Post No.: 0966
Fluffystealthkitten says:
The use of abusive interrogation techniques (torture) to extract information can easily produce false confessions. Prolonged torture screws up the mind so much that one can spew totally incoherent thoughts and report false memories. If you’ve ever been severely sleep deprived then others might realise how disorientated and discombobulated you can be.
Torture can also lead to false confessions simply because the victim wishes the ordeal to end. It can then possibly foment thoughts of vengeance once the wrongly incarcerated person is released, thus the lasting effect could be ‘since one has done the time, one might as well do the crime’, which may lead to being caught ‘again’, which may appear to confirm to the torturers that they were always a criminal or liar. But the fact may be that the torturer only turned them into one via the initial act of torturing them. So torturers can make enemies and criminals out of initially indifferent and innocent people. Families and friends might seek vengeance on the victim’s behalf too, thus violence and hatred ultimately escalates.
Most dangerous of all is that there’ll be an attitude of ‘this torture isn’t working but that’s only because we aren’t torturing them hard enough’ – the belief that torture will extract the truth will be unfalsifiable in the torturer’s mind. Nothing can prove them wrong, especially if they think that an imminent national security threat is looming. Even if science ever did show that something works, such as torture techniques, it won’t tell us whether or not it’s ever ethical to make use of it. Sticking steadfast with your verdict without a care for alternative conclusions or less ambiguous evidence is like burning witches at the stake with holy fire because you believe that this’ll destroy their evil… without caring that ‘holy’ fire destroys the innocent too!
Regimes of differential power can exist between e.g. governments and a populace, parents and children, teachers and pupils, employers and employees – where the former can either oppress, exploit, coerce or torture the latter.
And everybody has a limit – even if you’d rather die than capitulate, the torturers could just capture and torture your loved ones in front of you until you succumb.
So torture is neither ethical nor efficacious. If the suspect is lying then they’ll lie some more or merely reveal what the torturer already knows. If they’re telling the truth then they’ll need to give false information to make the torture stop, otherwise the torturer will refuse to believe that they’re telling the truth.
One of the greatest arrogances is accusing a truth-teller of lying, then placing the blame on that truth-teller for ‘acting suspicious’ after it’s been categorically proven that they weren’t lying! It’s never down to a truth-teller to behave differently – it’s always down to the accusers to update what they believe liars say, do or apparently look like. It’s like it’s not down to ‘slanted-eyed’ people to stop having ‘slanted eyes’ but on others to stop assuming that ‘slanted eyes’ look ‘scheming’. It’s not (just) the truth-teller’s loss – it’s society’s loss if lies are believed whilst the truth isn’t always trusted.
The assumption that bad people are always shifty-looking and behave nervously, and vice-versa, is why confidence tricksters do well i.e. those who look and behave confidently aren’t assumed to be doing miscreant things.
People who do monstrous acts can be extrovert, well-known, popular and can hide in plain sight too. They’re actually the worst because of the things they can get away with due to the automatic trust people grant them for merely having celebrity status (like Rolf Harris). So don’t stereotype what you think a deceiver or delinquent looks or sounds like. Many people trust the most opinionated or cocksure, the most charismatic or grandiloquent – but don’t ignore the voices of quieter individuals. Many assume those who sound articulate or posh cannot be criminals, and are more ready to doubt those who sound foreign, aren’t so well-spoken, or don’t dress as respectably.
We thus need to refine what we believe are reliable indicators of trustworthiness. Assumption is the mother of all **** ups. Many miscarriages of justice have been proven to be miscarriages too late.
Try not to hastily take things at face value or jump to conclusions. Believing in erroneous information is worse than knowing nothing – that’s why a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. So take into account all of the information you can – not just the bits that (appear to) support your preconceptions and prove you right. Listen to all sides of a story first as there are many viewpoints. Care only about the truth – not about ‘winning’. The way we sometimes remark on real events and think ‘if somebody wrote that as a movie script, it wouldn’t have been believable’ shows us that some things that are ‘unbelievable’ are actually true. But of course it ultimately rests on the evidence.
It reveals our own biases whenever we form strong conclusions without caring for receiving hard evidence, after merely hearing a story of an incident that we didn’t witness. If we’re unbiased, we’d reserve judgement and say, “I wasn’t there. All I know is the outcome but I’ve not been presented any hard evidence or consensus from all sides about what actually happened, thus I don’t actually know who’s culpable.”
Even despite having firsthand experience with something, our assumptions of others can be incorrect e.g. we know we often sneeze because of some irritation up the nostrils, but we can immediately assume someone else must be cold or has a cold virus just because we hear them sneezing. Education can thus beat experience. We don’t appear to know ourselves as well as we think, or we have one standard for judging our own actions and another for judging those of others. It’s like adults bemoan the typical behaviours of teenagers despite having behaved in similar ways when they were fuzzy teenagers themselves! Or one situation that requires greater empathy is understanding that people are only ever nervous and involuntarily shake if they care about doing something well. Unless we’re well experienced with a task at hand, or over-confident or cold-blooded, we’re only not nervous about things we don’t give a toss about!
Being blunt doesn’t necessary mean being insightful or even truthful. And being confident about someone else being stupid doesn’t rule out the possibility that oneself is in fact the uninformed one e.g. there are those who laugh at those who reject the instruction of washing a raw chicken before cooking it (you destroy the bacteria by cooking it thoroughly).
The most convincing, and easiest, lies to fabricate are those that contain some element of truth. Similarly, the most seductive cults are those that present some elements of good e.g. they provide a strong community network, a sense of belonging, offer forgiveness of past misdeeds and new beginnings for new followers… but get closer and you’ll find the sexual abuses, money laundering crimes and the closing of members off from non-believers even if they’re their relatives.
People can be incredibly crafty to avoid telling lies without really telling the truth. When purrchasing a second-hand lawnmower, one question you might ask is, “Does the lawnmower work okay?” and a half-truth response from the seller might be, “It worked okay yesterday” (when it was below 25°C); which might be a cunning way of not disclosing that they know it overheats when the weather is hotter? It might therefore be a good idea to always ask, “Is there anything else I ought to know about this product that might compromise its function and reliability, or your right to sell it?” If they omit to answer this then you later discover something like a vital missing component then they’ve clearly lied!
More precise-sounding numbers seem more carefully considered and credible than rounded numbers e.g. €345,721 rather than a rounded €350,000 – even though these numbers could’ve also just as easily been plucked out of the sky too (like the forecasts presented in many business plans)!
Whispered words sound secretive, and secretive things seem more believable, but this again could be just a ruse.
People tend to lie less if messages will be recorded and thus may come back to haunt them – so ask for an email, or if not a text message, which is better than asking face-to-face or via telephone.
Printed information seems more believable than merely verbally expressed information, but they could’ve been pre-prepared fibs. Printed information like price tags seem non-negotiable – but you should understand that in many cases they can still be negotiated.
A picture may speak a thousand words but we don’t always know the full context of a photograph, what happened just before it was taken, or what was going to happen right after that snapshot in time? Facial expressions and body language could be in mid-transition e.g. pause a video of anyone who’s speaking and you’ll likely eventually find them seemingly scowling or frowning when they weren’t when viewed in real-time.
It’s hard when determining who’s perfidious in TV show competitions where deceit is a tactic because they’re deliberately edited to leave the audience guessing until the last moment – to keep us hooked until the very end. It’s TV.
‘You can’t kid a kidder’ means that the best people to catch thieves and deceivers are those who thieve or deceive themselves. It’s why many white hat hackers are former black hat hackers.
Deception is generally easier to pull off online. Catfishing involves creating a fictional persona or fake identity on social media for the purpose of duping someone for some kind of gain. Innocent people’s identities are often stolen too, which might damage their reputations. You can perform a rudimentary check on someone’s identity online by searching for them on social media or seeing if they’ve been mentioned on the news. You can check if they’ve been registered to vote. You can reverse image search their picture to see if it pops up elsewhere. Meow.
It may become ever harder to know what to believe or trust in because deepfakes and audio mimicry will become so indistinguishable from reality e.g. faking an important person saying something or faking footage of a crime or alibi. (Science fiction envisages synthetic robots and clones that are visually indistinguishable from real people even when up close one day.)
Jobfishing involves duping unsuspecting job applicants into thinking they’re starting a new job. But it doesn’t actually exist, which means they won’t ultimately get paid for the work they do.
Social media accounts convey deliberately selected, and often partisan, information, like only one side of a story. A snapshot in time may become taken out of context or simply fail to represent the true overall picture of events. Images and videos can be manipulated or even completely fabricated. Sources may be unreliable. An example of the self-reporting bias is when people report less than what they’ve actually eaten, or only present their desirable sides on social media. And if asked how adolescents relax, few ever admit that they use pornography despite the evidential prevalence of porn! (Perhaps they watch it for the plotlines?)
Know your own vulnerabilities because the insincere will aim to exploit these. If you have a desire and the other party claims to be able to fulfil it, watch out for exploitation. Try to remove your emotions and make a rational decision on whether to trust what you’re being told based on the probabilities and the potential costs or gains of the other party being deceptive or truthful e.g. can you afford it if you make a mistake? Are there legal protections if you find out you’ve been mis-sold? Beware when you’re told what you want to hear – question it, investigate further and be open to hearing what you may not want to hear too.
Meow! Post No.: 0935 included some more guidance to help you detect lies.
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