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View Full Version : Poligraph and a TV show


Luciana
3rd October 2003, 09:21 PM
(I was going to post this at the Entertainment Forum, but thought better of it)

Many of the TV shows here have their basic format inspired by American or European TV. So, I wonder, has anyone seen anything like that?

Set-up: Second-rate or decadent celebrity, preferably someone who is under the public eye for many years, stands behind a booth and earns $10,000 reais at the beginning, as shown by a LED behind them.

The TV show host proceeds to make questions, such as: in an interview in 1984, magazine X, you claimed that you married virgin. Is that true?

Then the celebrity goes on to tell that yes, she was virgin, and how her first marriage was wonderful, but she was immature and so was he, and he began to envy her career blah blah blah.

When she is over giving the most uninteresting details of her private life, the host says: TRUTH OR LIE! Now focus on a guy in a suit, with a laptop. He earnestly says: THE COMPUTER INDICATES THIS IS A LIE!

Close-up to a software with a bars graph, in many colors, which says "indication of deceit along the speech". She loses $1,000.

The celebrity is flabbergasted! She defends her truthfulness in earnest, and goes on to elaborate her story even more. With suspense, the camera again turn to the computer which indicates "truth is dominant along the speech". Celeb is relieved, smiles, gets her thousand back.

Needless to say, my trust on that software is nill. It's nothing more than a pretentious polygraph looking like an Excel graph. I even doubt - is it a question of the the software being just bogus (like astrology ones are, but at least those are based son omething, well, some thing, even some, clear throat, "theory" behind it) or the whole thing is a setup, and they decide the "diagnose" to spice up the interview.

Well, doesn't matter. I didn't watch until the end. I only remember seeing several mentions of it in the newspaper, how this seem to be best thing since bread came sliced, and how celebs are dying to participate.

There's just no way that thing can be remotely reliable. For starters, the talking part is so long that the software couldn't possibly find an "average". Second, was it tested beforehand, comparing her false and true answers, whose answers were known beforehand to be false or not? And third, what's the validity of that software in the first place??? I confess to being angry. It'snot like reality shows, people knew it was fake but that's ok, but when there's a whole "software" which proclaims who is lying or not - and its authority lays on a guy in a suit - then it takes much more of naiveté to fall for that.

She didn't have anything connected to her, as I would expect in a software, so it must have been some kind of speech pattern recognition software. Has anyone ever heard of it, Is there any hint of reliabilty with those things?

arcticpenguin
3rd October 2003, 10:45 PM
Meet my Folks (http://wantingseed.com/weblog/2003/07/02/meet_my_polygraph.php)

It doesn't seem to involve celebrities. I find it hard to believe a lot of celebrities would get involved with a 'lie detector' show without strict guidelines about which questions were off limits. Imagine O.J. Simpson, for instance...

pupdog
4th October 2003, 06:37 PM
We've known for a long time that the "Lie detector" doesn't detect lies (well, some of us have known). So the US Gummint commissioned a big study to evaluate polygraph efficacy, and the study found out that...lie detectors don't detect lies! So the Gummint decides they out to go ahead and use polygraphs anyway. Maybe Los Alamos can contract with the Church of Scientology to rent a few E-meters.