How can you tell if someone is lying? • Hacker News Board

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#141

Post by d0mine » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:26 AM UTC

doubleunplussed wrote: post #134

sriku wrote: post #123

"As a Homeland Security official told congressional investigators, “common sense” behavioral indicators are worth including in a “rational and defensible security program” even if they don’t meet academic standards of scientific evidence." What does that even mean? ... like there is a separate standard of evidence and there is a "we can get by without evidence" standard of evidence?

It's pretty obvious that there are useful truths that don't yet meet rigorous scientific standards of evidence. Like masks being useful in a pandemic or parachutes working. Non-serious "randomised trials" have been done with parachutes, and found no measurable effect - because for safety reasons the participants only jumped from an altitude of 2 metres or something. In sports medicine there are loads of things where…

It is a too charitable interpretation. Another interpretation of not requiring hard evidence is to imprison somebody just because police thinks that they look guilty.

Scientists are flawed. There is a replication crisis in soft science fields. Still scientific method is still a mile above anything else out there.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#142

Post by wnoise » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:26 AM UTC

carapace wrote: post #56

alexpc201 wrote: post #33

I recall reading about a patient with split-brain (severed corpus callosum) could tell when people were lying. It seems there are verbal and physical cues when we lie.

> It seems there are verbal and physical cues when we lie. Yes. Not being able to detect lies is a social construction, part of culture. (And so the results reported in TFA are technically useless because everyone involved is operating as part of the unconscious "conspiracy" and so would naturally "discover" that it's hard to detect lies.) You can tap into this with hypnosis, but it's unpleasant, like being an alien.…

If we have to be taught not to recognize lies, then why is it so easy to lie to young children?

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#143

Post by d0mine » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:31 AM UTC

addicted wrote: post #140

doubleunplussed wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty obvious that there are useful truths that don't yet meet rigorous scientific standards of evidence. Like masks being useful in a pandemic or parachutes working. Non-serious "randomised trials" have been done with parachutes, and found no measurable effect - because for safety reasons the participants only jumped from an altitude of 2 metres or something. In sports medicine there are loads of things where…

Your examples of parachutes and masks are not examples of useful truths that don’t meet standards of scientific evidence. They are examples of useful truths that have not been tested through double blind randomized control experiments. But they both have scientific evidence behind them, and by any reasonable definition of meeting standards of scientific evidence, they do. The efficacy of parachutes can be derived fro…

Deriving from first principles is not the only way parachutes, masks can be proved to be effective.

We don't need humans to be attached to parachutes, to test that parachutes work.

There is various research on masks effectiveness too.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#144

Post by hntrader » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:49 AM UTC

neolog wrote: post #77

Godel_unicode wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to question whether you're trying to prove GPs point, as this is hilariously incorrect. Unless you're using very unlikely values for easy and/or small.

I think you're right but I had to think about it and might not have noticed. How did you have that ready to go?

The probability is just pow(0.5, N) where N is the student population, assuming that the distribution has no skew, assuming independence between students, and assuming the students are drawn randomly from the general population. It's an exponentially decreasing function, so it becomes incredibly unlikely for large student bodies under these assumptions.

I disagree with this argument, but that's the basis of it.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#145

Post by StavrosK » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:53 AM UTC

sdf435t3 wrote: post #42

StavrosK wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time I read about spotting liars I thought "man, I don't know how other people do it, but I suck at detecting lies". I mostly think this because every time someone on TV insists they're innocent, I believe them, and then they turn out to be guilty.

Why do you choose to "believe" or not to "believe" an actor based off of what you know to be a performance?

Not actors, actual criminals from the news.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#146

Post by jonathanstrange » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:55 AM UTC

foobiekr wrote: post #65

David Simon's book, Homicide, has an apropos section: """Terry McLarney once mused that the best way to unsettle a suspect would be to post in all three interrogation rooms a written list of those behavior patterns that indicate deception: Uncooperative. Too cooperative. Talks too much. Talks too little. Gets his story perfectly straight. Fucks his story up. Blinks too much, avoids eye contact. Doesn’t blink. Stares.…

Luckily, there is this one reliable method for detecting a lie, checking whether what the suspect says is true.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#147

Post by blablabla123 » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 9:57 AM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #3

I can't recommend Talking to Strangers enough. We have a crippling inability of people to read strangers correctly. In addition to amazing testimony and evidence, great case studies, the production quality of the audiobook is like a good podcast.

Yeah I need to check it out. I think it's also that people (me included) are deeply fascinated by the ability the read other people and what they think.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#148

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 10:08 AM UTC

zakember wrote: post #117

foobiekr wrote: post #65

David Simon's book, Homicide, has an apropos section: """Terry McLarney once mused that the best way to unsettle a suspect would be to post in all three interrogation rooms a written list of those behavior patterns that indicate deception: Uncooperative. Too cooperative. Talks too much. Talks too little. Gets his story perfectly straight. Fucks his story up. Blinks too much, avoids eye contact. Doesn’t blink. Stares.…

I wonder if this would unsettle innocent people as well. Sounds like this would unsettle some non-suspects too

You are operating on the principle that finding the truth is the purpose of an interrogation. This belief may be false.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#149

Post by revax » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 10:10 AM UTC

doubleunplussed wrote: post #134

sriku wrote: post #123

"As a Homeland Security official told congressional investigators, “common sense” behavioral indicators are worth including in a “rational and defensible security program” even if they don’t meet academic standards of scientific evidence." What does that even mean? ... like there is a separate standard of evidence and there is a "we can get by without evidence" standard of evidence?

It's pretty obvious that there are useful truths that don't yet meet rigorous scientific standards of evidence. Like masks being useful in a pandemic or parachutes working. Non-serious "randomised trials" have been done with parachutes, and found no measurable effect - because for safety reasons the participants only jumped from an altitude of 2 metres or something. In sports medicine there are loads of things where…

Here is the paper about parachute in your example: https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5343

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#150

Post by oftenwrong » Sun, Mar 28, 2021, 10:10 AM UTC

This video is relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BemHqUqcpI8

It's about interrogation, and the common notion that a guilt can be inferred by the suspect's behaviour. It shows two example interrogations of innocent suspects, each displaying completely different behaviour.