch of
| biometric measurements might help, but current polygraph
| techniques can allegedly be beaten with training. If trained
| polygraph techs with special equipment can be beat I don't know
| what rules of thumb we're ever going to give to the general
| public that will work.
|
| If you know someone really well, you might have a decent chance
| of knowing when they are acting unusual. Such is the case with
| parents and teenagers, but suspicion often gets the best of the
| parents and they misinterpret the cues that they spotted.
|
| A good method would seem to be to catch someone on a logical
| contradiction, but that has issues when someone is under
| emotional distress. And emotional distress tends to appear often
| when someone is innocent but is afraid the evidence points
| towards them. The family cat may have knocked over Mom's favorite
| vase, but the child is less interested in the truth and more
| interested in avoiding a spanking- so they embellish whatever
| story they had (in a misguided attempt to make it more
| believable), which introduces contradictions that the mom
| notices. The kid technically lied with the embellishments but was
| innocent of breaking a vase, and gets spanked when they didn't
| deserve it. Then imagine the kid's emotional distress being even
| higher the next time something happens.
|
| I'm sure that there are a lot of learned people out there that
| study lying, but I agree with the article's main theme that most
| of us can't reliably tell when our why someone is lying, and
| we're overconfident in our abilities.
| strogonoff wrote:
| There's an interesting take[0] on defensive mechanisms
| societies have apparently evolved in order to detect a
| psychopath in their midst in daily life without having to know
| that person for a long time.
|
| [0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/05/05/dares-costly-
| signals-a... on dares and costly signals, also discussing _The
| Psychopath Code_ by late Pieter Hintjens.
| itronitron wrote:
| interesting, you should submit this as a top level post
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| What? The zeromq guy died?
| savanaly wrote:
| It gets even hazier, frankly, when you realize that not every
| statement you make can be firmly categorized as a truth or lie.
| Due to cognitive dissonance our lies to others can soon become
| lies to ourselves, and where do you draw the line between
| wholly believing in a lie to yourself and being flat-out
| mistaken?
| clouddrover wrote:
| > _current polygraph techniques can allegedly be beaten with
| training_
|
| No training is needed because polygraphs don't work. Polygraph
| testing is about as worthwhile as astrology:
|
| https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph
|
| https://www.salon.com/2000/03/02/polygraph/
|
| And inadmissible in court in many places:
|
| http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MurUEJL/2000/6.html
|
| > _if trained polygraph techs with special equipment_
|
| There are no trained polygraph techs. They are, at best, con
| artists.
| jldugger wrote:
| There is one weird bit of logic in favor of them in niche
| cases: they might be good at detecting people who have been
| trained to "pass" a polygraph test.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| I'm not going to vigorously defend polygraphs, but I'll play
| Devil's advocate for a bit. From your the Salon piece you
| linked to, "In studies, polygraph diagnoses are often wrong,
| with rates hovering around 80 percent correct"
|
| Which to some people sounds terrible. I certainly wouldn't
| want to hang a murder conviction on something with a 20
| percent error rate. But on the other hand, 80 percent is
| better than all but one of the cited results from the
| Atlantic article, and beats the results from all experiments
| using untrained people. These con artists are, at best,
| performing on par with specific lie detection training.
|
| Maybe the equipment is just for show, but who's to say that
| further biometric measurements, such as functional MRI,
| wouldn't significantly increase the accuracy of biometric lie
| detection (still technically within the realm of nonverbal
| cues from the Atlantic article)? I don't think it could be
| 100% accurate, but I can reasonably see future polygraphs
| being legitimate tools for lie detection.
|
| I wouldn't want my murder conviction to hang on the results
| of a current polygraph, but I would be satisfied using one to
| catch an office supply thief. Well, except it would probably
| be cheaper to just let someone keep stealing supplies than to
| pay $8k per employee to administer the tests.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| The US government still requires polygraphs as a condition
| of having administrative access to classified systems.
| They're one data point of many, since you already have a
| clearance and were thoroughly investigated by other means,
| but this is an obvious area where it is acceptable to use
| shitty evidence. The cost of a false negative is extremely
| high, but the cost of a false positive is close to nothing.
| Any person who can't pass just has to get a different job.
|
| Courts are the exact opposite situation and I hope the
| practice of using polygraphs in criminal investigations
| disappears at some point.
|
| People tend to miss that the error rate in a diagnostic
| procedure is not enough to evaluate the usefulness of a
| procedure because you need the relative cost of different
| types of error as well. It's the same reason FAANGs can get
| away with shitty interview methods. Cost of false negatives
| is much higher than cost of false positives.
| clouddrover wrote:
| > _Maybe the equipment is just for show_
|
| Yes, it's a con.
|
| > _but who's to say that further biometric measurements,
| such as functional MRI, wouldn't significantly increase the
| accuracy of biometric lie detection_
|
| That isn't what they're doing. The "who" that will say it
| is actual, statistically significant evidence that it
| works.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| That your post has been downvoted is disheartening. Your
| reply was factually correct, cited, and reasonably polite.
|
| Perhaps instead of saying "at best" they are con artists, it
| would have been more polite to say at worst, they are con
| artists. Probably many earnestly believe in what they are
| doing, and are just wrong.
| seppin wrote:
| One thing to add:
|
| > And inadmissible in court in many places:
|
| I'm not aware of any place that accepts polygraphs in a
| court.
| clouddrover wrote:
| Then I'll quote the article:
|
| _" In the United States of America, (where polygraph
| testing is a growth industry) the admissibility of lie
| detector test results is determined by courts and
| legislators on a State by State basis.
|
| In the Federal legal system, test results are
| inadmissible as substantive evidence. Whilst some States
| have allowed test results in criminal trials, States such
| as such as California have prohibited the admission of
| such evidence unless all parties consent to its
| admission."_
| judge2020 wrote:
| > It is difficult to get a man to understand something when
| his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
| anon_tor_12345 wrote:
| To be precise: a lot of people (even on hn, especially on
| hn) are personally and practically invested in
| authoritarian practices being legitimate.
| swayvil wrote:
| To vehemently support the policy of the hour as moral and
| correct, and then to be later shown to be wrong. At best
| a fool and at worst a criminal. Is more than many can
| tolerate. They would rather maintain the lie in the face
| of all evidence.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I'm kinda surprised. I felt this group was much more
| rebellious a few years ago. A lot of people might say
| it's growing up, but I still don't like it.
|
| I look back on the people I admired, and they questioned
| authority.
| clouddrover wrote:
| It really doesn't matter how earnest they are when
| polygraphs have been known to be garbage pseudoscience for
| decades, and especially when people's lives can be derailed
| by the fraudulent "results" obtained from a polygraph or
| even just the fiction that it can get results:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-doug-williams-war-
| on...
|
| Calling them con artists is about as polite as I can be.
| wespiser_2018 wrote:
| This is another good point: you can be interrogating (or
| interviewing) a suspect under investigation, use a withholding
| technique and successfully catch them in a lie, only to have
| them lying for a completely unrelated reason to the original
| inquiry. From what I've gathered, the best lies under
| interrogation are the ones with the most components of the
| truth and minimal superfluous information. The police will do
| everything to get you to talk and keep talking, which is why
| legal representation is so key.
| airhead969 wrote:
| The people who study lying the most are the ones who counter it
| for a living: police, interrogators, investigators, and
| business people.
| michael_vo wrote:
| This seems to be one specific category of lying detection (new
| training data with no prior training).
|
| This article doesn't seem to discuss machine learning techniques.
| For example what if we could have someone talk about "nothing"
| for x hours for a training set, then interrogate them. That's
| essentially what lie detection machines do when they ask a series
| of baseline questions. But heart rate is the only input feature
| they use. We could use word frequency, spoken word speed,
| sentence patterns, and all the rich feature sets of ML.
|
| For those who have watched the popularity of deception games like
| Among Us, Secret Hitler, Werewolf, etc, there are verbal and non-
| verbal cues we all use. And playing with the same players
| iteratively yields a lot of meta sussing. For example: "You sound
| guilty because you're usually calm when you're guilty and accused
| of being imposter. Right now you're excitedly defending yourself"
| pain_perdu wrote:
| I recently got to spend some time with Jeff Deskovic (we met
| while he was on vacation), the exoneree mentioned at the top of
| the article for having spent 16 years in prison for a murder he
| did not commit. He is looking for folks with technical
| backgrounds to to consult with Deskovic.org which has helped
| exonerate 9 other wrong-fully convicted persons.
|
| If anyone is interested, please contact me at the address in my
| HN profile!
| withinboredom wrote:
| I find it interesting that the TSA uses these behaviors but their
| own army's interrogation school[1] tells their students not to
| use them.
|
| 1. FM 2-22.3 (section 9-6)
| arbitrage wrote:
| The TSA is security theater. They don't accomplish anything
| statistically significant.
|
| The TSA is designed to make citizens of the United States feel
| better about their absurdly outsized risk of dying in a plane
| highjacking compared to literally every other civilised country
| on the planet.
|
| Also, it's a huge cash-funnel for the plutocracy. Some people
| make an enormous amount of money selling this lie.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| filed under: Things so true they're nearly physics.
| derryrover wrote:
| Or could it be that: It is actually possible to spot a lie, but
| it depends heavily on the skill of the liar vs interrogator: did
| they have experience with a previous lie that was similar?
|
| People that are good at lying will specialize in bluffing
| professions (smuggler, conman, undercover, sales, politics,
| gambling) and people good at spotting lies will specialize in
| interrogative jobs (police, inspection, acquiring business,
| teacher, journalist, border control).
|
| This is an arms race where specific interrogators may specialize
| in specific liars or specific type of lies. The problem appears
| when there is a mismatch between the interrogator vs the suspect
| or if the interrogator is just incompetent. Or maybe the suspect
| is just a awkward person, or has a guilty rest face. Yes spotting
| a lie is by far not 100% correct.
|
| To now conclude that spotting lies never works is basically
| claiming the whole range of aforementioned professions may just
| as well be done by inexperienced people, so why would one then
| ever hire a experienced journalist or interrogator?
| elygre wrote:
| This is a solved problem:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDc_5zpBj7s
| dfilppi wrote:
| I'd settle for knowing when I'm lying to myself.
| hntrader wrote:
| We evolved to be effective deceivers, so if there was a systemic
| and obvious physical tell (looking left = liar) then evolution
| would try to eliminate it.
| tim333 wrote:
| Also self deception helps.
| lazyweb wrote:
| I often think about that. If I can thoroughly convince myself
| to believe a factual lie, would classic lie detector devices
| still work on me?
| tim333 wrote:
| There was an interesting book on the theme that we've
| evolved to deceive ourselves especially on moral stuff like
| my side is good, the others are the bad guys
| https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-
| Psy...
| roenxi wrote:
| The article seems to have avoided mentioning the easy way of
| detecting a lie - go and collect some evidence then compare it to
| what the person is saying. Incentives count as weak evidence for
| detecting lies. While not foolproof, it is much more effective
| than looking for verbal cues.
|
| Detecting lies by assessing someone's demeanour is a symptom. The
| average person seem to have this unshakeable belief that they are
| psychic and can deduce other people's thoughts. They can't.
| arp242 wrote:
| Even this is hardly fool-proof, since human memory is far from
| perfect. Someone might say "I was at Tesco's at 4pm" and later
| video evidence shows they were actually at Tesco's at 2pm. Did
| they lie or misremember? Unfortunately, police are often very
| quick to assume that such a small mistake is done in bad faith
| and that they're lying. In reality, a lot of people just won't
| remember the exact time they were at Tesco's weeks or months
| ago; they may even get the day wrong, or the location.
|
| This is why you just exercise your rights and not talk to the
| police. Let them figure it out instead of risk being branded a
| "liar" over a simple mistake.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The FBI _loves_ those sort of misstatements.
| dataflow wrote:
| > go and collect some evidence then compare it to what the
| person is saying
|
| It's so much easier said than done though. Think about an
| example that might come up in daily life. Say, someone says
| they're busy/absent/whatever at X time, but then you spot them
| at that time, very clearly to the contrary. Did they lie to
| you? Sure looks that way. But it could also be that their
| schedule just changed. How can you possibly tell? Either you
| have to do it repeatedly and look at it statistically, or go
| prying around or asking other people to vouch for their story,
| or you have to ask them directly. Are you willing to do that?
| Especially if it happens multiple times? What if they in fact
| didn't lie, but also feel it's an invasion of their privacy to
| have to give a compelling explanation of what happened? Or what
| if they _did_ lie, but only due to circumstances beyond your
| imagination where you might have lied, too? Are you willing to
| risk your relationship with that person to make a
| determination?
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| > Say, someone says they're busy/absent/whatever at X time,
| but then you spot them at that time, very clearly to the
| contrary. Did they lie to you? Sure looks that way. But it
| could also be that their schedule just changed.
|
| Maybe they were just busy with the thing you spotted them
| doing? I've been "caught" a zillion times doing a thing by
| myself because I was booked on my own calendar and didn't
| have time for anyone else
| dataflow wrote:
| That's also possible. I said "very clearly to the contrary"
| precisely because I was _not_ talking about that scenario.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The notion that behavioural tics can betray lying (or truth-
| telling) is also part of the kayfabye / stage dressing of
| truth-determination and vetting.
|
| If you have a set of props (polygraph, truth-teller, various
| actual or fabricated observations, etc.) that you can present
| as a plausible basis for claiming someone is lying, then you
| can apply more severe psychological pressure, possibly getting
| them to break and confess, though often also simply forcing a
| false confession, a very real hazard.
|
| (See various accounts suggesting that friendly-demeanor
| interrogation is far more useful.)
|
| In the account I detailed in an earlier comment on this thread,
| I'd ... let slip to people who I thought might feed back my
| counterpart ... that I was in touch with some people who were
| incredibly good at hacking online information, and dug for (and
| revealed) a few details I'd turned up ... which actually were
| based on reverse-engineering a database structure and assessing
| the contents. (One ... glorious personal weakness of the
| adversary revealed some critical information I'd been looking
| for, in particular.) I suspect that message did find its way
| back, as my adversary was caught entirely unawares.
|
| The net effects weren't entirely unlike a YouTube video on an
| "amazing mind reader" (actually warning of data surveillance
| and privacy ... on behalf of a bank):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7pYHN9iC9I
|
| And the CIA's Crypto AG operation, in which a firm allegedly
| selling products to encrypt Telex communications had been back-
| doored for decades. The easiest way to decrypt or hack
| information is to have it in plaintext in the first place.
|
| (Other than seeking justice in my own case, I've not made
| further use of the data I obtained. Though the information had
| proved tremendously useful, the experience was also a powerful
| cautionary tale as well.)
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| Because that's going beyond the idea of nonverbal cues. It's
| easier to tell is someone is lying about a murder when you
| found the murder weapon with their fingerprints on it. If you
| have evidence you don't really need to worry about spotting the
| lies.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Finger prints on a weapon does not prove guilt.
|
| Perhaps you made a sandwich with that knife earlier in the
| day.
|
| Perhaps you own the gun, and therefore of course it has your
| prints on it. That doesn't mean you fired the lethal shot.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > the easy way of detecting a lie
|
| The problem is that is not easy. Lies can be generated easily.
| Disproving them requires probably 20x the time.
| Lio wrote:
| I wonder if there was a reliable method to spot lying if efforts
| would be made to keep it secret in the same way that broken
| ciphers are.
| raducu wrote:
| A non-invasive lie detection method would completely change our
| society, whoever has it, keeps it to themselves.
| wespiser_2018 wrote:
| I think there are three decent ways to tell if someone is lying:
| the statement itself (did it contain self-contradictions), the
| context around the statement (was their hand in the cookie jar),
| and credibility (does the person have a history of lying).
|
| You can use each of these questions to sway your belief in the
| truth of a statement, but nothing, short of corroborating facts
| at hand will give you an absolute assessment. Most of the time
| you just don't know, and it's a good reminder just how important
| trust is to a functioning society, and amazing how far some
| pathological liars can get. Importantly, behavioral queues are
| often misleading, and a person might be acting nervous for an
| independent reason, yet register all the behavioral clues of
| lying.
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've had two especially notable experiences with pathological
| liars, discounting smaller encounters with hucksters and various
| sales/marketing types (not all, but some, and an absolute
| showstopper when it occurs).
|
| The first was at a part-time job during my days at uni. A new guy
| had joined the crew, intelligent and affable, but it turned out,
| simply a pathological lair. We weren't aware of this until ... I
| forget precisely what had occurred, but apparently lying when
| filling out bank cheques was among his failings....
|
| The second was a more personal relationship, in which it
| transpired that I'd been lied to from the very beginning. This
| person displayed many of the characteristics of borderline /
| narcissistic personality disorder, and would often become wildly
| (and increasingly inappropriately) upset under questioning,
| deflecting or projecting questions and accusations back. I'd had
| little experience with the behaviour previously and it was
| exceedingly disconcerting.
|
| This essay on diversion tactics covers many of the behaviours I'd
| experienced in that incident (I'd submitted it to HN a few months
| back, though there was no traction):
| https://thoughtcatalog.com/shahida-arabi/2016/06/20-diversio...
|
| What ultimately broke that case for me was:
|
| - Finding several people who'd known something of the person's
| background, and comparing notes. Inconsistencies immediately
| started popping up. Score one for the consistency rule of truth
| determination. Various audit methods rely heavily on these.
|
| - Realising I had a trove of communications from the person
| (legitimately obtained --- they'd given them to me, though some
| reverse-engineering was required to recover data, both points
| that held significance in later proceedings). It took some
| patching together of these to generate a clear picture, which was
| hampered by the false / incomplete story I'd been told, but the
| full story eventually was clear.
|
| Eventually we were able to pin down the individual under
| testimony showing the scope of deception and the fact that it was
| intentional, premeditated, and predated my encounter with the
| person (I happened to be the sufficiently clueless victim
| appearing at the right or wrong time, depending on whose
| viewpoint you take).
|
| Many standard bullshit-detection tactics (see several referenced
| in
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28ge14/on_nons...)
| turn out to apply. Sloppy logic, imprecise language, deflecting
| questions, various forms of special pleading, turning to
| accusations against the questioner when the situation gets too
| heated, etc., vagueness as to facts, and inconsistencies within
| the story (these can require close listening) were ultimately the
| tells. Even once presented, there was a lot of work left to
| uncover the actual truth.
|
| In more mundane dealings, what I find is that fairly sensitive
| and alert to unqualified claims, inconsistent actions, or
| statements at odds with facts of which I'm aware. It's
| interesting to see just how often this occurs (I'm thinking of
| examples from an appliance purchase, broadband service calls, and
| medial services, within the past year or three), and once those
| occur, I call the person on their bullshit. I've walked away from
| purchases or services strictly due to such behaviours --- if you
| cannot be trusted to tell the truth or admit to the limits of
| your knowledge or understanding on the simple stuff, much as with
| Van Halen's brown M&Ms, why the hell should I trust you with the
| complex bits I _don 't_ have knowledge of?
|
| There's a book by an underappreciated author, Jeremy Cambbell,
| which I've yet to read though it's premise is fascinating. It's
| _The Liar 's Tale: A History of Falsehood_
| (https://www.worldcat.org/title/liars-tale-a-history-of-
| false...), and concludes that lying is a universal behaviour.
|
| (Campbell's other notable book, the 1982 title _Grammatical Man_
| , is about information theory, and was a fascinating introduction
| to the field for me.)
| sriku wrote:
| "As a Homeland Security official told congressional
| investigators, "common sense" behavioral indicators are worth
| including in a "rational and defensible security program" even if
| they don't meet academic standards of scientific evidence."
|
| What does that even mean? ... like there is a separate standard
| of evidence and there is a "we can get by without evidence"
| standard of evidence?
| simonh wrote:
| I can't be certain what they meant, but security agents and
| police will often find themselves in a situation where they
| need to decide how to devote investigative resources in
| situations where they have limited information. The information
| they do have might depend on their assessment of the veracity
| of what they are being told. In that case they may well have
| only their judgement to go on. I think that's reasonable, what
| else are they going to do?
|
| What we need to be careful of is making judgements about
| innocence or guilt based on subjective opinion.
| arbitrage wrote:
| It means it feels right, so they want it to be right. They will
| attempt to convince themselves AND you that this is the right
| choice.
|
| Hence, it's a pretty easy tell that this person is lying to
| you.
|
| Ironic.
| graeme wrote:
| It can mean no one has done a study of a thing or existing
| studies are poor.
|
| I don't know if that's what the official means, but all kinds
| of common sense things never end up being studied because
| they're commonly believed to be true.
|
| Edit: having read the article more closely, however, it sounds
| like the official may be referring to things scientists believe
| they have debunked.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Sounds like code for 'profiling' post 9/11, where it took very
| little due diligence to ship someone off to Guantanamo or pick
| someone out at an airport. Conjecture based on the department
| in question, DHS literally exists because of Islamic
| terrorists.
|
| I'll add that I think profiling is a necessary evil in tense
| situations, and terrible as a blanket policy (racial profiling
| en masse).
| doubleunplussed wrote:
| It's pretty obvious that there are useful truths that don't yet
| meet rigorous scientific standards of evidence. Like masks
| being useful in a pandemic or parachutes working. Non-serious
| "randomised trials" have been done with parachutes, and found
| no measurable effect - because for safety reasons the
| participants only jumped from an altitude of 2 metres or
| something.
|
| In sports medicine there are loads of things where the
| anecdotal evidence is _fairly_ strong and yet there is no
| rigorous evidence in favour of something. Like foam rolling, or
| running on your toes instead of your heels. Sometimes these
| things are hard to study, or simply haven 't been studied yet.
| In those cases it's OK to fall back on anecdotal evidence,
| particularly when you don't have reason to believe the evidence
| is biased (like it would be if someone was trying to sell you a
| product or an ideology). Some of these things I'm sure will
| turn out to not be real results, if and when "proper" science
| gets around to studying them. But in the meantime the
| anecdotal, uncodified folk knowledge is better than useless.
|
| When folk knowledge is "debunked" by science I sometimes still
| don't rule out that it might be true, because so much science
| is simply of too poor quality to be able to properly make any
| such conclusion. See the replication crisis.
|
| I'm a scientist with nothing but respect for the scientific
| method itself, but "has this been scientifically proven" can be
| a really weak way to determine what's true and what's not in
| many cases. In those cases you kind of have to do your own
| reasoning with the data you have, anecdotal or otherwise, and
| try to get closest to the truth that you can. Which I think can
| be a valuable process in practice that shouldn't be discarded
| merely because it's not "proper" science.
|
| Scientists are also flawed and sometimes publish results in a
| biased way to conform to an ideology. For example, I expect
| folk beliefs about gender differences to be somewhat accurate
| (not perfect), and for the official science to be hopelessly
| muddled.
| revax wrote:
| Here is the paper about parachute in your example:
| https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5343
| addicted wrote:
| Your examples of parachutes and masks are not examples of
| useful truths that don't meet standards of scientific
| evidence. They are examples of useful truths that have not
| been tested through double blind randomized control
| experiments.
|
| But they both have scientific evidence behind them, and by
| any reasonable definition of meeting standards of scientific
| evidence, they do. The efficacy of parachutes can be derived
| from first principles. We know parachutes slow descent. And
| we know the risk of injury and death caused by force of
| impact. We can calculate how much a parachute slows descent
| snd therefore reduces force of impact snd prevents death.
|
| The benefits of wearing masks in reducing the spread of COVID
| and serious disease through COVID can similarly be derived
| from first principles but more importantly, there are many
| comparative population studies that meet the standard of
| scientific evidence.
| d0mine wrote:
| Deriving from first principles is not the only way
| parachutes, masks can be proved to be effective.
|
| We don't need humans to be attached to parachutes, to test
| that parachutes work.
|
| There is various research on masks effectiveness too.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Sure, but in a legal regulatory context, "scientific
| evidence" means different things than your "reasonable
| definition".
| root_axis wrote:
| How do masks not meet the scientific standard of efficacy? I
| understand you're not making an anti-mask argument, but I'm
| just genuinely curious to understand why you say this.
| Besides the obvious benefit of masks mitigating the spray of
| viral aerosol, as far as I am aware, masks have a lot of
| scientific support for their efficacy.
| smaryjerry wrote:
| Not OP, but the primary studies saying masks are effective
| are basically experiments of function, such as, does a mask
| block particles more than not wearing a mask? However,
| studies on their effectiveness in the past have never found
| actual protection from diseases. For example if every one
| covers their mouth were they sneeze anyways, then what is a
| mask really doing? Do people touch their face more often
| with masks, reuse masks, and actually bring more particles
| to their face? Diseases are not all airborn and live on
| surfaces, so is all this interaction with your face to
| large untrained groups actually increasing the risks? The
| best we have now is comparing groups of people or states
| with different policies, which is also not proving masks
| are effective, but could that cause be due to people still
| following rules even though the policy isn't forced or some
| other unknown reason such as hers immunity being reached,
| etc.
| Rexxar wrote:
| "randomised trials" is not the gold standard of scientific
| evidence it just one method and there are a lots of other
| methods. It's used in medicine because we have a very weak
| understanding of what's going on and it's the only method
| that permit us to progress in this situation : It permit us
| to get some useful results without having a working model of
| the situation.
| meowface wrote:
| In the field of psychology and trying to determine what's
| going on in some particular person's mind, "common sense"
| doesn't really work, even if it may sometimes work in more
| objective scientific fields.
| d0mine wrote:
| It is a too charitable interpretation. Another interpretation
| of not requiring hard evidence is to imprison somebody just
| because police thinks that they look guilty.
|
| Scientists are flawed. There is a replication crisis in soft
| science fields. Still scientific method is still a mile above
| anything else out there.
| fractionalhare wrote:
| _> Like foam rolling, or running on your toes instead of your
| heels._
|
| These things have been studied numerous times. Head over to
| r/AdvancedFitness or r/AdvancedRunning and you'll find people
| seriously disseminating acacemic, peer-reviewed research on
| precisely these topics.
|
| It can take a while for certain things to go from
| practitioner consensus to academic consensus. But that
| doesn't mean academics aren't rigorously studying it. I also
| have doubts about your mask and parachute examples.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Or so much of science is filled with jargon that a regular
| person isn't going to bother understanding. This is why I
| never call BS on folk stories and such. Even with every story
| there is a grain of truth to it. Regardless of how much BS.
| antibuddy wrote:
| To be fair, the last wave suggests that wearing masks has no
| effect in this pandemic[0][1]. Comparing Sweden and Germany
| (which have at least similar health systems and count
| similarly) the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 is about the
| same, where Swedes rarely wear any masks and in Germany it is
| mandatory indoors (accessible to the public) and even
| mandatory in some zones outdoors.
|
| Also when you think about it, the permanent mask usage has
| some serious hygienic downsides.
|
| 1. You need to touch your face way more often (reseat+put
| on/off)
|
| 2. Most masks still allow viri to go through (especially on
| the sides)
|
| 3. Masks are often reused and used for too long (correct
| usage would need either a lot of money+time or hundreds of
| masks/month)
|
| The positive effects of masks in this pandemic are pretty
| debatable especially given the "circumstantial" evidence.
|
| [0]: https://imgur.com/a/MNlOoTN
|
| [1]: https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/blob/master/public
| /dat...
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| "Viri" is not the plural of "virus".
| https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-plural-of-
| virus-112199
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Personally, being a compulsive perfectionist, I always
| use "virus" in English as a mass noun, and never
| pluralize it.
|
| I thus say "several parts of virus" or "several programs
| of virus", -- an elegant solution, I would say.
|
| And yes, I do say "octopodes"; I am not some _bourgeois_
| peasant.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| The guy I knew who used "scenarii" instead of "scenarios"
| would probably drive you up the wall :)
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| Such I stand atop such lesser men of lesser etymological
| knowledge, that I unironically praefer the spelling of
| "lim", for the "b" is but a false etymology, an was never
| there.
|
| I demand nothing less than perfection, and I shall
| receive it.
| varjag wrote:
| I'm impressed to see spring 2020 WHO mask denialism persist
| all way into this season.
|
| Virtually all countries that stuck to mask regimen a year
| ago despite the misguided advice regurgulated here have the
| epidemic under control for a long long while.
| Applejinx wrote:
| I'm not impressed so much as dismayed. My theory is that
| it is warfare by decentralized means, worked through
| witting and unwitting subjects.
|
| In other words, there are a bunch of people whose job it
| is to keep the enemies of their country in mask denialism
| and maximum COVID infection as deeply as possible, and
| it's primarily done through social media.
|
| And while it's useful in a sense to put forth such
| intentions while knowingly coordinating bot networks and
| the like, it's social engineering that does the heavy
| lifting: the real effectiveness comes in ways you can't
| directly control, when people soak up the information
| around them and begin propagating your message (or weird
| mutations of it) on their own initiative, thinking
| they've invented it.
|
| And that's how they getcha. So I'm not the slightest bit
| impressed or surprised to see spring 2020 memes
| persisting: they're being fed, on purpose,
| singlemindedly. I confess to being surprised when the
| same memes turned up in English in various EU countries,
| but when the job is to propagate the message, I guess
| English signs in foreign countries is all part of the
| game, indeed a normal part of anybody trying to send
| messages to the West.
| isoskeles wrote:
| I'm both impressed and dismayed that both of your
| comments don't do a single thing to refute mask
| denialism, specifically whatever his point is on Sweden
| and Germany.
|
| I don't even believe his comment, but I'm not going to
| sneer at it and call it mask denialism to shut it down. I
| feel better about his comment at least attempting to
| state an argument and evidence in support of it.
|
| Anyway, this is a strange tangent for the OP.
| varjag wrote:
| Why not compare Sweden and Norway, in many ways a better
| comparison in culture, population density and geography
| than Sweden and Germany? ...oh.
|
| See, I didn't specifically went with countering the OP
| line of argument because refuting BS takes an order of
| magnitude more effort than slinging it. It's something
| anyone who did try to reason with generally unreasonable
| people so abundant lately can attest to. The laminated
| checklist from March 2020 above just gives that vibe of
| someone brining up their homework here and all reasoning
| is going to be futile.
| Applejinx wrote:
| There's a thing called a Gish Gallop (all this is
| actually rather on topic for discussions of lying) where
| the counter to someone arguing your points, is to pivot
| and rapidly throw out more points, pretty much anything
| you like, too fast to properly refute. It's a rather
| effective tactic for socially disabling an argumentative
| opponent: just not for anything truth-related. Might not
| be truth-related but it's still very real.
|
| All this relates to discussions of lying because the
| fundamental structure of the gallop, plus numerous other
| forms of BSing, requires the implication that everybody
| is in good faith: you're meant to grant that and then
| examine the arguments and see how they shake out. There's
| a lot of stuff happening in modern discourse where an
| anchor point to the argument is, 'since everyone here is
| in good faith and we just believe different things, let's
| break down the sides of the arguments'.
|
| But we're not. When you're desperate enough about winning
| (or not losing important things), good faith is
| disposable, and then people lie, for advantage, because
| they badly need advantage and aren't getting it from
| truth and good faith.
|
| Hence, the OP question of 'How can you tell if someone is
| lying?'. People will con themselves, but they will also
| lie on purpose to accomplish a goal.
| exo-pla-net wrote:
| He was using the equivalent of a Facebook infographic to
| "prove" that epidemiologists are wrong.
|
| His type believes that scientists are part of a cabal
| that is lying to the public for nefarious reasons.
|
| I won't say that he himself is deranged, but his thought
| pattern on this issue is.
|
| Anyhow, for those who believe in science:
| https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118
| smaryjerry wrote:
| There are actually a lot of reasons masks are not
| effective. Obviously they block particles but do they
| actually stop the spread of disease is the question, and
| the evidence there is extremely questionable. Besides the
| posters arguments and comparisons, there is the obvious
| question of why did we see this winter surge when all
| lockdowns and masks mandates were imposed and at their
| highest peak? If everyone is covering their mouth when
| they sneeze then or appropriately staying home when they
| get sick, would that be as effective as blocking
| particles, your hand or elbow is much better protection
| than masks as they are non permeable. Why is it that the
| supposed white right wing anti-maskers have the lowest
| death rate of any ethnicity? These are not easy questions
| to answer and I'm not saying they are all not able to be
| explained but the effectiveness of masks is very far from
| proven.
| sloshnmosh wrote:
| This is just silly pseudoscience, new-age BS if you ask me.
|
| The only scientifically proven way of knowing if someone is a
| liar is to examine the shape and bumps of their skull.
| superasn wrote:
| And the rabbit hole only goes deeper!
|
| "Craniometrists virtually without exception dismissed
| Phrenology as crackpot science while promulgating an
| alternative nonsense of their own. Craniometry focused on more
| precise and comprehensive measurements of volume, shape, and
| structure of the head and brain but in pursuit, it must be
| said, of equally preposterous conclusions. (Bill Bryson)"
|
| It's so funny how these pseudosciences diss each other and
| think the other one is nonsense :)
| m463 wrote:
| Well, or if they have neatly trimmed facial hair or wear dark
| clothing.
| meiraleal wrote:
| > The only scientifically proven way of knowing if someone is a
| liar is to examine the shape and bumps of their skull.
|
| The only proven way of knowing if someone is a liar is to get
| evidence.
| johncearls wrote:
| Of course you'd say that, you have the brainpan of stage
| coach tilter.
| swayvil wrote:
| I question your skull-bulges, sir.
| tarruda wrote:
| > The only scientifically proven way of knowing if someone is
| a liar is to examine the shape and bumps of their skull.
|
| Sarcasm?
| tim333 wrote:
| I relieved in a way that it's hard or impossible to tell based on
| the kind of stuff in the article as I've always been a bit
| rubbish at that and kind of assumed it was just me. Sometimes a
| practical way to tell if people are lying is observe them when
| they don't think you are looking or don't think it matters.
| johnsmith4739 wrote:
| >> Psychologists have long known how hard it is to spot a liar.
|
| Absolutely this.
|
| Lying is a loose concept. Is it lying if I believe it is true? Is
| it lying if it's just an omission of truth?
|
| You can spot nervousness, you can spot defiance.
|
| I work in a field where people deceive almost 80% of the time,
| and less than 1 in 10 where caught. The way we approach this is
| by flanking. Using falsifiable questions the subject cannot
| determine your intentions, therefore is much more likely to tell
| the truth (less cognitive taxing).
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what field is that?
| cbozeman wrote:
| > Is it lying if it's just an omission of truth?
|
| Yes. It's literally called "lying by omission".
|
| > Is it lying if I believe it is true?
|
| Yes. I'm struggling to keep from bursting out laughing because
| the answer to both these questions are so plainly obvious that
| even young children know them, even if they're unable to
| articulate to you _why_ its lying.
|
| A lie is a lie is a lie.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Lying is a loose concept. Is it lying if I believe it is
| true? Is it lying if it's just an omission of truth?
|
| I think what underlies this discussion are assumptions that
| lying is, by default, unethical and that we can trust truth-
| telling to be beneficial. I have found that neither of these
| things are factual.
|
| Truths can be devastatingly harmful with no discernible
| benefit. I have found this outcome more likely when one assumes
| truth is a moral high-ground, while disregarding the well being
| of the person on the receiving end.
|
| This led me to conclude that honesty is a poor goal, in and of
| itself. It is at best a tool, that often requires consideration
| and compassion to yield a positive outcome.
|
| Much of the same can be said for lying. It isn't the opposite
| of truthing so much as it is a different tool. Wielded like a
| blunt weapon, it's harms are legendary. Used with precision,
| with empathy and with wise consideration of larger outcomes -
| lying can be used to smooth over small rough spots and avoid
| large disasters.
|
| In short, it isn't uncommon for lying to be the most ethical of
| our choices.
| cbozeman wrote:
| > Truths can be devastatingly harmful with no discernible
| benefit.
|
| I completely and utterly disagree with this statement, but I
| want to try to see how you personally parse this out, so give
| me an example where this might be the case, if you would.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Our brains are complex things, with many independent actors.
|
| There are pragmatic parts that determine what actions would
| best serve your interest. These parts mostly make the
| decisions.
|
| There are other "press secretary" parts that come up with good
| sounding motivations for these decisions. You will believe
| those reasons, and state them with conviction.
|
| You may then be lying, if the press secretary lied to "you",
| but _you don 't consciously know_ that. Apparently evolution
| has favored that model, and here we are.
|
| I learned this reading "The Elephant in the Brain"
| (https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-
| Everyda...)
| r0rshrk wrote:
| Is the field law?
| jmcgough wrote:
| I played a ton of Among Us in 2020, which is a game where you
| have to figure out which of your friends are lying. I quickly
| learned that going off "well they're acting pretty guilty" was an
| easy way to lose. A friend of mine would immediately jump to
| accuse me whenever I cast suspicion on them, even if they were
| innocent.
|
| Way better to rely on actual evidence and not hunches, even more
| so when it comes to giving someone a prison sentence.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| For me the best game for this is Diplomacy.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| There is something of a meta-game there that doesn't exist in
| "real" cases like criminal investigations. Since everyone knows
| that they will be guilty some of the time, a reasonably
| strategy is to act guilty all of the time.
| XorNot wrote:
| Except this comes in in real life all the time: "you don't
| need a lawyer here, you're not guilty..." - yes you do. You
| always need a lawyer. You always should plead the 5th if it
| applies. No, you should never be talking to law enforcement
| without a lawyer. No you should not let law enforcement "take
| a look around" without a warrant.
|
| Real life is full of things you absolutely should do which
| are sold up and down through media as "looking guilty".
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| The best 47 minutes of legal advice you'll ever get:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
| path411 wrote:
| Yep, if anything, being innocent is the most important time
| for having a lawyer. I think not getting charged with a
| crime you didn't commit is more important than getting away
| with a crime that you did.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Also been playing a lot of Among Us with my friends.
|
| We started out realizing how difficult lying really is. The
| early games definitely were characterized by just people not
| able to hide their lies (maybe we were not trained at it ;)).
|
| But after some training it becomes easier to lie, and of course
| more difficult to spot.
|
| We also sometimes play it with my kids and those from my
| buddies, but they have a hard time lying, basically partly
| admitting when they are accused.
| Natsu wrote:
| I did the same, though there are weird people who lie for no
| reason and screw over the team, too, and sometimes you catch
| those idiots in a provable lie.
|
| The best way to catch liars is to know things they don't know
| and trap them with that. In Among Us, it could be as simple as
| two people saw each other do a visual task (one that proves
| they're not an impostor) then have someone accuse the wrong
| person, or worse, be the only person that wasn't cleared that's
| left.
| [deleted]
| dllthomas wrote:
| One Night Ultimate Werewolf has the additional wrinkle that
| initially most (or all) players don't even know whether they
| should be lying or not.
| Shoop wrote:
| Archived version: https://archive.is/9d6iG
| hbarka wrote:
| Then there's the cousin of lying. Bullshitting. It is outright
| practiced at work and job interviews. Elon Musk at one time was
| interviewed on how he spots it.
| bobmaxup wrote:
| Isn't Elon Musk a great bullshitter himself?
| fluxinflex wrote:
| Takes one to know one, perhaps that's how Elon Musk does it.
| bobmaxup wrote:
| Or his comments on detecting bullshit are bullshit?
| eric4smith wrote:
| They open their mouths.
|
| No seriously, we all, mostly lie. Stop and think about it for a
| second.
|
| It could be just a simple thing to make an otherwise humdrum
| experience seem interesting. No harm no foul. But there it is,
| its a lie.
|
| Heck, even my dog lies. He overplays the negative to get
| sympathy... and more food and petting.
|
| Children lie. A lot. If you have a child, you know what I mean.
|
| So yea, just open your mouth. That's how you can tell.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> They open their mouths. No seriously, we all, mostly lie.
| Stop and think about it for a second.
|
| I disagree. That's one of the oldest falsehoods in psychology.
| Sure, there are some people who lie all the time, but that's
| more of a symptom than a universal behavior.
| arbitrage wrote:
| > even my dog lies. [...] Children lie. A lot. If you have a
| child, you know what I mean.
|
| This really sold it to me right here.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| If it is a politician, you will know as soon their lips are
| moving /s
|
| On a serious note, there is no way to know on a sophisticated
| liar, and there are 1000 tell tales on a bad liar.
| fargle wrote:
| Very true. And sadly this works for all those amateur
| politicians we encounter every day too.
| raducu wrote:
| Immagine there was a non invasive method to detect lies.
|
| Presidential debates would be interesting. If we still had such
| debates or presidential elections after that :)
| effnorwood wrote:
| they
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I can't recommend Talking to Strangers enough. We have a
| crippling inability of people to read strangers correctly. In
| addition to amazing testimony and evidence, great case studies,
| the production quality of the audiobook is like a good podcast.
| routerl wrote:
| I'll also recommend the actual talking to strangers meetups,
| though I assume they're on hold due to plague.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| Can you give more info on that podcast? I'm finding a bunch
| with that name.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| It's a book, by Malcolm Gladwell. The comment said the
| audiobook is _like_ a good podcast.
| Robin_Message wrote:
| If it's a book by Malcolm Gladwell, I can't anti-recommend
| it enough.
|
| All of the Malcolm Gladwell books I've read have been
| tripe. Unless he has radically improved his writing and
| grasp of nuance in the last decade (and published
| retractions of his earlier books), his books are dangerous
| anti-knowledge which will make you feel smarter but
| actually be dumber.
|
| Gladwell takes an obvious, folksy thing, adds a bit of a
| twist to it, presents several anecdotes as dramatic stories
| illustrating his point, then slaps on some "science" to
| make it seem like its true. It's not. He's just making
| stuff up that sounds plausible but surprising.
|
| Gladwell writes well, and seems believable. That doesn't
| make him right.
| ksd482 wrote:
| I have the exact same opinion about Gladwell.
|
| One day on a flight I started reading his "Blink" when
| 1/4th of the way I realized he is full of crap.
|
| The realization came after I started noticing a pattern:
| that he would give an anecdote, or present a situation,
| explain it a little bit then bam! He would generalize his
| conclusion to a broader situation. Rinse and repeat.
|
| What a load of junk!
|
| I got introduced to him via his TED talks which I liked.
| But after reading Blink (1/4th of it), I opened by eyes
| and stayed away from whatever he said or did.
| qPkk4Bi wrote:
| I've only read Outliers and David and Goliath, but I
| really enjoyed them and feel that they provided some
| tangible benefits in how I think about things.
|
| Could you share some of the criticism against him so I
| could update any incorrect beliefs I may have?
| specialist wrote:
| My opinion flipped the other direction. Which totally
| surprised me.
|
| I used to dismiss Gladwell's "insight porn" (h/t
| lordnacho). But now I feel like he's a pretty effective
| advocate, popularizer of views and policies that I agree
| with. Briefly, he's punching up.
|
| Michael Lewis was the catalyst to reassessing Gladwell. I
| just frikkin love his Against The Rules podcast series.
| Briefly, he argues that we do better, both as society and
| individuals, with referees and coaching.
|
| Then I listened to a handful of Gladwell interviews. A
| long form chat with Lewis. Book tour stops for Talking
| with Strangers. I thought: Huh, Gladwell doesn't sound
| too bad.
|
| So I started listening to other Pushkin Industry
| podcasts.
|
| I especially love historian Jill Lepore.
|
| So I guess my TLDR is: I reevaluated Gladwell because
| he's now working with two people I really admire. Virtue
| by association.
| Robin_Message wrote:
| It's years since I read and then binned any of his books,
| but to give a concrete criticism of Outliers:
|
| Anders Ericsson, who conducted the study upon which "the
| 10,000-Hour Rule" was based has written that Gladwell had
| overgeneralized, misinterpreted, and oversimplified his
| findings. https://web.archive.org/web/20190320062202/http
| s://radicalsc...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Good counterarguments, thank you. Some caution should be
| exercised when reading pop sci-like books.
|
| The parts of the book that were meaningful to me were the
| summaries of other foundational studies and generalized
| beliefs based on lots of research. His conclusions were
| sometimes a bit of a stretch, but I accept a little
| 'dressing up' of results with additional opinion as part
| of writing to a broad audience
| ripe wrote:
| Oh God, thank you for saying this. I cannot read two
| pages of Malcolm Gladwell and cannot fathom his
| popularity. Generalizing from anecdotes in an
| entertaining way: that's his whole schtick.
|
| Or, maybe I'm an old cranky curmudgeon and should let
| people enjoy reading his junk science.
| [deleted]
| doublejay1999 wrote:
| Well, I'm pleased to read this. I say that as someone who
| fell for the schtick, and he made a couple of sales out
| of me.
|
| He tells a decent story, and you feel like you've learn
| something after reading him. Scratch below the surface,
| and it turns out you haven't.
| randycupertino wrote:
| Ahh! Thank you for finally articulating what has always
| bugged me so much about his books. I am reading along
| thinking, "yeah, yeah, this makes sense" and then
| realizing later that it actually had no depth.
| flycaliguy wrote:
| This is boiler plate Gladwell critique and has been part
| of his reputation for a long time. Ironically I think we
| are due for a contrarian shift back to him being
| brilliant.
| quesera wrote:
| I like the term "insight porn" to describe that feeling.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Igon value. Enough said.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Someone here used this brilliant phrase: "Insight Porn"
| frereubu wrote:
| When studying sculpture a tutor talked to me about people
| making "things that look like art", which really stuck
| with me - they made objects that mimicked what they
| thought art should be like, but had a kind of conceptual
| hollowness. I think Malcolm Gladwell is similar in that
| he produces content that has the appearance of science,
| but once you start digging it doesn't hold up. A bit like
| a version of "truthiness", except that in his case it's
| "scienciness".
| nosianu wrote:
| Oh right, art elitism as counter example, great. Who gets
| to define what I see as art? "conceptual hollowness" -
| that sounds nothing but esoteric to begin with. Reminds
| me of the (German) "Hurz"... event
| (https://youtu.be/MJ7jbQJXF68).
|
| I hate posting anything negative but sorry, this was just
| too much.
|
| Oh and I admit I actually didn't dislike the third of one
| Gladwell's book I once read, as well as a presentation he
| gave somewhere about the Norden bombsight. Every single
| one of the HN haters of him on the other hand remain
| exceedingly vague and don't really have anything of
| substance to say, only very over-styled ways to express
| _that_ they dislike them, or even the man himself.
| frereubu wrote:
| Leave aside the art metaphor if that's not to your taste,
| and perhaps a less metaphorical way of looking at it is
| that Gladwell is a storyteller, not a scientist. He
| creates coherent narratives, but they obey the logic of
| stories, not science. Other people have written detailed
| criticisms of his scientific writing - if you want to
| read them they're pretty easy to find. I genuinely think
| it's worth your time.
|
| I listened to his podcast history of napalm, and found it
| compelling and interesting (but then I'm not a historian,
| so perhaps it's Murray Gell-Mann amnesia!) So I have more
| time for his historical work, partially because history
| is a kind of storytelling.
|
| Science is not the same as history, and needs to be
| judged by different metrics. This is where he falls down.
| nosianu wrote:
| Thank you for making my point. Your comment is as vague
| and nebulous as you say Gladwell's stories are. Neither
| does he claim to publish scientific papers, last time I
| checked those were "popular science" category books like
| millions of others. I'm not sure what value there is in
| singling out one guy, or to point out the gigantic
| discrepancy between a scientific paper and a popular
| book, especially when it's done worse than the latter and
| even farther from any rigor.
|
| The vitriol, downvote-happiness and almost zealotry of
| "commenter movements" like anti-Javascript, or, here
| anti-Gladwell, to me signals that this is more a self-
| perpetuating fad driven by group think (trying to fit in
| and proof one is part of the core). If it was merely fact
| driven such as mine would be ignored - or not be given
| cause to exist in the first place. It's not like I care
| one iota about Gladwell, as I said, I never managed to
| read more than a small part of one book. What I _did_
| notice though and why I even paid any attention at all
| was the amazing level of effort - coupled with an equally
| amazing level of vagueness - some people put into this.
|
| If one were to think logically, even if you conclude all
| of Gladwell's books are really really bad, you would just
| ignore the whole thing. That call to arms anytime anyone
| dares mention Gladwell - or Javascript - is scary and as
| far as I can see far worse than anything Gladwell may
| ever have written. It reminds me more of high school
| "cool kids" group dynamics.
| Robin_Message wrote:
| Sorry to have scared you. I don't think pointing out the
| scientific illiteracy and anti-knowledge in his books is
| far worse than the books themselves, but YMMV.
|
| I commented on a relevant thread in the hope of saving
| someone else the time wasted reading them, and if I'm
| honest, because I'm still salty about the money and time
| he stole from me.
|
| I criticise it in the same wa as if someone was
| expounding homeopathy or a fruit-baswd diet for cancer,
| or horoscope-based hiring.
|
| JavaScript is fine by me.
| frereubu wrote:
| Your characterisation of my arguments is not fair. I
| specifically said I appreciated his historical podcast,
| so I'm certainly not a zealot. And to remove doubt, I'm
| not an artist critiquing science from a point of
| ignorance, I have a scientific background too, indluding
| a masters in neuroscience. Gladwell's
| mischaracterisations of science are widely distributed,
| and I think that's why he comes up so often - if he was a
| relatively unknown blogger nobody would care. It's
| frustrating to see this kind of scienciness get so much
| attention when the people who do the science he writes
| narratives about, and whose work he piggybacks on, are
| much more circumspect about how widely their work
| generalises.
|
| Again, I have said there are multiple critiques which go
| into detail about what is wrong with Gladwell's writing,
| so if your problem is the "nebulousness" of a comment on
| Hacker News (which is no place for a detailed critiqe),
| then I suggest you look for them if you're genuinely
| interested in why people have a low opinion of his
| science writing.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| "Remained exceedingly vague" isn't exactly fair. How much
| do you expect from a comment on a discussion board? If
| you want more specifics, ask for them! You're in attack
| mode here right out the gate.
|
| He has admitted to "mak[ing] trouble" rather than
| believing everything he writes.[0] He acknowledges that
| his books _are not_ "ends in themselves."[1] He cherry-
| picks supporting studies and leaves out their failure to
| replicate.[2] He throws around scientific terms but uses
| them incorrectly. [3] He offers ill-considered off-the-
| cuff "solutions."[3]
|
| One reason HN comments might be "exceedingly vague" is
| because the specific criticisms have been laid out
| extensively over the past decade.
|
| [0]
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/29/malcolm-
| gladwe...
|
| [1] https://www.thecrimson.com/column/behavioral-
| economist/artic...
|
| [2] https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwell
| ian_deb...
|
| [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinke
| r-t.htm...
| petewailes wrote:
| Sciensimilitude, as it were
| routerl wrote:
| "Scientism" is a pretty common term for this. I.e.
| superficially coating arguments in a veneer of rigor and
| data, for the sake of riding on the epistemic prestige of
| empirical science.
| [deleted]
| blablabla123 wrote:
| Yeah I need to check it out. I think it's also that people (me
| included) are deeply fascinated by the ability the read other
| people and what they think.
| mettamage wrote:
| Two thoughts:
|
| 1) If law enforcement ever has the time, they might want to play
| Maffia or Werewolf. Playing those games enough makes you realize
| how idiosyncratic lying can be.
|
| 2) I'm glad to know that my lecture on lying when I studied
| psychology basically had the same conclusions as this article.
| easton wrote:
| Among Us is the most recent version of those games, and it made
| me realize how good my friends were at gaslighting me.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| What if I told you that playing a low-stakes game and real
| life are not the same thing?
| yarcob wrote:
| You should try it. I found it very enlightening to find out
| how utterly incapable I was to get away with a pretend
| murder in a primitve computer game with random strangers.
|
| (Even if like me you won't end up playing the game I found
| the experience worth five dollars)
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Most real life lies are also pretty low stakes. "Oh, I'd
| love to come to Aunt Mabel's party but I can't." "We should
| totally do lunch sometime."
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Which is, of course, totally irrelevant. Nobody cares
| about detecting those lies. Where's the evidence that big
| lies are in any way related to little lies?
| saberdancer wrote:
| This article talks about exactly those concerns.
| noiseman wrote:
| Pathological lying is one of the indicators of
| psychopathy. Not quite the same thing as what you're
| talking about but one can't be too careful about those
| things.
| graeme wrote:
| Everyone tells little lies. But it someone, in a game for
| example, is so good at lying that you have no idea
| whether they're telling the truth, that raises some
| questions.
|
| How can you trust your judgement on whether they're
| truthful about bigger things?
| klibertp wrote:
| > How can you trust your judgement on whether they're
| truthful about bigger things?
|
| You can't. You will believe what you want to believe, and
| good liars are great at finding out what you want. A well
| constructed lie rests on verifiable foundations - ie.
| they also know when _not_ to lie to earn your trust - and
| comprises of almost exclusively truths. There is no way
| to defend yourself once you become the target and start
| listening.
|
| The only winning move is not to play.
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| "Does this dress make me look fat?" It looks low stake,
| but it is definitely not. Be careful out there.
| nullsense wrote:
| No. The burgers and fries make you look fat.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| And, like in a police interrogation, anything you state
| now can and will be used against you later ;)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Playing those games enough makes you realize how
| idiosyncratic lying can be.
|
| In my view this is just one more error springing from the root
| error of turning "a jury of your peers" into "a jury of random
| strangers". One point of being judged by a jury of your peers
| is that they are familiar with the types of things you're
| likely to do.
|
| But another is that your peers are familiar with the ways in
| which you're likely to react to things.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| People are practiced at telling lies that their peers
| believe. Random strangers are better at being skeptical
| because they are not empathetic about the excuses that are
| necessary to smooth out an explanation.
| greggman3 wrote:
| Are random strangers better? The stereotype is they just
| based on looks and mannerisms. Dark skin + sweats = guilty.
| etc...
| effnorwood wrote:
| They publish an article in the atlantic.com
| jchook wrote:
| If you liked this you might like Embassytown
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Great suggestion. It's very underrated
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Seconding, one of my top 5 SF reads.
| airhead969 wrote:
| It's always about probing for consistency, congruence, and
| naturalness. You're never going to be able to spot every lie
| every time, only individual lies. For example, most women and a
| few men are able to act improv, that is lie fluidly without
| hesitation. It's only if you know directly what they're saying
| isn't true or after asking deeper questions that it becomes
| apparent if they don't know what they're talking about or begin
| to contradict themselves.
|
| As my grandmother used to say: "One lie leads to another. Tell
| the truth because lying is too much work." I would also add that
| getting caught lying severely destroys trust and so isn't
| conducive to society either.
| arbitrage wrote:
| Liars and abusers are emotionally invested in what they're trying
| to convince you of. They try to sell you their story.
|
| That's the best common theme I've found in reality. If someone is
| trying to convince you to believe them, they don't have your
| interests as their primary concern. It's all about them.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _U.K. police, who regularly use sketching interviews and work
| with psychology researchers as part of the nation's switch to
| non-guilt-assumptive questioning, which officially replaced
| accusation-style interrogations in the 1980s and 1990s after
| scandals involving wrongful conviction and abuse._
|
| I wonder if this explains a trope I notice in British detective
| TV shows but not in American ones. Writers have the fictional
| detectives speculatively throwing around accusations whenever
| they have a vaguely plausible guess as to what might have
| happened. Apparently in the hopes that it will scare the accused
| into confessing right then and there.
|
| Ten minutes into the investigation, and based on no evidence, the
| detective will say something like, "You were in love with your
| best friend's husband, weren't you? You wanted him for yourself,
| and _jealousy_ is the reason that you killed her, isn 't it?" And
| the just-accused person will reply, "Hardly. It's well known
| among all of us that I felt he was a terrible husband and
| encouraged her to leave him." And then both will continue on as
| if all that was no big deal and you can't fault the detective for
| asking.
|
| Was this once a real technique, and now there's a cultural
| perception of it still lingering? I'm sure fictional portrayals
| are inaccurate everywhere, but this particular thing seems unique
| to British shows.
| jopsen wrote:
| I don't think we should confuse a technique for drama in TV
| with reality.
|
| If British detective shows were realistic, Midsummer county
| would be dangerous murder hotspot, hehe
| hotz wrote:
| It's quite easy, if it's got two legs and the ability to speak...
| Expect to hear lies.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Amusingly, dogs can lie too. I noticed this recently.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| "The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount
| of truth at the right time -- and then shut up."
|
| -- Robert A. Heinlein
| seppin wrote:
| Two ways to lie, say something false or only give 1/2 of the
| story.
| tim333 wrote:
| A third is to come out with a lot of nonsense all the time so
| people don't really differentiate the important lies. I've
| noticed that technique in certain well known politicians.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Yes, the best lies are based mostly in truth with a key
| substitution. And, it is a novice's mistake to keep babbling.
| The best liars are the ones who must do so their entire lives
| in order to survive.
|
| To be honest, I do the opposite: I intentionally play with
| random people by telling them truths in a manner that comes
| across as lying.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Best liar ever if you want to see how good some people's poker
| face can be:
|
| Prison escapee convinces cop he is actually a jogger:
| https://youtu.be/vBrnBmUmVzI
|
| Liars of this type probably have been practicing in real
| situations where their lies got them something.
|
| I think most of us (non nefarious people) don't have to deal with
| lies of real significance. I've lied at stand-up, and I'm sure
| people know it. It's a polite request for dignified forgiveness.
|
| The only real lie that can happen in your life is with a
| spouse/partner, since that is a calamity in relative terms
| (betrayal). Kids/Teens will lie about a lot of things, but that
| should be expected (immaturity). Your company _has_ to lie to you
| (business).
|
| If for whatever reason you are dealing with major lies of any
| other kind, then you are probably dealing with a criminal.
|
| So yeah, we _should_ be bad at spotting serious liars since we
| have no business being around them (e.g your business is crime).
| bluecalm wrote:
| The guy isn't dressed like a jogger. Joggers don't usually
| carry bottles of water either. That's some actual evidence he
| is unlikely to be a jogger. Instead the policeman is focusing
| on what the person say.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| It's not the first time he escaped. Here's his track record:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lee_McNair
| mxcrossb wrote:
| > One person was not upset enough. The other was too upset.
|
| This immediately made me think of Camus's The Stranger, though
| maybe it's an overreaction to bring existentialism into the
| conversation!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Any time I talk to someone about this evidence it's always "yeah,
| most people suck at telling liars, but _I 'm_ good at it."
|
| Lake Wobegon effect for people reading.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Any time I read about spotting liars I thought "man, I don't
| know how other people do it, but I suck at detecting lies".
|
| I mostly think this because every time someone on TV insists
| they're innocent, I believe them, and then they turn out to be
| guilty.
| sdf435t3 wrote:
| Why do you choose to "believe" or not to "believe" an actor
| based off of what you know to be a performance?
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| I think that is the joke.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Not actors, actual criminals from the news.
| sushisource wrote:
| I think people probably immediately think about how they react
| to their spouse or other very close relationships, and I
| suspect (haven't looked it up) that people are actually pretty
| good at detecting lies in those situations because we have so
| much experience with how that person acts.
|
| Detecting the lies of strangers? Yeah... good luck.
| [deleted]
| dwaltrip wrote:
| This article primarily focuses on the ineffectiveness of using
| non-verbal cues. It doesn't really go into that much depth on
| how easily (or not) liars can be detected by analyzing what
| they actually say. It briefly mentions that this method appears
| more effective (although the accuracy was still only 80% or
| so).
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I should have included more details, but the claimed expert
| lie-detectors almost always name non-verbal cues as the trick
| to detecting liars.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Lake Woebegon effect is such a terrible name. It is very easily
| possible that every student in a small town is above average
| compared to e.g. the national average.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| And the eponymous commons didn't suffer from a tragedy of the
| commons. It's still the name.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| I have to question whether you're trying to prove GPs point,
| as this is hilariously incorrect. Unless you're using very
| unlikely values for easy and/or small.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Now I'm thinking of a horror fan fiction version of lake
| wobegon where they give all kids an IQ test at a young age
| and murder all those below the national average.
|
| Just my crazy version of what "easy" could entail.
| hntrader wrote:
| They're not incorrect.
|
| Firstly, you're assuming independent probabilities between
| the students.
|
| If it's a single class of 30, for certain skills it might
| be much more likely than pow(0.5, 30) if they were all
| specifically coached on that particular skill, or if there
| are selection effects impacting what type of person ends up
| in that group of 30.
|
| Secondly, even if we grant the assumption of independence,
| the claim doesn't rely on "unlikely values for ... small".
| There's many small towns with a student body of only 5 or
| less people, and pow(0.5, 5) isn't that unlikely.
| neolog wrote:
| I think you're right but I had to think about it and might
| not have noticed. How did you have that ready to go?
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| I have a basic understanding of statistics and a basic
| understanding of logical fallacies, and I deal with this
| kind of sounds-good-if-you-don't-think-too-hard
| "insights" all the time.
| hntrader wrote:
| The probability is just pow(0.5, N) where N is the
| student population, assuming that the distribution has no
| skew, assuming independence between students, and
| assuming the students are drawn randomly from the general
| population. It's an exponentially decreasing function, so
| it becomes incredibly unlikely for large student bodies
| under these assumptions.
|
| I disagree with this argument, but that's the basis of
| it.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's also the very strong confirmation bias.
|
| We're all very good at detecting the liars we detect.
|
| (This is the fundamental diagnostics fallacy. Absent some known
| ground truth, identifying hard-to-detect, hard-to-confirm
| phenomena is, well, hard.)
|
| (This then gets coupled to the treatment fallacy, post hoc ergo
| prompter. I did A, B was cured, therefore A cured B.)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Most policemen aren't really learning state of the art stuff.
| It's institutional knowledge passed down over time. So they're
| likely to be far behind the truth. They likely usually don't have
| the tools necessary1 to even understand these studies since they
| are not taught how.
|
| This manifests in hard to prove stuff like this, but also
| obviously in things like when facial recognition or shot spotter
| tech is used. Scientists and engineers comprehend the limitations
| of these tools, but the users here are similar to prehistoric man
| before the monolith. The tools are magic to them and they rely on
| them like they are magical truths.
|
| This isn't particularly changeable. So for those who build for
| these users, it's important to guide them to the right truths and
| express the right uncertainties.
|
| 1 After all, even the most basic adversarial analysis would be
| that people are aware of the "eyes averted" nonsense and would
| subsequently compensate. As a matter of fact, almost anyone who
| believes in this stuff also believes they can dodge detection
| because they know these secret truths that everyone knows.
| [deleted]
| wildermuthn wrote:
| A lie-detector that works is a trillion-dollar business. A great
| sci-fi novel that explores the implications of an accurate lie-
| detector is "The Truth Machine".
|
| I've given a lot of thought to this topic over the years, and
| have concluded that the way to tackle this problem is indirectly.
| The problem with "truth" is that it is subjective. There is a
| better metric to judge: "false-confidence". There is a subtle but
| distinct difference between a lie and false-confidence. A lie is
| subjective, being a mismatch between what I believe and what is
| true. But false-confidence is objective, in that what I believe
| (regardless of the truth of what I believe) may not match what I
| assert. We can never know, objectively, if a person is speaking
| the truth. But we can know, objectively, if a person is speaking
| with false-confidence.
|
| This might seem like semantics, but focusing on "false-
| confidence" rather than "truth" is quite helpful in highlighting
| the real problem that is being solved: communication.
| lazide wrote:
| That doesn't seem like the real problem being solved or
| highlighted? Communication is a vector here that is surfacing a
| fundamental competitive force and strategy between actors?
|
| Information is power. Knowing something, and that being
| representative of reality and providing predictive ability
| related to that thing provides you power in a number of ways
| (ability to predict and intervene or not depending on desired
| outcomes being a huge one).
|
| Someone presenting you plausibly correct, yet misleading
| information (a good lie) provides them a major advantage (short
| term, or long term depending on the situation). It allows them
| to influence your behavior and actions in a way they can likely
| predict and influence your ability to predict or react
| accurately to something.
|
| A lie detector (as compared to an objective truth detector)
| would tell you if you were being manipulated or mislead
| intentionally. Very different from a 'do they actually know
| what they are talking about' aka truth detector like you are
| referring to, but a very valuable tool if one existed in a
| competitive world like the one we exist in.
| wildermuthn wrote:
| I think we're saying the same thing. People manipulate one
| another through communication, not only in a criminal-justice
| setting, but also in business and relationships. Using
| "false-confidence" as a metric is simply reminding us that
| deception has no connection with objective truth. You can lie
| even while communicating something that is objectively true.
| You can also lie while intentionally displaying outrageously
| high false-confidence (i.e., jokes). It is easier to reason
| about this topic if we choose the right name.
| lazide wrote:
| Reading your description though, the only way I can imagine
| such a machine working would be by analyzing what is said
| against an objective truth - and that is what the false
| confidence value is measuring?
|
| If I'm confident of something that is wrong, my false
| confidence number would be very high - especially if I
| believed it, right?
| simonh wrote:
| A lie is a mismatch between what I believe and what I say. It
| has nothing to do with objective truth.
|
| We sometimes talk about lying versus telling the truth, but
| this is a shorthand. What we mean by telling the truth is
| saying what we believe to be true. No reasonable person would
| say that someone is lying if they say what they believe to be
| true, but it turns out they are mistaken.
| wildermuthn wrote:
| Actually, this happens all the time. Especially in business
| and relationships. Most of the time we don't know what is
| objectively true. When there is a disagreement about what is
| objectively true, we often accuse or judge one another as
| being liars. What you are saying makes rational sense, but in
| practice human beings get mixed up about objective vs.
| subjective truth-telling. Using the term "false-confidence"
| cuts through the gordian knot by decoupling objective truth
| from subjective truth. It also recognizes that deception is
| not a boolean measurement (a lie vs. a truth), but is rather
| a percentage (somewhat of a lie, somewhat of a truth).
| simonh wrote:
| I don't think calling it something else is going to remove
| people's personal stake in the behaviour. When I said
| reasonable person, I meant an objective observer. People
| with ulterior motives and something to gain will tend to
| prevaricate if it's in their interests to do so whatever
| terminology we use.
| wildermuthn wrote:
| Naming is both hard and important. Reading over the
| comments in this thread, one of the most up-voted of them
| reads, "Luckily, there is this one reliable method for
| detecting a lie, checking whether what the suspect says
| is true."
|
| I'm writing from the perspective of "how would one build
| an accurate lie-detector?" And my point is that you
| shouldn't. You should build something that measures
| false-confidence. It is infinitely harder to create a
| lie-detector than it is to create a false-confidence
| assessor because people always mix up subjective vs.
| objective truth.
|
| It is kind of like the late 90's difference between a
| "Web Portal" (yahoo) and a "Search Engine" (google).
| Ostensibly, they were aiming at the same thing: getting
| us to the content we were looking for. But the difference
| in name led to a difference in implementation and
| product. The analogy is even more striking because
| Yahoo's categorization of links made a stronger implicit
| claim to being the kind of content you wanted than
| Google's ranked list of results.
| 13415 wrote:
| Not really, if you think about it, lying is knowingly saying
| what you believe to be false _and_ what you say is also
| false. If what you say is accidentally true, then you tried
| to lie but failed. If you misdirect someone by saying the
| truth - e.g. because you know the person would assume the
| opposite of what you say or because you omit a presupposed
| fact such as that the gas station someone asked for is not
| closed -, then that 's better regarded as deceiving.
|
| At least that's the theory of a dear colleague of mine who
| published that in various prestigious philosophy journals. I
| think he got it right. What I disagree with him about is the
| presumption that there is a "right" theory of lying. In the
| end, you can define it in different ways, but I do think his
| definition is a very good one.
| wildermuthn wrote:
| I love this. But this is also why I think using "false-
| confidence" as a metric avoids all these questions by being
| unambiguous about what is being measured.
| simonh wrote:
| That's not right at all. Lies are false statements about
| your own knowledge. Even if the fact your lying about
| happens to be true, you are still lying about your
| knowledge of it. It's important to distinguish between the
| act of lying, the intended result of the lie and the
| relationship to the true facts. Those are all independent
| things. You can't "fail to lie", though you can fail to
| deceive with your lie.
|
| Suppose my daughter is accused of stealing the sweets. I
| might lie by saying I saw her in the garden at the time
| they were taken. Even if she was actually in the garden
| then, and didn't take the sweets, I'm still lying about my
| knowledge of these things because I didn't see her in the
| garden.
|
| Even if I lie about remembering something, such as that I
| saw her in the garden (maybe it was a long time ago), and
| it turns out I did see her in the garden I'm still lying
| because I didn't recall the memory when I said I did.
|
| >"If what you say is accidentally true, then you tried to
| lie but failed."
|
| No, because you still misrepresented your own knowledge.
| You did not deceive someone with your lie and maybe led
| them to the truth, but it was still a lie.
| rdiddly wrote:
| The best liars, like the best actors, actually believe what
| they're saying though, so I don't think false confidence is the
| answer.
| wildermuthn wrote:
| That's my point, though. A lie-detector tries to do the
| impossible. A false-confidence assessor only does what it
| claims to do.
| tocoder wrote:
| I guess my question is, "why would you like to know?" Of course,
| there are times when knowing important information can be the
| difference between helping people and harming people. Otherwise,
| I think there are other ways to either ascertain the truth or
| even find peace in not knowing. I take some solace in being okay
| with not knowing some things.
| seibelj wrote:
| The only way to lie effectively (if you are committed to lying,
| which IMO is not a good longterm strategy) is to commit to the
| lie 100% and then believe it yourself.
|
| For example, if you want to lie about where you were, you have to
| _believe yourself_ that you were there. If you consciously think
| you are lying, it won't work. It's like forming a new truth and
| then fully accepting that reality.
|
| Many years ago I worked at a Dominos pizza with a pathological
| liar. It was so obvious everything he said was false, and he
| couldn't stop himself from lying about literally everything. That
| is not effective lying. Effective lying is believable.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I worked with a pathological liar for about a year. We didn't
| have day to day interactions, but he was always eager for an
| audience and if I had time I'd humor him.
|
| My goal was to let him spin his yarn and wait for him to
| contradict himself in some way. Rather than directly going a
| "gotcha" I'd act sincerely confused, "Oh, you just said you met
| him yesterday, but earlier you said you met that person months
| ago. I must be misunderstanding." Then I'd just enjoy how
| effortlessly he would create a new fabrication to cover up the
| gap in his story. I guess practice makes perfect, or at least
| better.
|
| He was incredibly bold. Once he told me about spending
| Thanksgiving with a coworker ... and that coworker was in his
| cube immediately adjacent to mine. After the BS artist left I
| asked the guy in the next cube if her heard that ... nope, he
| was wearing his headphones. When I relayed the story, he said
| nope, he was more likely to shoot the BS artist than invite him
| over for a meal.
|
| He ended up getting fired because he was taking time off work
| to attend classes at Stanford. After a few months of this
| someone in HR checked with Stanford and they said they had no
| record of a student by that name. LA few weeks after getting
| fired, HR received a call from another company checking
| references on one of our former employees, Dr. <bs artist
| surname>.
| alexpc201 wrote:
| I recall reading about a patient with split-brain (severed corpus
| callosum) could tell when people were lying. It seems there are
| verbal and physical cues when we lie.
| carapace wrote:
| > It seems there are verbal and physical cues when we lie.
|
| Yes. Not being able to detect lies is a social construction,
| part of culture. (And so the results reported in TFA are
| technically useless because everyone involved is operating as
| part of the unconscious "conspiracy" and so would naturally
| "discover" that it's hard to detect lies.)
|
| You can tap into this with hypnosis, but it's unpleasant, like
| being an alien. Imagine being the _only_ person in the room
| that can tell when someone, anyone, is lying. It would be
| pretty creepy, eh? Like Twilight Zone creepy. People would shun
| you. You 'd have to hide the ability, eh? And so we come full
| circle: we all can tell but we're taught not to as children.
| wnoise wrote:
| If we have to be taught not to recognize lies, then why is it
| so easy to lie to young children?
| carapace wrote:
| Seems kind of obvious, eh?
|
| When they're really young their minds are not yet formed.
|
| And children are biased to trust their parents and adults
| in general.
| dathinab wrote:
| Yup, many of the "signs someone is lying".
|
| Are actually signs someone is uncomfortable/insecure.
|
| And while you might be such because you lie, you might also be
| such without lying and you might not be such when lying.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Yup, many of the "signs someone is lying". Are actually signs
| someone is uncomfortable/insecure.
|
| Which might be why LEO are so partial to them. The power to
| ruin vulnerable people is irresistible to some folks.
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