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

How can you tell if someone is lying?

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 363 posts

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#301

Post by Blikkentrekker »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #179
antibuddy wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the last wave suggests that wearing masks has no effect in this pandemic[0][1]. Comparing Sweden and Germany (which have at least similar health systems and count similarly) the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 is about the same, where Swedes rarely wear any masks and in Germany it is mandatory indoors (accessible to the public) and even mandatory in some zones outdoors. Also when you think about it, the perm…

“Viri” is not the plural of “virus”. https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-plural-of-virus-112199

Personally, being a compulsive perfectionist, I always use “virus” in English as a mass noun, and never pluralize it.

I thus say “several parts of virus” or “several programs of virus”, — an elegant solution, I would say.

And yes, I do say “octopodēs”; I am not some bourgeois peasant.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#302

Post by 13415 »

simonh wrote: post #292
wildermuthn wrote: post #282

A lie-detector that works is a trillion-dollar business. A great sci-fi novel that explores the implications of an accurate lie-detector is "The Truth Machine". I've given a lot of thought to this topic over the years, and have concluded that the way to tackle this problem is indirectly. The problem with "truth" is that it is subjective. There is a better metric to judge: "false-confidence". There is a subtle but dis…

A lie is a mismatch between what I believe and what I say. It has nothing to do with objective truth. We sometimes talk about lying versus telling the truth, but this is a shorthand. What we mean by telling the truth is saying what we believe to be true. No reasonable person would say that someone is lying if they say what they believe to be true, but it turns out they are mistaken.

Not really, if you think about it, lying is knowingly saying what you believe to be false and what you say is also false. If what you say is accidentally true, then you tried to lie but failed. If you misdirect someone by saying the truth - e.g. because you know the person would assume the opposite of what you say or because you omit a presupposed fact such as that the gas station someone asked for is not closed -, then that's better regarded as deceiving.

At least that's the theory of a dear colleague of mine who published that in various prestigious philosophy journals. I think he got it right. What I disagree with him about is the presumption that there is a "right" theory of lying. In the end, you can define it in different ways, but I do think his definition is a very good one.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#303

Post by rdiddly »

wildermuthn wrote: post #282

A lie-detector that works is a trillion-dollar business. A great sci-fi novel that explores the implications of an accurate lie-detector is "The Truth Machine". I've given a lot of thought to this topic over the years, and have concluded that the way to tackle this problem is indirectly. The problem with "truth" is that it is subjective. There is a better metric to judge: "false-confidence". There is a subtle but dis…

The best liars, like the best actors, actually believe what they're saying though, so I don't think false confidence is the answer.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#304

Post by johncearls »

meiraleal wrote: post #215
sloshnmosh wrote: post #196

This is just silly pseudoscience, new-age BS if you ask me. The only scientifically proven way of knowing if someone is a liar is to examine the shape and bumps of their skull.

> The only scientifically proven way of knowing if someone is a liar is to examine the shape and bumps of their skull. The only proven way of knowing if someone is a liar is to get evidence.

Of course you’d say that, you have the brainpan of stage coach tilter.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#305

Post by golergka »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #146
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.

Saying something that is false and lying are not the same thing.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#306

Post by wildermuthn »

simonh wrote: post #299
wildermuthn wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this happens all the time. Especially in business and relationships. Most of the time we don't know what is objectively true. When there is a disagreement about what is objectively true, we often accuse or judge one another as being liars. What you are saying makes rational sense, but in practice human beings get mixed up about objective vs. subjective truth-telling. Using the term "false-confidence" cuts t…

I don't think calling it something else is going to remove people's personal stake in the behaviour. When I said reasonable person, I meant an objective observer. People with ulterior motives and something to gain will tend to prevaricate if it's in their interests to do so whatever terminology we use.

Naming is both hard and important. Reading over the comments in this thread, one of the most up-voted of them reads, "Luckily, there is this one reliable method for detecting a lie, checking whether what the suspect says is true."

I'm writing from the perspective of "how would one build an accurate lie-detector?" And my point is that you shouldn't. You should build something that measures false-confidence. It is infinitely harder to create a lie-detector than it is to create a false-confidence assessor because people always mix up subjective vs. objective truth.

It is kind of like the late 90's difference between a "Web Portal" (yahoo) and a "Search Engine" (google). Ostensibly, they were aiming at the same thing: getting us to the content we were looking for. But the difference in name led to a difference in implementation and product. The analogy is even more striking because Yahoo's categorization of links made a stronger implicit claim to being the kind of content you wanted than Google's ranked list of results.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#307

Post by wildermuthn »

rdiddly wrote: post #303
wildermuthn wrote: post #282

A lie-detector that works is a trillion-dollar business. A great sci-fi novel that explores the implications of an accurate lie-detector is "The Truth Machine". I've given a lot of thought to this topic over the years, and have concluded that the way to tackle this problem is indirectly. The problem with "truth" is that it is subjective. There is a better metric to judge: "false-confidence". There is a subtle but dis…

The best liars, like the best actors, actually believe what they're saying though, so I don't think false confidence is the answer.

That's my point, though. A lie-detector tries to do the impossible. A false-confidence assessor only does what it claims to do.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#308

Post by fractionalhare »

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…

> Like foam rolling, or running on your toes instead of your heels.

These things have been studied numerous times. Head over to r/AdvancedFitness or r/AdvancedRunning and you'll find people seriously disseminating acacemic, peer-reviewed research on precisely these topics.

It can take a while for certain things to go from practitioner consensus to academic consensus. But that doesn't mean academics aren't rigorously studying it. I also have doubts about your mask and parachute examples.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#309

Post by wildermuthn »

13415 wrote: post #302
simonh wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lie is a mismatch between what I believe and what I say. It has nothing to do with objective truth. We sometimes talk about lying versus telling the truth, but this is a shorthand. What we mean by telling the truth is saying what we believe to be true. No reasonable person would say that someone is lying if they say what they believe to be true, but it turns out they are mistaken.

Not really, if you think about it, lying is knowingly saying what you believe to be false and what you say is also false. If what you say is accidentally true, then you tried to lie but failed. If you misdirect someone by saying the truth - e.g. because you know the person would assume the opposite of what you say or because you omit a presupposed fact such as that the gas station someone asked for is not closed -, t…

I love this. But this is also why I think using "false-confidence" as a metric avoids all these questions by being unambiguous about what is being measured.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#310

Post by Applejinx »

varjag wrote: post #248
isoskeles wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m both impressed and dismayed that both of your comments don’t do a single thing to refute mask denialism, specifically whatever his point is on Sweden and Germany. I don’t even believe his comment, but I’m not going to sneer at it and call it mask denialism to shut it down. I feel better about his comment at least attempting to state an argument and evidence in support of it. Anyway, this is a strange tangent for…

Why not compare Sweden and Norway, in many ways a better comparison in culture, population density and geography than Sweden and Germany? …oh. See, I didn't specifically went with countering the OP line of argument because refuting BS takes an order of magnitude more effort than slinging it. It's something anyone who did try to reason with generally unreasonable people so abundant lately can attest to. The laminated…

There's a thing called a Gish Gallop (all this is actually rather on topic for discussions of lying) where the counter to someone arguing your points, is to pivot and rapidly throw out more points, pretty much anything you like, too fast to properly refute. It's a rather effective tactic for socially disabling an argumentative opponent: just not for anything truth-related. Might not be truth-related but it's still very real.

All this relates to discussions of lying because the fundamental structure of the gallop, plus numerous other forms of BSing, requires the implication that everybody is in good faith: you're meant to grant that and then examine the arguments and see how they shake out. There's a lot of stuff happening in modern discourse where an anchor point to the argument is, 'since everyone here is in good faith and we just believe different things, let's break down the sides of the arguments'.

But we're not. When you're desperate enough about winning (or not losing important things), good faith is disposable, and then people lie, for advantage, because they badly need advantage and aren't getting it from truth and good faith.

Hence, the OP question of 'How can you tell if someone is lying?'. People will con themselves, but they will also lie on purpose to accomplish a goal.

Post reply on HN