Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Better and worse ways to spot a liar

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 152 posts

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#131

Post by yakult »

Lie detection via facial cues / body language strikes me as the sort of thing best done with a neural network: thousands of tiny noisy cues each with very weak correlations that need to be combined with solid statistics. Humans can't process this many cues at once and bias drowns out the signal, but a smart NN hooked up to a powerful camera is another story.

The 'active' method in the article is useful, but has a limitation: you need to be able to ask questions in real-time.

Collating the answers and automating truth evaluation would be a pretty interesting AI problem. It should also be possible to have an AI formulate the statistically optimum questions to ask, Akinator style.

P.s. That would be the killer app for Google Glass, right there. Would also increase chance of being thrown out of pubs by 1000%, but hey.

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#132

Post by stephengillie »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #125
abawany wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly your experience of a journey from communist Poland to Germany was full of Brave New World experiences. Now that that regime is gone, your travel is easier. The GP is pointing out that the rest of the world appears to be adopting the tactics that you encountered 20 years ago. Traveling to the US or Israel, for example.

Israel has had military police psychologically-profiling travelers for its entire history.

The technique described in this article - an article years ago described Israeli military using this technique to screen air travelers there.

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#133

Post by rayiner »

splat wrote: post #77
JonnieCache wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have border guards not always asked those questions? I'm pretty sure it's been like that since before the 20th century.

Border guards and passports as we conceive them didn't really exist until the 20th century. The historian Paul Fussell wrote in his book Abroad : "[B]efore 1915 His Majesty's Government did not require a passport for departure, nor did any European state require one for admittance except the two notoriously backward and neurotic countries of Russia and the Ottoman Empire." And it wasn't until 1945 that Americans were…

Maybe not passports, but border guards? Establishing the customs service was literally the fifth act of congress in 1789.

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#135

Post by [deleted] »

beachstartup wrote: post #69

i lie every time i go on vacation by myself. after having to explain myself one time for absolutely no reason, now i just don't even bother. apparently traveling alone for pleasure is highly suspicious. i tell them i'm traveling on business, or act vaguely rude to the border agent with very curt responses. apparently they're good at filtering the real liars because i've never been hassled since.

[deleted]

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#136

Post by adekok »

hackuser wrote: post #117
adekok wrote: post #53

There are ways to work around this. The key is to not lie, but to tell a different truth. I used to do this in high school, when my parents were grilling me. Friday night: go out with quiet friends. Saturday AM questioning: "How was your evening?" "Fine". "OK". Saturday night, go out with less quiet friends. :) The Sunday AM questioning was rather more rigorous. So I described what I did Friday. There were telling he…

Wait until you are a parent and see if you are so easily fooled. Then ask your parents how much they really knew.

What makes you think I'm not already a parent?

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#137

Post by danharaj »

superuser2 wrote: post #121
coldtea wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and they are very good at detecting when the details don't add up or when the person is acting too uncomfortable. Considering several horror stories and uneeded questioning (of students etc) entering the country, not that "good" really.

No plane out of Ben Gurion has been hijacked in decades. For a high-traffic airport of a major city in one of the most hated countries in the world, that's pretty damn amazing.

It really isn't that impressive when you count the number of commercial flights that happen every year and how many planes are hijacked every year. The odds are already mind-bogglingly low per airport. Of course no one knows what the rate of hijackings out of Ben Gurion would be without their security.

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#138

Post by rangibaby »

veb wrote: post #70

I grew up very deaf. I went to mainstream schools, I did everything everyone else would do... except hear much at all. I wore hearing aids which helped somewhat, but that just makes all that jumbled noise louder, which isn't that helpful. I was deaf since birth. So at a very early age I picked up body-language, micro-expressions and of course lip-reading which were rather an integral way for me to communicate! > "The…

With the Singapore thing you got lucky. Lots of times people in positions of power within a bureaucracy will take a remark like that to mean you are being "clever" and decide to fuck with you. It's better to act politely, but mildly clueless. It's not fun for them to bully nice, stupid people.

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#139

Post by joe_the_user »

The whole procedure seems to hinge on catching some people assigned to engage in a naive effort at deception - people who have constructed a story from whole cloth. It seems likely that anyone attempted a sophisticated act of deception wouldn't invent a story but rather take their true experiences and rearrange them to fill holes where things they wouldn't describe are, giving them an unlimited number of true details to recite. Spending some time on learning the rearrangement would give someone a stronger grasp of their supposed itinerary than the average person has of their actual itinerary.

Which is to say this probably catches confused people and people hiding harmless but embarrassing facts but probably isn't useful against "determined evil doers".

Re: Better and worse ways to spot a liar

#140

Post by scintill76 »

rorykoehler wrote: post #63
jwr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or traveling to the US, for that matter. I still don't understand why border guards ask incoming US citizens where they are going and what is the purpose of their travel.

I like to take things as I go (at least when planning seems like overkill, e.g. for non-critical things). This caught me by surprise the last time I flew into NYC from Europe. I had intended to get into the city and then call a friend I was staying with to meet up and go to their place from there. Naturally I didn't get the address before hand. They wouldn't let me into the country without an address on my dis-embark…

You're a US citizen? Just asking because the parent comment talked about hassles entering US as a citizen, so I am wondering if they really make it that stringent yet simultaneously pointless, even for citizens.
Post reply on HN