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World's Most Accurate Lie Detector
An anonymous reader points to this "interesting article about the world's most accurate lie detector. It seems they are getting real close to Voigt-Kampff. Watch out fellow replicants."
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What's scary is that this test can be used without someone knowing. A regular lie detector is hard to sneak on someone.
I read in a one of those women magazines ( I was getting my hair cut, okay?! What else was I to do?) various ways to tell if people are lying. It was the usual bag of tricks - see which direction their eyes go. (Something like if they look left, then they are accessing the left hand side of the brain which is the 'artistic' side - so they are making something up. If they look right then they are trying to do memory recall.)
Anyway, they said that experts had looked at videos of clinton telling everyone that he hadn't had sexual relations, and that the experts had all said he was a very bad liar, and it was really obvious..
Dunno how true this is...
No need for the premature capitulation.
Just get botox injections like poker players do.
I would bet that politicians will soon start to emulate aging soap stars and get them too.
How soon before a newspaper pays to have some footage analyzed? How soon before tabloids say they have had some footage analyzed?
I also would not be surprised if there popped up a service that taught you how to beat the new system, for the right fee. Look at all the effort used to defeat urine tests for drugs...
Free book: Science Toys You Can Make
I wonder when banks will start to use this for loan screening. I think there are no laws to prevent them from doing that. A simple hidden camera behind a mirror.
Now this thing is very easy to use and operate (contrary to other known methods). And will probably cost peanuts. Which means with 87% accuracy 13% of people who are honest and good citizens will be denied loans, insurances, jobs, etc.
That's more than 1 in 10. Scary, huh?
But how this ends is easy to predict - through generations of breeding more successful people at looking thruthful will prevail and the indifferent faced bustards will perish in extinction.
*makes an honest face*
It seems they are getting real close to Voigt-Kampff. Watch out fellow replicants.
"Reaction time is a factor in this, so please pay attention."
I'm not a replicant, but after that movie, I'd still run if I heard that phrase. It's like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The test dealing with my response will, in turn, affect my response. That's what polygraphs base themselves on, that if you lie, it'll detect your nervousness due to the fact that the test looks "real"
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
Not sure if this helps, but I've seen several specials on TV about micro expressions (or something like that). Apparently you can't really replicate micro expressions purposely, and they don't look anything like nervousness to the trained eye. They are difficult to spot (though not so difficult with a camera that's able to slow down the action).
There's a theory that the knowledge that you're lying evokes some cognitive thoughts that sort of "leak out" into your facial expression. You can be nervous on the one hand, but still show micro expressions when you lie. Maybe a very fast curl of the muscles between your eyes, or the flip of an eyebrow, or a slight quivering of your lower lip. They're much, much faster than signs of nervousness...
Recently, however, there was a committee put together by the National Academy of Sciences to study the scientific validity of the polygraph and related lie-detection methodologies, both in the lab and out in the real world. If you want to read the report, you can find it online through the NAS's publishing website.
As for what the report says about micro-expressions (from page 164), it notes that previous studies of micro-expression detection were able to achieve rates of up to 75% accuracy, far better than chance. It goes on to note that such methods, at the time of the report's writing, were labor intensive but that recent work in automating the process held promise. It seems that this new AI work is showing that promise to be well founded.
While 75% accuracy is good, it is nowhere near what would be needed in a diagnostic tool. Even 95% accuracy isn't good. (Note, according to signal detection theory, we really should be talking about percentages of false positives and false negatives, but I digress; let's assume the accuracy works the same for both error types.) 95% accuracy would mean that for every 100 truthful people interviewed, 5 would be judged as liars. For every 1,000 people, 50. Inasmuch as such false positives can ruin lives, careers, marriages, reputations, etc., that rate is too high. Likewise, if 5 out of 100 liars slip through, that isn't a test I feel confident using for national security concerns. Even "good science" needs to be damned good to fill the shoes made for the "lie-detector".
-tcp