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Lie Detector Company Threatens Critical Scientists With Suit
An anonymous reader writes "The Swedish newspaper DN reports that the Israeli company Nemesysco has sent letters to researchers at the University of Stockholm, threatening legal action if they do not stop publishing findings (Google translation). An article called 'Charlatanry in forensic speech science: A problem to be taken seriously' was pulled by the publisher after threats of a libel lawsuit." Online translations can be a little wonky; if your Swedish is as bad as mine, this English-language article describes the situation well.
1. socially conservative politics
2. intellectual property laws
civilization is bettered in terms of happiness, health, and financial prosperity as long as the power of social conservatives and corporate oligarchy are held in check. certainly, there is now ay to ever completely defeat these forces, and they do actually do good some good in this world. but they must be eternally pruned, for in part sof the world where their power runs unchecked, corruption and classism, intolerance and tribalism take hold
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wonder when companies will realize that trying to silence people in this modern age will just lead to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
.
Hey, look! I can blast buzzwords and pretend my software works too!
So how much would you pay? Wait, don't answer because this can flash the overall value for each parameter in a separate window! Now how much would you pay?
I know lie detectors have only been more of toys or threats than really useful tools. A trained questioner doesn't need a lie detector. A lie detector is more for them to let you know that they are almost positive that you've lied on the subject.
There are folks that want lie detectors to work like in the movies or have it on their cell phones so that they know when the other person is lying. They'd hate to have it used on them though. I have news for you.
Everyone has a built-in lie detector. It's just how well that it's been trained to work. How would the world be different if we gave elementary school kids the same questioning for lies tools that are usually taught to police detectives? Short answer; not too different. They'd just know faster when the teachers are lost and clueless, and any attempts to bring new information that you know the teacher doesn't have would just be punished faster. We would get politicians that are even better at lying though.
Except that if the lie detector says the scientists are telling the truth, the company can either:
1. Publicly admit that the scientists are telling the truth.
2. Publicly claim that the scientists are lying and, thus, also publicly admit that their own lie detectors are faulty.
Easy solution: the scientists should agree to undergo an interview in which they would be asked if they have proof of what they are saying. A lie detector provided by this Nemesys Co. would then detect if they are lying or not.
I'm not on the lie detector company's side and I sympathize with the Swedish researchers too. However, you seemed to be taking things black-and-white...
In reality it is all about probabilistic correlation between "lie-o-meter" readings and subjects' honesty. This correlation may be strong or poor. Lie detectors may work or not. I don't know. But I think it's how this correlation is measured and interpreted that matters. If the instrument company fails to make the measurement and interpretation on science, and further exaggerate it's actual use, that would be fraud. And scientists take fraud very seriously.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
It would show no stress whatsoever. If a politician is reading from a teleprompter, it is duckspeaking, and not actually thinking about the words it's reading.
If the politician isn't using a teleprompter, you'd get the same flat-line reading you'd get from any other sociopath. Some sincerely believe their lies, others can switch that belief on for just long enough to get the lie out, and then switch the belief off again as soon as there's an opportunity to gain from breaking whatever promise was uttered.
This isn't moral judgement. It's a normal conclusion based on their research. Things like this happen all the time in science - it would not be at all out of place in the conclusions part of their paper.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, coin flips, sticking your hand in the statue's mouth and Scientology's "E-Meters" all share the same validity in catching lies -- basically none. It's all pretend "science" with cool moving needles and wires, but you might as well be watching a seismograph for all the good it does you. It simply gives government agencies and insurance companies an excuse to call you a liar. "Hey, don't look at me, the MACHINE says you're lying..."
Now FOX has this propaganda puff piece for the TSA called "Lie to Me" going where an actor I like is helping spread nonsense I can't stand.
Can you imagine the revolution society would undergo if "voice stress analyzers" actually worked? "I did not have sex with that woman!" BZZZ! "Saddam Hussein is building nuclear weapons!" BZZZ! "The 700 billion will be wisely spent!" BZZZZ! "I was misquoted!" BZZZ!
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Except that if the lie detector says the scientists are telling the truth, the company can either:
How do you know the lie detector will say the scientists are telling the truth? The scientists themselves say its results are the same as chance.
Your scenario only works if the lie detector works, in which case the scientists are wrong (though not necessarily lying, so we don't get into any paradoxes here).
The enemies of Democracy are
My point is that this isn't lying, it's the listener lying to himself about what he heard... When Reagan said, "Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down this Wall!" he wasn't lying about his unwillingness to tear down the wall himself, he was just phrasing his position in such a way the made everyone hear "OMG Reagan promises to defeat teh sovs!" when in fact Reagan was taking responsibility for no action on his part.
Just the same, when Obama says "Yes we can close Guantanamo!" he isn't promising to do a goddamn thing, he's just phrasing his aspirations for what America could do in such a way that people hear "OMG Barack is gonna close gitmo!"
This is not lying, and treating it like it is is just victimology of the voter against eeeeeeevil politicians.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I don't know about Swedish, but I use Google translate for Chinese and Arabic translations into English a lot ,and they've gotten notably better in some places over the past year.
MT system performance is often very dependent on language genre. They tend to be good at translating news because news text has been a big focus of NLP training corpus development. It's a pretty well controlled genre (you don't get a lot of random slang or neologisms, non-standard syntax, etc.) and there's a whole lot of it already electronically encoded (no print or speech to text conversion needed). And it's packed full of information, which is important to a lot of the big funders of MT research.
Am I the only one who was expecting a statement from Nemesysco advertising "Our products are for entertainment purposes only." ?
They couldn't do that as their major contracts are with military, intelligence, and police organizations. Labeling their product as an entertainment device would be to more or less admit that the paper is correct and most likely cost them all of their contracts (and future sales).
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Because a relationship built on a situation where you knowingly or surreptitiously subject your partner's speech to a voice analysis to determine if they like or love you is bound for success, right?
Just the same, when Obama says "Yes we can close Guantanamo!" he isn't promising to do a goddamn thing, he's just phrasing his aspirations for what America could do in such a way that people hear "OMG Barack is gonna close gitmo!"
This is not lying, and treating it like it is is just victimology of the voter against eeeeeeevil politicians.
That is absolutely lying! We're talking about natural language communication here, not a programming language. Words and phrases have meaning that are not necessarily the sum of their individual parts, there is context involved that guides the necessary interpretation of both sides. As in, pedantic literal interpretation is not, and has never been, the sole judge of the meaning of a sentence.
When the words spoken by a speaker are designed to convey a certain meaning to the listeners, and the listeners receive that meaning, then we call that successful communication. When that correctly conveyed meaning is deliberately false, that's a fucking lie!
When the speaker also designs their words to leave themselves a semantic escape valve so they can claim to have meant something else later, that doesn't mean they weren't lying, it means they knew they were lying and thus needed the out!
When Obama said "Yes we can close Gitmo", everyone correctly interpreted that to mean that if he were elected, he would close Gitmo. That is the meaning he obviously intended to convey. If he doesn't close it, then that's a lie*. And if he defended himself by saying that all he had meant was he thought it was something America could do hypothetically, then that makes him a double liar because that obviously is not the message he intended to convey when he spoke!
The only people who think that isn't lying are:
1) People who've sacrificed reason itself on the Altar of Pedantry.
2) Liars who are lying about it not being lying and just like being able to use semantics to escape from obvious lies.
I refuse to sacrifice my ability to detect lies covered with such a thin ruse to either group of people.
* So far so good on this count, but of course I won't be happy until the thing is really truly closed.
The enemies of Democracy are
Torture doesn't work either except as a tool to get somebody to admit to things you've already decided you want them to admit to or as a tool of terror. That is why the KGB used it. One classic is the guy that admitted to blowing up more trains than the USSR had at the time. Another classic is the "evidence" of Saddams involvement in 911 being the ravings of a drowning man and getting presented to the UN to show the world that the US administration no longer cared about truth or the rule of law.
How do you test a lie detector? For it to work you have to have someone ACTUALLY LYING, not saying something contrary to the truth, but actually trying to be secretly untruthful. It is an impossible situation because you have to know 100% that they are lying and they have to be 100% concealing a secret. Otherwise, its all just guess work.
There is NO WAY to test a lie detector without the existence of a 100% accurate working lie detector. Short of that, there is no way to objectively or theoretically test any such device.