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Technology and the End of Lying
HughPickens.com writes: The Washington Post reports that lying may soon become a lost art as our digital, data-hoarding culture means that more and more evidence is piling up to undermine our lies. "The research shows the way lies are really uncovered is by comparing what someone is saying to the evidence," says Tim Levine,"and with all these news analytics that can be done, it's going to enable lie detection in a way that was previously impossible." For example in Pennsylvania, police are prosecuting a woman who claimed she was sexually assaulted earlier this year after data from her Fitbit didn't match up with her story, Just like you can Google a fact to end an argument, instant messaging programs that archive digital conversations make it easy to look back and see exactly who said what — and if it matches up with what a person is saying now. "Lying online can be very dangerous," says Jeff Hancock. "Not only are you leaving a record for yourself on your machine, but you're leaving a record on the person that you were lying to."
Even more alarming for liars is the incorporation of lie detector technology into the facial recognition technology. Researchers claim video-analysis software can analyze eye movement successfully to identify whether or not a subject is fibbing 82.5 percent of the time. The new technology heightens surveillance capabilities—from monitoring actions to assessing emotions—in ways that make an individual ever more vulnerable to government authorities, marketers, employers, and to any and every person with whom we interact. "We must understand that—at the individual level and with regard to interpersonal relations—too much truth and transparency can be harmful," says Norberto Andrade. "The permanent confrontation with a verifiable truth will turn us into overly cautious, calculating, and suspicious people."
Even more alarming for liars is the incorporation of lie detector technology into the facial recognition technology. Researchers claim video-analysis software can analyze eye movement successfully to identify whether or not a subject is fibbing 82.5 percent of the time. The new technology heightens surveillance capabilities—from monitoring actions to assessing emotions—in ways that make an individual ever more vulnerable to government authorities, marketers, employers, and to any and every person with whom we interact. "We must understand that—at the individual level and with regard to interpersonal relations—too much truth and transparency can be harmful," says Norberto Andrade. "The permanent confrontation with a verifiable truth will turn us into overly cautious, calculating, and suspicious people."
Sure, sure. The technology works so well no one will ever be able to lie again.
Liars won't stop lieing. Few enough do even after confronted with their lies IRL. If anything, the lies will be more elaborately spun. That too can be done very convincingly online, we've seen enough evidence of that, too. Sure it will probably come out eventually. But by then the damage may well be done.
... for politicians, bureaucrats and profiteering corporations.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
will not work for poker games where people bluff
... not always... just easier in some cases. Good liars will learn to work around the evidence and bad liars as usual will be caught as they always have been caught.
I am disturbed by how many fake rape claims there are though. Something about that should be done. I don't know... maybe its all just media hype but it seems like that has gotten out of control and maybe the law needs to be tweaked a bit to discourage false claims.
One thing which I think is reasonable with false accusations is having the person sentenced to a smiliarly harsh prison sentence.
If you accuse someone of murder and you KNOW they didn't do it... if you fake the evidence up... whatever... and it is proven in a court of law that you did all that stuff. I'm okay sending that person away for 30 years. Because that's effectively what they tried to do to someone else. They tried to get someone kidnapped and kept in a cell for 30 years. Imagine if I just grabbed you and threw you in a cell. What would the sentence for that be? Again... at least 30 years of me in being in a cell, no?
Alright... so if some person makes a fake rape accusation and stages the whole thing... falsifies evidence... commits perjury. Then lets look at how long whomever would have gone to jail had the scam worked. If the guy would have gone to jail for 10 years then... if you can prove she tried to set him up... then she goes away for 10 years.
The sorts of people that do this thing are generally cowards. They do it because they think they can get away with it and they think the consequences of being caught will be nothing.
If you make it clear that their story will be audited and if it is proven that they tried to set someone up that they'll do the time instead... I think a lot of these bullshit cases will go away.
I am applying this to all crimes. Not just rape. Everything. If you try and make it look like someone stole something... same thing If the person would go to jail for 4 years or something... you go to jail instead for 4 years.
Do not make false claims before the court.
The sword of justice must cut both ways.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...If you always tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Even in his time, just sticking to the truth was the path of least resistance.
Do not ever forget --- not all data are reliable !
Just like you can Google a fact to end an argument
Obviously the author has never been in an argument on /.
Imagine that you are talking to someone, and they are making a statement every few seconds (typical in a conversation). Now imagine that 1 out of every 5 sentences, a bell rings, telling you that they're lying, even though they are being perfectly truthful. (because that's the likely false positive rate, if the false negative rate is 20%.. most researchers "tune" the algorithm for what's known as equal error rate).
Would this be ok?
Technology is just another piece of evidence that can be manipulated. Would a good liar use it to their advantage? Absolutely. Had Risley been smarter, could she have taken a nap and then started thrashing around as she woke up? Yes. Then the FitBit would be _evidence_, not contradiction, that she was raped.
There's a reason things like lie detector tests don't have to be admissible in court- they're still fallible. Don't be fooled into thinking anything new still relying on humans to analyze and use is going to be any different.
> Fitbit
"Let that Slashdot nerd go, Chief, he's clean. His Fitbit showed he spent most of the day slouched and barely moving, interrupted only by trips to the bathroom."
"What's this series of spikes here?"
"It looks like he was shaking hands with someone vigorously. We're not sure who."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Great example of our technology out-pacing our wisdom. What many people label "lying" is actually misremembering. Our biological memory-retrieval systems are extremely bad. Every time you remember something, your brain is rewriting the memory, meaning the more you remember an event the more your brain distorts it.
This happens over and over again in our courts, people honestly remember things completely wrong and we call them liars. The film "Rosemary's Baby" is based on a true story of ritualistic child abuse, except the "real" story was entirely implanted in the minds of everyone involved by psychologists. Even the accused were convinced they were guilty. It's absurdly easy for a psychologist to implant false memories of our childhoods in experiments.
The wording in this post unnerves me. The older I get and the more digital the world becomes, the more I learn that I misremember 60% of what has happened in my life. If technology is used to prosecute anyone who makes a statement that contradicts hard factual data, then many innocent people will be prosecuted. We need our scientific wisdom to catch up to our cognitive biases.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
... who catalogued their entire lives online including endless photographs, times and dates, feelings, opinions, likes, dislikes etc.
Wait, whats that loud clucking sound I can hear?
Ask me no secrets and I'll tell you no lies.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Sometimes I can't even tell when I'm lying or am just mistaken or whatever.
Whenever I see these "the end of..." articles I can't help but roll my eyes. And that's the honest truth.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Memes and misleading statistics are growing, and even if lies are shorter lived they occur exponentially more quickly.
Gently reply
I didn't see anyone suggest that it would. Poker is a game.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
False rape accusations are rare.
Rare? I'd hardly call 8% of accusations in the US rare. Even the lowest estimates are between 1-2% of cases. While it can be difficult to prosecute he-said/she-said cases and (too) many rape cases never come to trial, false accusations of rape are anything but rare.
You can fool some of the people all of the time;
You can fool all of the people some of the time;
But you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Still holds true since most people will not research what you say.
The art of a good lie is in weaving it into truth.
A lie on its own without some truth to back it up is doomed to failure. This has always been the case. If you want to be convincing in your lies, they need to be just small parts of a larger story which is mainly truth.
If I told you that I was once interviewed by the TV news, talking about Princess Diana just after she died, then you might disbelieve me. And you'd be right to: it never happened.
However, if I told you about the day I was walking around London minding my own business when a roving news camera crew approached me and started asking me questions about her, and then it ended up on TV... well, then you might be more inclined to believe it, because you'd know (or could check) that I had been in London that day, and the events described are perfectly plausible (there were a lot of news crews doing exactly that in London around the time). This version of the story is also a lie, but it's a lot more believable, and more importantly, the lie can survive a basic fact-check.
So, no. This isn't the "end of lying". It may mean that a good liar now needs to be more careful in building the back-story, and it might mean that a few more liars are caught out, but lying in general will continue. It's human nature.
The only time lying is permissible is in hard situations like the classic "Nazi asking if there are Jews in your house" or some other flavor of serious and unjust consequences for telling the truth. For most people, there won't be dire consequences because their lies will just make them lose face the way it's always been. For women like the one in PA who is being prosecuted, it will help those they victimize (both the male unjustly accused and real rape victims whose claims are viewed more skeptically).
People wonder why lying is such a problem now in courts, well the reason why is that perjury is a joke compared to what it should be. The Old Testament definitely got that right. The price in the Mosaic Law for perjury was to be sentenced to the exact same punishment that is ordered for the list of offenses filed against the defendant. If the woman in PA knew that her perjury would get her say 20-30 years in prison and permanent sex offender status, you can bet she'd have taken it a lot more seriously than the usual at most few years it actually carries. Add a civil component that immediately pierces government immunity and you'd see cops behaving like boy scouts on the stand.
Here lying is as natural as breathing. It is extremely rare to find someone who speaks a truth the first time you ask something to him, here they lie even when it makes no sense to lie. A technology that could detect with 99% certainty when someone is lying would make the brains of people here to collapse, because they would not be able to withstand the urge to lie and having to tell the truth to avoid being caught by the machine.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I am disturbed by how many fake rape claims there are though. Something about that should be done.
Perhaps this is awfully unfair of me, but I get the distinct impression that unprosecuted rapes don't bother you half as much.
And here we have the technique of trying to switch from an argument that one does not like to fight against to an argument one wants to fight for. If only there were a name for such a rhetorical device.
Googling a fact end an argument?
Not only lying will vanish then, but changing one's mind over time, too :-(
I've actually tried confronting people with their lies, but that doesn't mean their friends will check the links you provide, or do research on them. Instead they will battle you. Then other people who can't be arsed to do any research of their own will base their opinion on the group of friends, etc etc.
ie. If the liar's reputation is high enough, people won't believe the truth, even when presented with evidence.
Technology has been instrumental in spreading lies on a scale that was hard to achieve earlier: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06...
Facial analysis studies could show how to detect lies, but it could also instruct on how to evade detection. If you know which eye movements, twitches, etc. are indicators of lying, you can practice avoiding those things while lying. Conversely, peppering in those types of indicators during obvious truths could cause false positives and totally throw off the reliability of knowing whether someone is lying.
...and the Universe will produce a better idiot.
I'm sure the same applies for liars.
Let's say we have a school of 200 students, one of whom pulls a prank. Teachers apply the test to all 200 students and they get 35 people that failed the lie detector - but only of them did it. Worthless information.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Columbo could have figured out the fake rape case in 1975. There were no footprints in the snow, and no water or mud on the hardwood floors inside the house. You don't need to look at the Fitbit data to figure that one out.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I hope so!
Please apply it to political power plays, clandestine operations, secretive courts and legal systems, like tort law
https://www.law.cornell.edu/we...
A million years will pass and there will still be lies!
Besides, who plays big brother and hoards all data in secrecy?
Can all be manipulated at will, thats a permanent lie right there.
Okay, pretty much stopped reading at that point. The fact is that it's as easy to propagate lies through the Internet as it is truth.
Did the cops get a hold of her "fitbit" info?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Yes.
You lied if you intended for us to believe you were being accurate.
You made a careless mistake anyways, either if you intended us to believe you were trying to be accurate, or if you were actually trying, but of course, didn't...
And after all this, you could be forgiven. Just not by us.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Sorry, but I see this as an unmitigated good. The times I have been damaged, I have been damaged by liars. Liars telling lies they know I have no way to contradict. In fact, this is basically how the world is run. People receive false evaluations from people in positions of power, they receive false promises from associates, they receive false information about people's intentions and the false factual information about events of the world. If there were some way to take away their power, then that would be a good thing.
If you read the Snowden documents I read, then you know the intelligence techniques they use to discredit our enemies and others all involve the falsification of stories about that person- false accusers, false attribution, false stories.
They do this because they know what everyone else on planet earth discovers over the course of their lives- there is virtually no penalty for lying about the speech and action of 3rd parties. It's just what people do to anyone they don't like for any reason and man, it works. It works so well it appears in top secret how-to manuals.
So taking away this power which si basically used by most people for malignant reasons, where is the bad in that? What if you never had to be worry about malicious exes or lying co workers or HR couldn't lie about your performance or other gate keepers couldn't lie about the relative merits of your performance or attitude or speech or actions? How would your life be different?
Sure, I could not tell Aunt Margey that her pie is wonderful, but by then Aunt Margy would have acclimated her expectations for praise, as would have everyone else. People whould do what I did a long time ago and seek and prefer the unhappy truth to the happy layer of bullshit that just confuses the issues.
A lot of very very bad things in society are undergrided by agreed-upon lies. The motivation to maintain these lies ranges from a desire to comfort, to control, to manipulate, to hurt and to maintain a kind of Victorian veneer over the widespread ugliness of human nature.
But many people who is aware of all those things in all their ugliness and the bottom hasn't fallen out of their psyces. They know why they are being rejected (you're ugly !), they know people are, at some basic level, reliably selfish and just bad, they know their SO lie to them that their inlaws have contempt for them that their boss steals credit for their work, that their preist lost his faith ages ago, and that Facebook is abusing its TOS every chance it gets. Still, they are not running mad into the streets or even giving up on humanity.
Interpersonal relations aside, look you can't fix scietal problems you can't acknowledge and this will force people to, amongst other things, acknowledge reality. When in history has the knowledge of reality ever led to a regression in civilization? As far as I can tell it's led to an increase in the sphere of people society is willing to feel compassion towards.
Simple - their lips are moving
Because NOBODY ever lies on the internet. That's a proven fact, amirite?
-Styopa
If a person is a Marketing drone, a politician, or a lawyer, they are liars.
Being owned is the new freedom
No kidding. I don't think anyone is tweeting while playing poker "Royal Flush! Check out my #pokerface."
I'm always kind of amazed its a crime (and a fairly serious one) to lie to the FBI and many other government police agencies. It seems like a fair number of people accused of some crime don't get convicted of it, but instead end up getting convicted of lying to investigators, often before they have been charged with a crime or even if they are not the target of the investigation at all.
The better strategy most criminal defense attorneys advocate is don't talk to them at all. I think only a handful of people truly understand this and probably even fewer have the moxie to tell a government agent they don't want to talk to them. Cops have all manner of techniques they use to trick people into talking, including outright lying themselves, which is perfectly legal.
I think it's a natural psychological reaction when asked questions about something by someone in authority to provide answers that make you seem as innocent as possible, even if you actually believe you personally haven't done something wrong. Some of it may not even be something we're aware of, along with all the other problems of memory error and the stress of being questioned by someone in authority.
Perfecting lie detection just seem to be another way to ultimately force people into making confessions.
Fine. Let's turn it around and make impossible for them to lie to us!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing"
So then what will politicians, salesmen and Kickstarter campaigns ever do with themselves? Just remain silent? Maybe that's not a bad thing...
"Deprived of the ability to omit or retouch the truth, under penalty of being caught by an army of inquisitorial eyeglasses, society would feel nearly uninhabitable. The permanent confrontation with a verifiable truth will turn us into overly cautious, calculating, and suspicious people. The apparent truth of what we are and say will be derived not from personal perceptions, particular intuitions and social judgments, but from complex calculations made by algorithms and computations based on the way we use our voice, turn our nose to the right, or incline our mouth to the left.
It will be a mechanical and mechanized truth.
We run the serious risk of losing, little by little, our spontaneous humanity, appearing more and more like the predetermined algorithms that observe and judge us."
By not being able to think one thing and say another, our identity will become monochromatic.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
if (random_float(100.0) < 82.5) return LIE; else return TRUTH;
You are aware there's a difference between a miscarriage and a premature birth, right? Every translation I can find of Exodus 21:22 indicates "no serious injury" after the birth, implying a premature (but otherwise healthy) birth, rather than a miscarriage.
I know I'm nit-picking your post but your argument is seriously flawed for that particular portion.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
would increase.
It appears:
Lying = 1 / Copying (inversely proportional)
I'd like to see a study on how long it takes people to use this tool as a training aid, to become a less detectable liar.
I say not paying property tax can result in death because it reduces the cash flow to schools, thus reducing the quality of education, thus reducing the number of well-educated doctors, thus reducing people's access to quality healthcare, leading to worse health outcomes, including death. See! That was easy!
"The research shows the way lies are really uncovered is by comparing what someone is saying to the evidence,"
Looks like those mad scientists make new groundbreaking discoveries every day now.
The poster asked a question. I offered an answer. Did you miss that?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
A long, and happy marriage will never exist if everyone has to be 100% honest.
I mean, one of the familiar "Honey does this dress make my ass look big" episodes alone will cause chinks in the marital armor.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I am seeing several lines that would defend me to murder useless infants and even adult homo-sapien-animals.
If they were intentional, that's cool I guess. I mean, I do recognize that someone slowly stabbing me to death doesn't matter in the Grand Scheme of Things. I'm strongly of the opinion that stabbings are wrong, particularly stabbings of myself, but I defer to fact, to the precise accuracy of your words, which indeed declared a cosmic scale of reference. There, even the loss of Earth can become a footnote, be it by a ruined climate or a comet.
Now, having finished this tour of my respect towards meticulous accuracy, maybe we should revisit my first sentence.
I guess Santa, the Easter Bunny and [insert cultural myth here] are dead. Damn webcams.
However, a Fitbit device Risley was wearing told a different story, the affidavit shows.
The device, which monitors a person’s activity and sleep, showed Risley was awake and walking around at the time she claimed she was sleeping.
What if the intruder had messed with her Fitbit while she was sleeping, unbeknownst to her?
Just because all humans are animals, and some humans are also persons, that doesn't mean all humans are persons. Stories about Artificial Intelligence researchers trying to create persons prove that the English language allows personhood to be entirely independent of animal-ness. So we must make distinctions here for the sake of accuracy, if nothing else. Here is a little table (could be expanded enormously when thinking about the whole Universe): .x. .| . x .| . x .x. .| . ? .| . . . .| .x. .| .x. .| .x. .|
Entity . . . . . . . . . . | animal | person
typical human. . . . . . . | .
True A.I. (when perfected) | . . .
. . . . dolphin. . . . . . | .
human hydatidiform mole .
brain-dead human . . . . . | .
. . . . . . dog. . . . . . | .
human womb-occupant. . . . | .
(Note, while each cell in a hydatidiform mole is a human animal organism, the mole as a whole is as disorganized as a "bacterial mat"; it is not an animal.) The concepts are "human" and "person", are proved to be independent of each other when the language allows non-humans to be called persons (even if, so far, only in terms of religion or mythology or fiction) --and when we know of cases where humans most certainly are not persons. Like brain-dead adult humans on full life-support. The whole reason the legal system allows the "plug" to be pulled is because the person-aspect of the human is dead. Only a living human animal body remains, with no essence-of-personhood present. And with one example, others become possible, too. Like unborn human womb-occupants, whiare also totally animal, and even just before birth have measurably far less of personhood than adult dogs, to say nothing of the personhood of adult dolphins (which in turn is a magnitude still being debated; on what basis could womb-occupants qualify as persons if dogs can't possibly qualify?).
And are we going to use this technology on our candidates? I think we should.