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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."
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.
... 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.
Not really. Facial analysis is unlikely to work on psychopaths, especially those who fully believes in the alternate reality the invent.
That leaves looking at electronic communication, but that information is private. (For politicians, the whole honest people have nothing to hide thingy only applies to common plebs like you and me.)
It is also only a problem for corrupt bureaucrats.
True bureaucrats that follow the forms religiously won't have a problem with this. They would amputate their own legs if the correct check-mark for it is set. To them filling out a form untruthfully is a mortal sin.
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?
This hasn't stopped politicians so far. You can go on line and find video of damn near any one of them claiming to fully support an idea and then in a different campaign claiming that same idea will be the end of civilization as we know it and (s)he would never support such a thing.
That's why I never post anything!
Interestingly enough, saying two contradictory thing means that any one of them could be true. Or neither. Or both?
Damn, I'm confused.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
...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.
Basically good advice, but the reality is often subtler than that. Sometimes, you need both a good memory for the facts, and also a good memory of exactly what you really said. Ask anyone who's ever run for an elected audience. Your opponents will extract a portion of what you actually said, tweak it just a bit, and claim you said something rather different from what you really said.
And publicising what you actually said, with the expectation that it'll expose your opponents' trickery, isn't always helpful. Google "invented the internet" for a nice example of how poorly exposing the facts can work. At least in the political arena, it's unlikely that anything will have much effect on the prevalence of brazen liars.
Mark Twain also said "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Lying is a self defense mechanism. When someone faces a threat it takes more energy to build up the courage and tell the truth, because our natural instinct is to tell a lie point the finger to someone else. For the most part telling the truth is better long term, but for many of those white lies it is probably better.
Now on more of a point.
This technology isn't about finding lying, nor is Though shalt not lie one of the 10 commandants. It is baring false witness or perjury. In essence where they need to take your statements as truth. So in this article electronic data is useful in solving crime and if you lied in court then you can be shown that you did, due to more evidence. Was I talking on the cell phone when the cop pulled me over? We can take his word for it, or we can just show the court the phone bill showing that we didn't make a call at that time. Is that acquisition that I did something that day true, perhaps there is digital evidence that I wasn't there. A cell phone log, where I was getting some data at a different location, or on the other side showing that I was indeed there.
Now with this technology it can go both ways, that why it is extremely important that we don't have blanket over-site of our data, from the NSA, or other officials, unless via a warrant. We can't have truth cops, or even being flagged for suspicious activity if we very from our normal activities.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Not really. They have control of the media, that is, the modern propaganda apperatus. The truth no longer matters in such a sphere. Lies can become truth, and truth blasphemy if the media simply choose a narrative and stick to it no matter what.
We live in the age of "framing", "narratives" and "explainer journalism". The truth, reason, hard evidence? None carry more weight than a twitter post these days.
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.
"The permanent confrontation with a verifiable truth will turn us into overly cautious, calculating, and suspicious people." Maybe this is the answer to the Fermi Paradox. It makes cultures too cautious to go explore the Universe. Christopher Columbus, for example did not lie when he told Isabella that the Earth was 18,000 miles in circumference; he simply had bad data. But the ancient Greeks had good data that could have been replicated in the time of Columbus. If it had been suspected that the distance to India, sailing west from Spain, was an extra 7000 miles, the mission would have been "no go".
This hasn't stopped politicians so far. You can go on line and find video of damn near any one of them claiming to fully support an idea and then in a different campaign claiming that same idea will be the end of civilization as we know it and (s)he would never support such a thing.
Yeah - much of what The Washington Post proposes only works if people are willing to: test their own beliefs; do the research; analyse what they read; can find the facts in the first place (like if, maybe - in an alternate future, Google, and maybe one day other search engines, can be forced to change recorded history).
I don't dispute it's possible, but likely is another thing.
As for software driven micro-facial expression used to recognise liars. I suspect it won't catch those that believe the lie (and bullshit is trickily nuanced thing). A 17.5% failure to detect "lies" could be a worry - depending on where the technology is deployed. I imagine that even with that failure rate it'd be damn handy at airports.
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.
Facts can be changed. Welcome to 1984.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
Googling a fact end an argument?
Not only lying will vanish then, but changing one's mind over time, too :-(
> This is a curse for politicians, bureaucrats and profiteering corporations.
Whatever. Technology has been advancing since those institutions began, and they've only gotten more powerful.
No advance in technology will strip them of their power unless it's created by a concerted effort to do so. It won't happen by chance.
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
As long as there are statistics, there will be lies.
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.
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
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.
This is not quite correct about Columbus. Pretty much everyone except Columbus knew that Columbus was wrong about the travel distance to Asia. In fact, Columbus proposed his voyage to King John II of Portugal as early as 1485, and was laughed out of court. His brother was rejected by Henry VII of England in 1486 for the same reason.
The Spanish Crown financed Columbus, over the objections of their scientific advisers , for two reasons: the conquest of Grenada was wrapped up in 1492, and the Crown needed to find something for their surplus soldiers and sailors to do, and more importantly, the Crown was absolutely desperate to do something, anything, to break Portugal's trading monopoly with the East around the Cape of Good Hope.
Mod up. Please.
Like this
Or this
Or this
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You bring up one good point... when it comes to politicians, you can spot a lie from them from 10 miles off.
Example? In CNN's recent interview of Hillary Clinton, she claimed that she never got a subpoena for her private mail server... took less than 30 seconds to discover otherwise. Opposing ideology groups were broadcasting her false statement -- with evidence proving that she spoke falsely -- across social media even before the interview ended.
However... it means approximately nothing. Why? Because the public at large is afflicted with three social diseases: a hard balkanized group of ideologies, a nasty case of civic ADHD, and the collective attention span of a fruit fly. Claim otherwise all you like, but as a general rule, do some research... you'll not only find it, but you will find it occurring at a distressing frequency.
QED: Politicians can take comfort in the knowledge that they can continue to blatantly lie their asses off, and their political base will still love them unconditionally in spite of it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Example? In CNN's recent interview of Hillary Clinton, she claimed that she never got a subpoena for her private mail server... took less than 30 seconds to discover otherwise.
Technically, she is correct. She never received a subpoena for her mail server. She did receive a subpoena for certain emails, but not the server itself. Now did she speak truthfully? Probably not as for all practical purposes, people see the emails stored on the server and her email server as synonymous. But, the question isn't if she spoke truthfully, it is whether or not she lied, which she did not.
There have been studies showing that humans are not alone, when it comes to the fine art of deception. Certain birds, mammals, and even fish have been known to use some form of deception to improve their situation. One of my favorites is the cuttlefish, which can show flashy male mating patterns on one side of the body, but leave the other side (facing potential competitors) dull and uninteresting.
As far as humans go, I imagine it's part learned and part innate. I have a four-year-old who lies all the time about stupid things that don't carry a negative consequence. Yet she's perfectly honest when I ask her whether she colored on her wall again.