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How can you tell if someone is lying?

theatlantic.com

241–250 of 363 posts

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#241
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He talks about this at ~9 minutes. Even if you said something good for your case, it won't be heard in court because its hearsay. And if you're in a spot when the police wants to interview you, the decision for your arrest was already made; you can only make the situation worse.

>when the police wants to interview you, the decision for your arrest was already made; That's not true. The police will interview everyone connected to a crime. Like if your SO turns up dead you're going to be one of the first people the police talk to. Depending on what else they've found they will have varying levels of suspicion. That level will absolutely change on how you do in that interview or if you refuse t…

Fine, but the police level of suspicion is not relevant.

Never, ever agree to be interviewed by police without your attorney. There is no reason not to have someone who knows the game play for you. You have no clue what the police know or think they know already and your innocuous answer about something that seems unrelated may seem to confirm some wrong information they already have.

Again, your word cannot exonerate you but it can absolutely get you charged or even convicted.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#243
I guess my question is, "why would you like to know?" Of course, there are times when knowing important information can be the difference between helping people and harming people. Otherwise, I think there are other ways to either ascertain the truth or even find peace in not knowing. I take some solace in being okay with not knowing some things.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#244

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…

How do masks not meet the scientific standard of efficacy? I understand you're not making an anti-mask argument, but I'm just genuinely curious to understand why you say this. Besides the obvious benefit of masks mitigating the spray of viral aerosol, as far as I am aware, masks have a lot of scientific support for their efficacy.

Not OP, but the primary studies saying masks are effective are basically experiments of function, such as, does a mask block particles more than not wearing a mask? However, studies on their effectiveness in the past have never found actual protection from diseases. For example if every one covers their mouth were they sneeze anyways, then what is a mask really doing? Do people touch their face more often with masks, reuse masks, and actually bring more particles to their face? Diseases are not all airborn and live on surfaces, so is all this interaction with your face to large untrained groups actually increasing the risks? The best we have now is comparing groups of people or states with different policies, which is also not proving masks are effective, but could that cause be due to people still following rules even though the policy isn’t forced or some other unknown reason such as hers immunity being reached, etc.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through a screening with a "robot" - in quotes because it was literally a breadboard with a bunch of wires sticking out of it, a battery and a squarish box. Didn't even have to open the bag to show the agents what it was, went right through the scanner with no comment. And I was nervous as hell cause I was sure I was going to have to explain it, maybe even show that it worked. But nope, not a peep.

How white are you, out of curiosity? What's your demographic look like, and how closely did it match the screeners? Seems like if you were nervous that would be additional weighting in the direction of you being questioned, so the additional weighting doesn't seem to have motivated anything.

Before we jump to “how white are you?”, it may make sense to ask “was there anything that could possibly have been the explosive?”

Random wires, breadboards, etc aren’t going to explode without a source of fuel.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#246
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also self deception helps.

I often think about that. If I can thoroughly convince myself to believe a factual lie, would classic lie detector devices still work on me?

There was an interesting book on the theme that we've evolved to deceive ourselves especially on moral stuff like my side is good, the others are the bad guys https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Animal-Science-Evolutionary-Psy...

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

17 pantomimes...nuff said.

Is it? Is it really "nuff said"? Cuz I have no clue what you're talking about. From my perspective, a lot more needs to be said.

It was a joke, a reference to a Quentin Tarrantino movie where a character says there are 17 pantomimes that give a male liar away, but the character doesn't list them.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not impressed so much as dismayed. My theory is that it is warfare by decentralized means, worked through witting and unwitting subjects. In other words, there are a bunch of people whose job it is to keep the enemies of their country in mask denialism and maximum COVID infection as deeply as possible, and it's primarily done through social media. And while it's useful in a sense to put forth such intentions whil…

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 checklist from March 2020 above just gives that vibe of someone brining up their homework here and all reasoning is going to be futile.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they wrote that he was being vindictive and spiteful, then I don’t think it quite qualifies as armchair psychology on GP’s part

They were assessing character and yes, making a judgement on it, which was their role. I find it likely that OPs behavior came off as seeming vindictive and spiteful, even if not intended that way. They would have done better to observe specific behaviors (which they did fairly with "slouching"), but their intent was likely to judge character and fit for the school, based on the evidence in front of them. Not saying…

> if you can demonstrate remorse and desire to change, it goes a long way

It sounds like you're presuming to know more about what happened there than you can. I fully expressed remorse, and explained how in hindsight I understand that what I was doing was disruptive, and that I wouldn't behave that way in the future, etc.

Their rubbish analysis was just that. Also, how is "slouching" a fair thing to observe in analysis? I sit with bad posture. I did then and I do now. It's completely irrelevant.

Oh, I should also point out that by this point I had been clinically diagnosed with ADD - which they expressed, and I'll have to paraphrase as it was about 13-14 years ago, was "made up" and that it couldn't possibly explain my behaviour.

Re: How can you tell if someone is lying?

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a fairly disruptive kid in school. It was all boyswillbeboys stuf. Drinking and smoking with friends in abandoned sections of the school. The kind of stuff that seems really serious then, and inconsequential now. I was brought in front of the board for expulsion after a litany of these types of things, and questioned about anything and everything for about two hours. We took the case to the board of education a…

This is an extreme case, but not an unusual one. People draw conclusions about people with very little information. They then carry on to believe that their conclusions have real weight, and are based in fact. It's part of why there were always be socially fluid types and con artists.

It's as if directly when they draw some random conclusion about someone, they stop thinking, stop evaluating that person any more.

And they go on believing forever that that weird first random idea they got, was right.

(I might be exaggerating a bit.)

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