{"id":31092,"date":"2015-04-24T02:00:42","date_gmt":"2015-04-24T06:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31092"},"modified":"2015-04-21T21:55:27","modified_gmt":"2015-04-22T01:55:27","slug":"junk-science-watch-lie-detectors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/04\/24\/junk-science-watch-lie-detectors\/","title":{"rendered":"Junk science watch – lie detectors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gavin McInnes<\/a> on the polygraph machines and their questionable accuracy:<\/p>\n

I met Doug Williams in August while developing a pilot for a TV show about myth busting. He\u2019s the most vocal critic of polygraph machines in the world and authored the book From Cop to Crusader: My Fight Against the Dangerous Myth of \u201cLie Detection.\u201d<\/em> Williams\u2019 history in law enforcement brought him from the Oklahoma City Police Department to the White House where he served under Johnson and Nixon as a communications advisor (Johnson was cool, Nixon was a dick). He has issued thousands of polygraph tests over the years and even helped<\/a> make the test part of federal law.<\/p>\n

Doug started to realize the whole thing was a scam in the late 1970s and since then has devoted his entire life to giving everyone else the same epiphany. Unfortunately, the government doesn\u2019t see it the same way and on May 12th, his trial<\/a> will begin for the crime<\/a> of \u201ctrain[ing]\u2026 customers how to conceal misconduct and other disqualifying information.\u201d He was busted by two undercover federal agents who took his course and decided the class had gone from simply \u201cdebunking\u201d to \u201caiding and abetting.\u201d The Feds are trying to say that Williams is hampering investigations, but all he\u2019s doing is proving these machines don\u2019t work by presenting evidence. 60 Minutes<\/em> did the same thing in a 1986 episode<\/a> where three out of three experts failed their own test. People are losing their jobs and going to prison based on the findings of a machine that appears to be totally unreliable. The only thing he\u2019s hampering here is the abuse of power. The irony is, if it\u2019s possible to beat a polygraph, it clearly isn\u2019t a reliable piece of equipment. If it\u2019s not possible to beat, his courses are irrelevant. You can teach someone to trick a police radar all you want. It\u2019s still going to clock you if you\u2019re going over the speed limit. This seems like common sense yet the state has won cases like this before. In 2013, an electrician named Chad Dixon was sentenced to 8 months in jail<\/a> for helping people beat the machine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gavin McInnes on the polygraph machines and their questionable accuracy: I met Doug Williams in August while developing a pilot for a TV show about myth busting. He\u2019s the most vocal critic of polygraph machines in the world and authored the book From Cop to Crusader: My Fight Against the Dangerous Myth of \u201cLie Detection.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,15,13],"tags":[347,39,267,98],"class_list":["post-31092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-liberty","category-technology","category-usa","tag-debunking","tag-junkscience","tag-justice","tag-police"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-85u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31093,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31092\/revisions\/31093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}