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Lie Detector Glasses Coming Soon
Zelphyr writes "The EE Times is reporting on a product soon to be released by an Israeli company that allows the wearer of special glasses to tell whether the person they are talking to is telling a lie. Not only that, they can tell you whether someone loves you! Apparently a PC version of the 'love detector' is in the works as well. Think my Windows box will be upset when it knows how much I hate it?"
There are serious doubts as to whether polygraph machines actually work or are simply junk science... and that criticism is of using polygraphs in a controlled environment like an interrogation room used by law-enforcement types. Now this company wants us to believe that an under-paid & under-trained security screener working in a chaotic environment like a busy airport is going to be able to detect a lie using their unproven product? Ha!
Polygraph tests, and probably these glasses, too, make far too many assumptions about certain physiological responses which occur when someone is not being truthful. Firstly, they assume that a raise in heart rate or pulse can only mean that the person is lying, which is simply untrue. Secondly, unlike polygraphs, there's no way for these glasses to perform a control on the person being examined (meaning that you measure what a person's "normal" physiological patterns are like). And even those controls performed are dubious, at best, because there are simply too many variables to consider. Even in basic psychology classes, they go into the problems with polygraphs in detail, and it's not hard to deconstruct the test's assumptions, even for first-year university students.
Suppose you went up to a girl and asked her when the last time she gave a blow job was, and she answers you (hypothetically, she'd probably slap you in reality). You'd probably register a raise in blood pressure and heart rate. Are you to conclude that she lied to you? No, that's simply absurd. You asked her a personal question, out of the blue. Of course she'd be surprised. Furthermore, are you going to act normally and cooly when someone with glasses that can supposedly tell whether you're lying or not is asking you questions? Probably not. If you're an innocent man being polygraphed to see if you've committed a relatively serious crime, you're not exactly going to be acting normally, either.
Polygraph results are inadmissible in court for a good reason. I have a very hard time buying their "96% accurate" figure.
Anyone that accepts that the traditional polygraph has an 83% "accuracy" is obviously starting from a different viewpoint than the rest of us. Still with law-enforcement agencies being willing to hire psychics and dowsers we shouldn't be too surprised at seeing contra-rational thinking being employed by people that don't understand science.
Try 89% (from the article), but that number is also made up. I see nothing here that reliably demonstrates that this "lie detector" actually works. All this "voice analysis" is basically wishful thinking, and in the hands of a jack-booted thug, it is just another tool to take away what little liberty we might have left.
The only thing worse than a lie detector that doesn't work, is one that does .
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But in my life, there have been several instances where someone who initially bores me or totally annoys me eventually grows on me, so that we become friends -- something that wouldn't have happened if I'd been rude and just told them off; and I've been on the receiving end of that too. I had a good friend tell me that when he first met me, he thought I was just an arrogant American and had no interest in getting to know be better; eventually we became really good friends.
So with the "love glasses": even if they're 96% accurate as far as what's going on in the person's head right now, they're not necessarily that useful for what's going to happen in the future. The person who just thinks you're a nice guy, or even doesn't really care for you now, may get to know you better and begin to like you; and the person who is initially attracted to you and thinks your cute may realize you're not really her type.
So this may be useful if you're just looking for one-night-stands, but if you're looking for anything else, I'd say it's best to stick with the social cues. They developed for a reason.
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