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Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete)

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Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete) Demons and Angels Seven Days to Skitter
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Ashkari said:
While polygraph tests aren't usually admissible in themselves in court, they are usually sufficient for probable cause and warrants. It's one reason why, as a general rule, if the police are trying to get you to submit to one, you shouldn't. Because usually that means they're fishing for that exact thing, when they know don't have it. The issue is that there's laws against them compelling you to take one (as opposed to them convincing you to agree, which is legal)
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The fact a polygraph is so unreliable that it can suggest a hunk of asphalt is capable of thinking and feels nervous IMO would suggest that it can't even be used to suggest probable cause.

*reads interlude*

Interesting.
 
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FaerieKnight79 said:
The fact a polygraph is so unreliable that it can suggest a hung of asphalt is capable of thinking and feels nervous IMO would suggest that it can't even be used to suggest probable cause.
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A what of asphalt?

Also, considering the variability of parahumans, reading emotions from alternate materials like power armored people, walking metal statues (Weld) or other things which are also people is useful.
 
Jormuungaand said:
A what of asphalt?

Also, considering the variability of parahumans, reading emotions from alternate materials like power armored people, walking metal statues (Weld) or other things which are also people is useful.
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I had typed "hunk". Autocorrupt apparently decided that was the wrong word though. Fixed now.

Also, I wasn't referring to parahumans made of inorganic material. I was referring to the fact that a polygraph will claim that plants, a randomly chosen rock, or even the street it's self are thinking feeling beings that can definitely lie to you or tell the truth. The reason they aren't admissible in court is because they are so unreliable that they are useless.
 
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FaerieKnight79 said:
Also, I wasn't referring to parahumans made of inorganic material. I was referring to the fact that a polygraph will claim that plants, a randomly chosen rock, or even the street it's self are thinking feeling beings that can definitely lie to you or tell the truth. The reason they aren't admissible in court is because they are so unreliable that they are useless.
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A skilled polygraph operator can, indeed, determine when someone is lying.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the polygraph, and everything to do with the skill of the operator when it comes to detecting a lie. The polygraph is just a way for the operator to lie and claim that there is scientific proof of what they're claiming.
 
Polygraphs measure a variety of physiological indicators such as heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, etc, the belief being that deceptive answers will produce certain physiological responses that can be differentiated from those associated with non-deceptive answers. The problem with this is that there are no specific physiological reactions associated with lying, and while some individuals may have certain specific 'tells' such things are unique to the individual and thus only apply on a case by case basis.

In short, the basic fundamental assumption behind polygraphs is wrong, this is why they don't work.
 
Neruz said:
Polygraphs measure a variety of physiological indicators such as heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, etc, the belief being that deceptive answers will produce certain physiological responses that can be differentiated from those associated with non-deceptive answers. The problem with this is that there are no specific physiological reactions associated with lying, and while some individuals may have certain specific 'tells' such things are unique to the individual and thus only apply on a case by case basis.

In short, the basic fundamental assumption behind polygraphs is wrong, this is why they don't work.
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IIRC, there is also an issue where there are a variety of psychological issues that can completely skew results. Psychopaths, for example, often don't have any stress reaction from lying, while people with any of a spectrum of anxiety disorders or autism may have stress reactions while being completely truthful due to other factors. NOTE: I am not a mental health professional, so this is a generalization based on my basic understanding through reading about it.
 
Hell, they can produce a false positive simply because being questioned by the police is stressful. Telling the truth, lying, doesn't matter. If you're not use to dealing with pressure, they will report you as lying. I willingly subjected myself to a polygraph once for various reasons. And according to it, I was lying when I gave my full name and birthday, despite the people doing the experiment knowing I'm telling the truth. That was the "control truth" questions. For the "control lie" questions I was asked my gender and if it was daytime (it was around noon). According to the polygraph I was telling the truth for those answers, despite all evidence saying they are lies.
 
Like I said; there are no specific physiological reactions associated with lying. There are physiological reactions associated with other things, like stress and nervousness, but not specifically lying.

And that's not even getting into basic techniques for mucking up the measurements; for example if you clench your anus while answering control questions the large amount of blood vessels in that area will throw off the blood pressure measurements, rendering them useless even if they did actually mean anything, which they do not.

The thought behind the polygraph was a good idea to explore, unfortunately it turned out to just not be correct; there simply are no physiological tells for deceptive behavior that are common across multiple people.
 
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All of which suggests that Armsmaster's infamous lie detector is... probably ineffective in the extreme. The thing is, in the Worm section of the multiverse it's quite possible that the modern studies that show just how useless the polygraph actually is never got made. So he would think that a tinker tech version of the polygraph that doesn't rely on graph paper, sensors being attached to the subject, and an expert to analyses the results is a sensible and reliable thing.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
All of which suggests that Armsmaster's infamous lie detector is... probably ineffective in the extreme. The thing is, in the Worm section of the multiverse it's quite possible that the modern studies that show just how useless the polygraph actually is never got made. So he would think that a tinker tech version of the polygraph that doesn't rely on graph paper, sensors being attached to the subject, and an expert to analyses the results is a sensible and reliable thing.
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Of course considering much tinkertech only functions via the tinker's shard filling things in, it's entirely possible that it is just as effective as he thinks, but doesn't actually operate as he thinks.

i.e. He thinks it operated by reading vocal cues, temperature changes, micro-tremors or whatever while it is actually working via the shard scanning the targets mind-state and feeding that back into the device. Being able to tinker with the accuracy it measures things may then alter how much the shard chooses to feed back as a result.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
So he would think that a tinker tech version of the polygraph that doesn't rely on graph paper, sensors being attached to the subject, and an expert to analyses the results is a sensible and reliable thing.
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And since his doesn't have any of that, it's less a polygraph, and more a voice-stress analyzer. Which I doubt is any more effective than a polygraph, for exactly the same reasons.
 
Oh, it's probably very good at accurately determining if someone is stressed or nervous. And is useless for determining if someone is lying or not. It may on the other hand be 100% reliable as a lie detector... for the now extinct species that invented the stolen tech originally. Which would again mean it's useless for telling if a human is lying or not. Kind of like how over in Mauling Snarks Jessica Yamada is a parahuman who's shard over specialized in reading skin pigmentation changes to determine various things about a person's mental state. Which was very effective for previous species it had been deployed to, and utterly useless with humans.
 
metalax said:
i.e. He thinks it operated by reading vocal cues, temperature changes, micro-tremors or whatever while it is actually working via the shard scanning the targets mind-state and feeding that back into the device. Being able to tinker with the accuracy it measures things may then alter how much the shard chooses to feed back as a result.
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It would be amusing if it primarily worked effectively on capes, because it was somehow communicating directly with shards. Probably a large chunk of Armsmaster's test subjects are capes, so it may be very accurate for them, but only as good a stress analyzer for non-capes, which may be why he has to keep recalibrating it... :)
 
Given that it is Tinkertech, it is impossible to say whether Armsmaster's lie detector actually works or not, as things like Tattletales Negotiator shard and Path to Victory demonstrate implausible levels of information gathering and analysis, making it basically impossible to determine the actual limitations of any shard-related capability beyond 'cannot reverse entropy'.
 
Considering the underlying science behind a lie detector flat out doesn't work for humans, it is unlikely his lie detector works as he thinks. I have no doubt it can tell if someone is stressed or not. Maybe even if they are nervous. But tell if someone is lying? I doubt it very much.
 
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