The
Loveline
Companion

Adam often rants about his simplistic notion of just sticking the monitors on someone and--presto!--instant truth. So we can just dispense with judges and juries and let a machine do all our thinking for us. Trouble is, current lie detectors aren't really science. They are more of an art: increased sweating and heart-rate can mean almost anything; they don't necessarily mean a suspect is lying. (Maybe the suspect merely feels guilty, which isn't proof that he's lying. Innocent people can feel guilty, especially if they're neurotic.)

Practical, reliable lie detectors are not here yet, but they could be, in the not-too-distant future. These new machines, which work by scanning the brain, would open up a lot of interesting and difficult civil liberties questions. Adam would be pleased, though, and that's the important thing.

• The Economist: Making Windows in Men's Souls

—Saffeau

I'll bump this, because it is interesting. I'm too distracted to try and combat Adam's lie detector argument...but yes, it has much more to do with than just the machine, it takes a very skilled person to interpret it the results. But if they are good at what they do they can be 70-80 percent effective I think. If a better lie detector could be made, than it probably would have...and people are now working on that. But it just seems like he had an extremely uniformed view of how the machines worked.

—piesore

Isn't that mixing apples and oranges? How is believing in lie detectors like religious fundamentalism? Those are two different things but you're lumping them together.

—Captain Obvious

I missed that part of the article, but I guess it would mean that the lie detector is like "God", it's infallible. Religous fundamentalism requires you to be faithful to the word of God, filtering all your perceptions through that window, and it would be the same with lie detectors if it was used as the only way or primary way to discover guilt. All other factors would become irrelavent, because people would blindly and devoutly put their faith into one object.

—piesore