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

Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 159 posts

Re: Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation

#71

Post by UlyssesSKrunk »

LordKano wrote: post #46

The idea that you cede the moral high ground when you use torture seems to have been forgotten. I don't care if it works. I grew up believing that we were "The Good Guys" and under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people. What made the Viet Cong so bad? They tortured people. What made the Japanese so bad? They tortured people. What made the Germans so bad? They tortured people. We sh…

>The idea that you cede the moral high ground when you use torture seems to have been forgotten.

It wasn't forgotten, it's simply not true.

I don't care if it works. I grew up believing that we were "The Good Guys" and under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people.

Well of course, growing up you're a child who is incredibly naive and can't understand the complexities of the world enough to know that the idea that "under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people" is just kind of dumb.

Re: Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation

#72

Post by vacri »

sirrocco wrote: post #27
littletimmy wrote: post #20

Why is this a topic of conversation? Even if torture worked it would not be ethical and the people doing it would be immoral.

If your daughter and wife were kidnapped by 2 people and you catch one of them, would you torture him to save them? What if you learned that they are being raped every day? Would you torture him then ? What if you knew they do this every two weeks to another family, would you do it then? What if you caught someone that has a habit of planting bombs in schools, would you do it then ? I don't know if torture works or i…

Hand them over to the police and let them deal with it - they're far better at interrogating people for information, and far better resourced for a rescue operation.

Re: Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation

#73

Post by cm2187 »

varjag wrote: post #59
XorNot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue your audience is failing to understand what torture is. Most people are deathly afraid of any pain. But they're also not agents/operatives/soldiers for their government. They're not at war with an enemy they think worth fighting and killing. So they don't have a particular strong desire to conceal information from anyone who threatens them. This means, in an actual scenario of torture interrogation, you…

> I would argue your audience is failing to understand what torture is. Most people are deathly afraid of any pain. But they're also not agents/operatives/soldiers for their government. They're not at war with an enemy they think worth fighting and killing. It almost sounds as if you are trying to define away torture for a fringe case where it's guaranteed to be useless. This is a legalistic approach not anymore conv…

In fact in France, there is a strange concept called "juge d'instruction". Basically a district attorney with the power of a judge. And this power includes sending someone to jail pending a trial.

Over time, these judges have been known to send people against who they only have a weak case to jail to make them talk. The state of French jails is appalling, many date from the XIX century, infested with pest, and all are overcrowded.

One could argue that this is a form of torture. Particularly for white collar crime.

Re: Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation

#74

Post by cm2187 »

dror wrote: post #34
rjtobin wrote: post #7

About 4 years ago I went to a talk given by the author of the book, the subject was along the same lines as the book: how torture is ineffective because it damages the subject's ability to recall information. Afterwards someone asked a question that a lot of us had been thinking: that in a lot of situations where torture might be used, the information being asked for is very well known to the subject, so unless serio…

Here's the reason that it doesn't work. Imagine that your village has a 1000 people and someone is torturing you to find out "who is your cell leader." At first you are resisting, and so you name random people in the village. After you've named 50 people or more, you break and name the real person. The torturers though don't know that this is the real person, so they'll keep torturing you, and you'll just go through…

Usually you ask for verifyable information. CIA officers do not need to be reminded what a lie is.

Re: Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation

#75

Post by doikor »

TheLogothete wrote: post #61
jdc wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bad because it increases human suffering, and it's unfair to harm someone who can't fight back.

That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, but let's say a terrorist is captured and you have to put a stop to his operation. His cell will kill a hundred or so people in the next month. You don't torture him and the bomb goes off killing 243 people. A year and a half later you capture another and you have to put a stop to his operation. What do you do?

And if you torture him and he doesn't really know and he just feeds you some lies just so you will stop torturing him and you follow wrong info and cannot stop the incident. But if you didn't follow his lies you might have followed some other leads and stopped the attack.

Re: Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation

#76

Post by klibertp »

varjag wrote: post #59
XorNot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue your audience is failing to understand what torture is. Most people are deathly afraid of any pain. But they're also not agents/operatives/soldiers for their government. They're not at war with an enemy they think worth fighting and killing. So they don't have a particular strong desire to conceal information from anyone who threatens them. This means, in an actual scenario of torture interrogation, you…

> I would argue your audience is failing to understand what torture is. Most people are deathly afraid of any pain. But they're also not agents/operatives/soldiers for their government. They're not at war with an enemy they think worth fighting and killing. It almost sounds as if you are trying to define away torture for a fringe case where it's guaranteed to be useless. This is a legalistic approach not anymore conv…

> Trying to frame it in terms of performance is damaging to the moral aspect of it,

Well, I prefer performance-based explanation as to why not use torture. The problem with morals is that they change. And they tend to provide a lot of backdoors. Like, it's obviously bad to torture, but what if you could save X lives by torturing one person?

With a performance-based explanation it's easy: nothing because torture won't give you reliable information and you won't save the people that way; better start thinking about some other way.

Re: Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation

#77

Post by TheLogothete »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #66
TheLogothete wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, but let's say a terrorist is captured and you have to put a stop to his operation. His cell will kill a hundred or so people in the next month. You don't torture him and the bomb goes off killing 243 people. A year and a half later you capture another and you have to put a stop to his operation. What do you do?

You fire half your detectives fpr incompetence. You know how hard is to procure even rudimentary explosives without leaving a trail?

It's not hard at all. You need a few google searches and household supplies.

Re: Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation

#78

Post by cm2187 »

LordKano wrote: post #46

The idea that you cede the moral high ground when you use torture seems to have been forgotten. I don't care if it works. I grew up believing that we were "The Good Guys" and under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people. What made the Viet Cong so bad? They tortured people. What made the Japanese so bad? They tortured people. What made the Germans so bad? They tortured people. We sh…

It's not a matter of moral high ground. Carpet bombing cities to weaken the morale of the ennemy would have been treated as a war crime should the allies have lost WW2. It was deleberately killing civilians. The Good Guys is usually defined as "our own side". Even today, if you place a bomb under a car it is terrorism, but if the bomb is delivered by a drone, then it's all OK...

Re: Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation

#79

Post by alendit »

venomsnake wrote: post #52
nickff wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily; you could torture someone for something like a key to an encrypted file. This is something difficult to guess, but easy to verify the correctness of. I am not saying that torture is justified in this scenario, but only that it is not true that "to verify outside of checking is to continue torturing which defeats the reasons for the person surrendering the information in the first place".

TrueCrypt plausible deniability. Once I have surrendered the key for the outside container, what do you do?

"Hand over the jew gold you jew, i know you have two bags, one real one fake, give me both."

Re: Why Torture Doesn't Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation

#80

Post by corin_ »

UlyssesSKrunk wrote: post #71
LordKano wrote: post #46

The idea that you cede the moral high ground when you use torture seems to have been forgotten. I don't care if it works. I grew up believing that we were "The Good Guys" and under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people. What made the Viet Cong so bad? They tortured people. What made the Japanese so bad? They tortured people. What made the Germans so bad? They tortured people. We sh…

>The idea that you cede the moral high ground when you use torture seems to have been forgotten. It wasn't forgotten, it's simply not true. I don't care if it works. I grew up believing that we were "The Good Guys" and under no circumstance is it ever acceptable for the good guys to torture people. Well of course, growing up you're a child who is incredibly naive and can't understand the complexities of the world eno…

Plenty of us still have that view as adults, actually.
Post reply on HN